It’s an old adage that happy customers remain customers. In today's competitive markets, customer retention and customer loyalty are more important than ever. Especially when you consider that the cost of acquiring new customers, according to many surveys, runs 8 to 10 times more than the cost of keeping existing ones.

The Business Problem

To provide superior service, your support team needs to create deeper and more trusted relationships with your customers. This becomes a challenge when customer information is distributed over many systems throughout your organization. As a result, your support staff is unable to find the information needed to resolve customer issues in a timely manner. Valuable lessons learned from previous inquiries are not available to help solve current issues. Your customer service representatives are unprepared and the resolution of customer complaints is handled ineffectively. Your customers become increasingly unsatisfied, costing your company time and money.

The IGLOO Software Solution

Streamline customer support and ensure customer retention with an IGLOO online community or customer social network.

Manage Your Customer Knowledge

Empower both employees and customers by offering Web-based customer support services, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Because IGLOO is SaaS (software as a service) delivered, you can build out your own self-service online support community or "one stop shop" for product info, upgrades, FAQs, and more based on your support needs and user generated content. An IGLOO customer support community results in faster client service by giving employees and customers real time access to technical information. Customers can access the network from any place, at any time. And accuracy of information is 100% guaranteed.

IGLOO Forums are online discussions related to specific activities, issues and topics. Set up forums to facilitate interaction with customers, such as new feature requests and bug reports. Use Announcements to create a variety of news channels for broadcasting important product and service news to your customers.

A support Wiki—a collection of web pages that customers can access, contribute to and modify online— can be set up as a living, breathing document that always contains the most recent product-related information. Your support team can manage a wiki as a self service support site, for example, where customers can participate to refine and improve the site, as well as your product and service offerings.

Blogs are great tools to regularly publish upcoming releases, bug fixes, new features, and more. Engineers can make project information public using blogs and collect valuable feedback from customers. Customers can also create their own blog and comment and pose questions to other bloggers within the community, stimulating customer input and involving the customer directly in product development or upgrade processes.

Use an IGLOO support network to assemble information from different sources to give services representatives all the information necessary to resolve customer inquiries. IGLOO’s powerful content management functionality supports multiple file formats. The Sales and Marketing department can push out new product developments and releases. IT Services can place FAQs, technical tips, training tutorials or videos, documentation, and downloadable software upgrades at the customer’s fingertips. All of which can be viewed inline, as well as searched, bookmarked, commented on and subscribed to (via email or RSS) by any authorized member of the community. Customers can set notifications on documents (RSS or email) or files (instant, daily, weekly or monthly) to be alerted to when information changes.

Manage Customer Relationships

Customer service representatives can establish and use an IGLOO Community of Practice to save lessons learned and identify the expertise needed to resolve difficult issues.  IGLOO supports best practices— extending the dialogue to customers, partners and suppliers—to educate your stakeholders about new product offerings and services.

By directing customers to an online support community, Customer Service Representatives (CSRs) are
freed up to use their time wisely and answer more pressing telephone inquiries. IGLOO improves access to information—ultimately improving customer satisfaction and retention.