The Portal of the Future: Customer Support for the Web 2.0 World

Customer support is becoming a key differentiator in many industries, including electronics and high tech—but increasing product complexity and disruptive technologies are making it harder to keep customers satisfied. Leading electronics and high-tech companies are leveraging Web 2.0 tools and technologies to help them improve their customer-service portals, providing enhanced customer support that contributes to the achievement of high performance.

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Customer support has become a critical differentiator for companies in all industries that aspire to high performance.

As products become commoditized—and yet more complex—customer service and support will be the key to customer satisfaction, and thus a prime enabler of high performance.

Providing adequate customer support in this environment is becoming more and more of a challenge for consumer electronics companies.

Increasing product complexity plays a role, but arguably the range of technologies collectively called Web 2.0 is playing a more influential role in creating customers’ service expectations. A number of technology tools are loosely grouped under the rubric “Web 2.0” and include rich Internet applications, mash-ups, software as a service, simulations and virtual worlds, social networking, folksonomies, crowd sourcing and blogs.

Confused about Web 2.0? Download Accenture’s Web 2.0 Primer.

Accenture’s experience shows that leading companies are already taking advantage of Web 2.0 technologies to improve their service and support Web portals.

These companies realize that meeting the needs of their customers more effectively in the post-sales environment can build allegiance to the brand in the future. In addition to leveraging Web 2.0 technologies, these leaders’ portals share six key principles that all electronics and high-tech companies should incorporate into their support and service portals to support high performance:

• Get the basics right. Before introducing advanced features, the basic features of the site need to be right.
• Focus on having the right answer. Leaders invest in building content through multiple channels internally within their organization but also externally through their user groups or enthusiast sites.
• Actively learn about the customer to customize the site proactively to build brand loyalty.
• Master search capabilities to help users find the right information easily.
• Understand how customers use your products and the problems they encounter so that the site is geared to help them get high value from products purchased.
• Create a feedback loop so that problems experienced by customers contribute to product development efforts.