How to Proactively Alert Customers to a Problem and Cut Help Desk Costs

In an earlier post I discussed how sending proactive notifications to business users and customers can cut down help desk calls and generally improve customer satisfaction. The idea is that automatically notifying a few thousand users about a service outage costs very little, whereas fervently hoping they won’t notice or won’t care can result in a massive influx of angry customer calls (and those aren’t free).

An Alert Management Platform can contact service customers before they contact you.  For example, typically when a critical application is sending out an alert that it’s overloaded and may go down at any second, the only people who know about it are IT. But while they’re trying to fix the problem, your customers are out in the cold and about to heat up.

At the same second that the IT guy gets an alert that the application is failing, personnel can choose to let a business level message go out to the service users.   A simple email, IM, voice call, BlackBerry alert, or iPhone notification from a friendly customer service representative informing customers that their service may be briefly interrupted can go a long way in soothing ruffled feathers. Simply upload the contact info of your most important business users or all affected customers into an Alert Management Platform, and set up the system to send out a polite heads-up message BEFORE anything big goes down.

To avoid spamming users, you can even let the user decide what they “want” to know about.  Customers will feel they know what’s going on, and, more importantly, that you care about their needs. One company we worked with reduced help desk costs by almost $2M per year after implementing proactive notification to customers. Their customers were also universally happier with their service, which is pretty impressive, as their main customer was the government. Those people can’t agree on anything.

On a related note, don’t miss our upcoming Webinar: Amplify the Relevance of IT Service Management on February 10 to learn how to increase the effectiveness and relevance of IT Service Management.  Register now and you are automatically entered in the drawing to win a Garmin Nuvi 260W portable GPS navigator – a $230 value!