Online customer service is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Is it saving you time? Check. Is it saving your customers time? Check. Is it saving you money? Check. Is it increasing customer satisfaction? Check. But just how good is it? How much time and money is it saving? How much happier are your customers? It's time to check.

The following handy-dandy Online Customer Service Checklist can be torn out of this book and posted to your wall. Please purchase the book first. And I personally recommend using a copy machine. Once ensconced on the cushy felt paneling of your cubicle, it will remind you to take a look at how you're doing every now and then, instead of spending all of your time just getting it done.

This checklist is only three questions, but they're recursive. Once you've addressed the issues, it's time to readdress the issues. You're never finished asking these questions, and trying to improve on the answers you get:

1. How many people are using your online customer services?

2. How much does that decrease the need for other, more expensive forms of support?

3. How well does online customer service improve customer satisfaction?

How Many People Use It?

How many people are using your Web-based customer service tools? Is it a lot? Is it a little? Is there an industry standard? No. There are no typical answers. There are only your own internal benchmarks and comparisons. The benchmarks include the number of people on your site today versus yesterday and the day before. The comparisons are the number of people using other, more expensive means of getting help from your company. In the beginning, there were zero people using your Web site for customer service. Slowly, more and more people discovered its value. If the Web really is saving you time and money, then getting more people to use it is a worthy goal. Step 1, count them. Step 2, increase their number.

Getting more people to the customer service portion of your site takes the same skills as getting them there in the first place. You'll need to promote your online customer services just as you would any other significant product feature. Remind people to use your Web site when they contact you in other ways. Playing music while the customer is on hold is nice, but a gentle reminder that they can go to your Web site is nice, too. Give them specific hints. If they pressed the number 3 for order status, the very next message-on-hold should describe where to go on your site for that information, instead of waiting for the next operator. Don't forget to include the cost of educating your customers in that great ROI spreadsheet you're preparing.

How Much Does It Help?

Just how well your Web-based customer care efforts are helping the company depends on how you define your charter. What does your customer service department do? What is its charter? What specific services does it provide? What tasks does it perform to deliver those services? Here're a couple of quick examples (your mileage may vary):

Example 1:

What does your customer service department do?

• Helps customers install and implement our products What specific services does it provide?

• Telephone support What tasks does it perform to deliver those services?

• Receive calls

• Respond to calls

• Log calls

• Follow up on installations via phone

Example 2:

What does your customer service department do?

• Answers questions about deliveries What specific services does it provide?

• Telephone, fax, and email correspondence What tasks does it perform to deliver those services?

• Receive calls, faxes, emails

• Investigate shipments

• Respond with anticipated delivery dates

• Resolve customer schedule problems

Given a list of the particular tasks your department performs in its daily chores, you can start measuring how much your Web site has improved things for your customers. You can start to track the number of calls and email messages you receive. You can measure the number of problems that come in and the speed with which they are resolved. You can produce a formula to calculate how many calls you deferred due to customers electronically getting answers for themselves.

While you're increasing site traffic, don't forget to record benchmarks for those other means of communication. If call center activity is down, you'll want to correlate that to the increase in Web utilization. If the flow of email slows, you'll want to see if it's related to additional traffic to the new knowledge base. With these numbers in hand, you can begin the ROI calculations that upper management likes so well.