Self-service Ideas for Premium Support

As we discussed last week creating a special collection of knowledge base documents for premium customers may not be a great approach — but there are other ways to provide premium levels of service online. Here are some ideas, in no particular order:

– premium forums (communities): for instance, the forums may be monitored more attentively by your staff, guaranteeing fast responses.

– private webinars for new releases or other technical discussions. An interesting idea here is to record the webinars and make them accessible to all customers later, giving the premium customers early and interactive access to the speakers and materials but leveraging the information for everyone.

– customized portals that include personalized information such as the contact information for the account. Such portals are fairly easy to create and maintain, especially for the larger accounts (and if you need more proof ask the account team: chances are that it maintains such information already, so why not roll it into one coherent whole?)

– account-wide case tracking: instead of allowing each contact to see only his or her cases, it’s very helpful to allow contacts to view everyone’s cases (with permission.) Fortunately this feature is becoming routine in many case-tracking systems so should not be too hard to implement. It happens to be particularly attractive to the larger accounts that are more likely to take advantage of premium support.

– account metrics. Many times premium customers receive regular metrics on their support activities through an account manager. POsting the metircs online (or even better, allowing the customer to generate custom metrics at will) is an easy step up.

More knowledge base for premium customers

When building premium levels of support the focus is typically on assisted support features: longer support hours, faster response times, assigned support engineers, etc. But does it make sense to also include additional self-service features such as access to premium knowledge base articles? Let’s see the pros and cons.

Yes! There’s no reason why self-service features should not be included in a premium offering. For instance high-end, consulting-like white papers or access to the same knowledge base support engineers can access (before articles are sanitized and reviewed) would be appealing to premium customers. The other, obvious benefit is that the cost of delivering those extra features is very small, unlike that of typical assisted support add-ons.

No! There’s a technical issue with providing levels of access to the knowledge base, in that many tools only provide a public/private access dichotomy so providing customers with different access levels will require customizing the tool, which may be cost-prohibitive. But the larger issue is that providing self-service materials helps to cut down on requests for assisted support, so the temptation will always be to make the self-service information available to all customers. Many of my clients who initially embraced the idea of a graduated knowledge base (and made the necessary tool investment) later decided to publish all materials for all customers’ consumption.

So in most cases I would choose something else than graduated knowledge base access for premium support. We’ll see other self-service ideas in future posts.