Escaping the Customer Service Dilemma

1. 01 | escaping the customer service dilema
Escaping the Customer Service Dilemma.
For VP of Customer Loyalty, VP of Customer Success, VP of Churn, VP of Customer Service, VP of Customer Care
How You Can Make Customers Happy, Make Your Support Reps More
Effective, and Cut Costs – All At The Same Time.
Here’s one way to do customer service: provide premium live support to everyone, win the love of
your customers, and watch your margins evaporate. Here’s another way: hold onto your money,
shunt customers off into long support queues or online self-help, and watch brand loyalty and
repeat business take a hit. Or you could pick something between those two extremes. But you’d
still be balancing the same old trade-offs: quality versus economy and customer satisfaction
versus labor costs.
Then there is the Jive way • A great user experience that encourages swift adoption and
heavy use.
Jive’s Customer Service Solution offers a new approach that
doesn’t just tweak the existing trade-offs. It rewrites the entire • Features that build connection: personal profiles, “likes,” the
equation, turning the “versus” into an “and,” so companies can ability to follow conversations and people.
boost customer satisfaction, improve rep productivity, and
• Gamification technology that makes the community even
reduce support costs all at once.
more vibrant, fun, and participatory.
Social Customer Service has none of the inefficiencies of traditional
The augmented community
one-to-one support. Nor is it another fend-for-yourself automated
system that leaves users to find their way through a maze of Jive’s Social Customer Service solution augments community
FAQs and forums. Instead, it provides all the benefits of personal interactions with intelligent design features and assisted
contact and hands-on human expertise, in a way that optimizes processes that surface answers faster and point people quickly
the effectiveness of every resource involved, including agents, to the most helpful resources:
customers, and digital content.
• Aggregates social feedback to identify the best answers in a
discussion and push them to the top, so users don’t have to
The power of peer-to-peer support search for them.
Social service starts with a customer community, of course, but
• Anticipatory recommendations that suggest answers to users’
goes far beyond the usual DIY forums. Jive’s solution employs
questions as they type their queries, even before they hit “search.”
the whole arsenal of social techniques to foster high levels of
customer participation and useful responses. They include: • Facebook integration that automatically pulls fan page questions
into the customer community and pushes answers back to the
• Recognition and reputation features that reward the most Facebook wall.
helpful participants.
• Automatic search engine optimization (SEO) of community
• Badges and special privileges for customer experts and key discussions and other content, raising visibility and brand
influencers, such as the ability to launch conversations and awareness.
create new user groups.
© 2012 Jive Software. All rights reserved.

2. 02 | escaping the customer service dilema
Better use of service reps asked Jive customers across dozens of industries to quantify the
impacts Social Business on their customer service programs.
Social Customer Service enhances the effectiveness of agents,
Hundreds of companies reported back, quoting results such as:
freeing them from answering the same user questions over and
over again, and instead leveraging their expertise across an • 28% reduction in support calls
entire community for maximum impact. Crucially, Jive’s solution
supports not only customer communities but also internal • 26% decrease in channel support costs
communities where the services team can quickly share best • 33% increase in clicks from Google searches
practices and find vital information.
• 32% percent less time spent for agents to find answers
Other important features include: • 30+% percent increase in customer satisfaction and retention
Bridging that allows service reps to pull customer questions into Buried in these averages are a lot of compelling individual stories.
the team community, collaborate on the answers, and then push T-Mobile’s Jive-powered community serves over 150,000 customers
them back out to the external community. Reps can likewise pull and employees, who generate 100,000,000 pageviews/month.
in feedback and insights from customers and share them with The company’s call center reps handle 500,000 phone calls daily,
colleagues internally, integrating the customer’s own voice into typing customer questions into their internal community to get
company culture to improve service, product development, and fast answers. Overall, Jive’s Customer Service Solution has helped
marketing efforts. T-Mobile significantly improve resolution rates and customer loyalty.
National Instruments has likewise seen huge adoption (nearly
• Auto-escalation capabilities that automatically turn
half its total customers participate) and jumps in case resolution
unanswered questions into cases after a specified interval,
(50 percent of customer questions answered in the community).
allowing agents to focus where they’re needed most.
More than 2 million SAP employees, customers, and partners now
• CRM integration, enabling agents to easily access case data collaborate more effectively thanks to Jive communities. Cerner,
while in the community, and to access community social Cisco, and McAfee report dramatic reductions in support calls and
information while in the CRM system. cases logged.
• The ability to easily turn relevant customer discussions into The list goes on. To learn more about how Social Business is
knowledge base articles, which can then be searched and changing customer service as we know it, check out the customer
utilized by all community members. videos and case studies in our Customer Service Toolkit:
• Instant team-wide distribution of new information as reps
http://www.jivesoftware.com/resources/kits/get-customer-service
answer questions and add content to the knowledge base.
In these and other ways, Social Customer Service harnesses a And for more on our complete, ready-to-deploy Customer
vast store of collective knowledge to empower service reps and Service Solution, visit our website:
customers alike, deflecting calls while answering questions and
http://www.jivesoftware.com/social-business/solutions/
resolving cases faster.
customer-service
Real results
All very nice in theory, but does it actually work as advertised?
The answer is demonstrably “yes.” In a 2010 survey, MarketTools
Jive. First in Social Business.
Jive is the largest and fastest-growing independent Social Business Software company in the world.
For more information, visit www.jivesoftware.com.