Customer service is a bit like Marmite: businesses either love it or they hate it. John Lewis prides itself on customer service, and reaps the benefits. First Direct was started with the word “service” written on a bit of paper with a circle around it with the question “how will we deliver that?”
Like it or hate it, the main problem with customer service is that it's expensive to set up and run. The most expensive support is a human being on a phone; the next step down in cost is a universally hated call centre and IVR (interactive voice response) system (e.g. "press 2 if you require…"). Then the there's a human answering emails, and at the bottom of the cost pile is users answering their own queries and questions.
A good business should realise that you can’t get rid of humans; there’s always some problem that only a human and a one-to-one conversation can solve. However there’s no reason to spend money on customer support when the web can handle the problem for free, and more and more systems are arriving to help automate customer responses and to push voice and email to a web self-service solution.
Web customer service business Eptica has a service that enables businesses to reuse and repurpose web, email and even live call centre problems into a dynamic question and answer database. The idea with Eptica's system is that as problems are presented, they're then used as the basis for a Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) system.
The call centre users can use the FAQ system as a resource to answer difficult questions, and add new questions and answers, while some clever artificial intelligence (AI) and rules-based systems allows the Eptica system automatically to send replies to email questions without the need for human intervention, and to populate search queries to help sections on the website. And as the data in the systems grows larger, this gradually reduces support costs: Eptica claims it can reduce email handling by 50% and customers like Haven Holidays claim it has helped increase conversion rates by 5%.
If you want to try and build a solution of your own that emulates some of the features and functions that Eptica’s system incorporates, one of the simplest ways is to build a wiki, either using a general Wiki package like MediaWiki or a more niche Wiki package like BrainKeepe.
Or you can approach the problem from a customer relationship management perspective and use customer support add-ons to web-based CRM packages like Zoho and SalesForce to produce dynamic FAQs.