The Customer Service Life Cycle

by Blake Ives and Jerry Learmonth

Ownership

Once the customer is in possession of the product or has contracted for the service a new set of questions arise. Some are fairly generic and can be answered with a service such as a frequently asked questions repository. In other cases it may be necessary to give customers access to their own customer files. The following are typical questions within the various sub-activities of the ownership stage.

Ownership Activity	Typical Question
Assembly and Installation	How do I put this together? Who can I hire to help me? Can you show me how?
Training	Is there a course I can take? Who will train my employees<
Use	Tell me things related to use? Is the plane on time?
Tracking	Where is it? Has it arrived yet? Who received it?
Maintenance	Is it broken? Does it need a checkup? Does it Need Supplies Help me diagnose this? Send me the fix-it.
Upgrade	Is there an upgrade available? Do I need it? How do I get it?
Inventory Management	Is it time to reorder? How much should I have on hand?

Some Examples

Thus far most of the commercial use of the WWW has been to promote sales or, to smaller extent, to carry them out. After sale service, unfortunately, has gotten a lot less attention on corporate home pages. Partially, this reflects that it is often necessary to personalize the service required after the sale to reflect the customers unique circumstances.

Use: Customers frequently have questions related to their actual use of the product or service. Southwest Airlines extends a helping hand by giving passengers information on boarding procedures and even on how to pack for the trip. The Vicerage Hotel provides its guests with information on the London Theater scene, web sites for museums in the neighborhood, and even reports of recent Princess Di sightings. Millipore Corporation gives customers with problems applying their filtration products the opportunity to interact, via an online form, with support personnel. They have also provided a reference showing the compatibility of their products with other chemicals.
Training: The power of the WWW for education is just beginning to be recognized and, given likely resistance from the educational establishment, it is likely that the private sector will be first to exploit this opportunity. Among the first applications will be directories of training programs such as that at Digital learning Services, Millipore, and Sun Microsystems. Online courses will probably not be far behind. Already a great deal of "how to" product information is available on the WWW, particularly for software.; Patrick Crispin's Roadmap Workshop isn't realy training in support of a specific product, but it does richly illustrate the power of the WWW for education. In the summer of 1994 Crispin, a college senior, ran an Internet training program using the Internet's electronic mail facilities. 62,000 people from 77 countries participated. Each received their lessons each day via email.; Education about the Internet and the WWW presents the best look at the present time of how training and education will be transformed. For instance, Hewlett Packard has made available a nice "Internet Primer" as well as other educational offerings.
Tracking: Federal Express has linked the WWW to their internal tracking system, thus permitting a customer to enter a package tracking number to determine if her package has arrived as well as who signed for it at the other end.
Maintenance: Maintenance is often a life cycle activity in its own right - going through all of the stages of requirements, acquisition, ownership, and retirement.. Thus, for instance, Digital Equipment Corporation provides its web-based customers with a list of its Personal Computer Service locations - a kind of support we described previously in the Acquisition section of this guide. Nevertheless, we will look at some specific maintenance examples here.; Help desks and customer service centers often have sophisticated databases to help make their operators smarter. Using the WWW, this information can be made directly available to the customers. This means less money spent on staff and less customers waiting on the phone. Apple Computer, for instance, has established theirTechnical Information Center. A similar system at SiliconGraphics gives their customers access to the maintenance questions asked by other customers as well as SiliconGraphics answers.
Upgrade / Update: Digital Equipment Corporation and SiliconGraphics are but two of many high techhnology firms providing customers with software patches via the WWW. Claris gives its customers the ability to download software which automatically updates software already existing software.

CSLC Home Page

Navigation Map

ISWorld Net Home Page (or text alternative)

This page is maintained by Blake Ives who welcomes your feedback at [email protected].. This page was last updated on October 22nd, 1995. Although we will attempt to keep this information accurate, we can not guarantee the accuracy of the information provided.