While technology is a great facilitator in improving the customer experience, the drive and passion to use it to its full potential is equally important.
A Top U.S. Internet Site, Ask.com has been a leader in the Q&A business for more than 16 years, delivering trusted answers to more than 100 million global users every month. But it wasn’t long ago that the company known for answering the world’s questions was facing a huge challenge in answering its own customers.
Eric McKirdy, Global Customer Care Manager, for Ask.com accepted the challenge of turning this around, and within two years of finding a technology solution that could facilitate this, Eric has now become a customer service thought leader who has shared Ask.com's best practices for improving customer service and the customer experience at events such as CRM Evolution, Constellation Connected Enterprise, IQPC Future of Call Center Summit, Microsoft Convergence and more.
Noted CRM analyst Paul Greenberg recently asked Eric to guest post on his ZDNet blog (read Why You Should Treat Customer Care Like It’s Your Core Product), and Eric was recently presented a Stevie Award for Customer Support Manager of the Year in recognition of his personal passion and effort for delivering amazing customer service.
Here are some highlights from Ask’s customer service success story:
- Through the development of their online answers, the number of support tickets submitted weekly went from 2,000 to 800 within just two weeks of launching their new customer service solution.
- The previous Ask.com support site knowledge base received approximately 500 page views per day. The new, well-organized, well-developed and search-friendly knowledge base receives more than 90,000 page views per day.
- Customer service response times went from 8 hours to 1.5 hours.
- With a mobile service desk, Eric has even answered support tickets while rehearsing on the pipe organ in the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City, at 38,000 feet on commercial flights, below sea level in Death Valley, and even at the top of the Empire State Building.
- Eric puts his name and his picture on the home page of the support portal and welcomes conversation and feedback so customers know he personally cares about their issue.
The bullets above are just a small part of a far bigger, and now larger customer service success story with Ask’s addition of a mobile-responsive portal, live chat and social customer care, that Eric McKirdy and Parature co-founder Duke Chung will share at 10:30 – 11am Eastern Time, May 21 at the Gartner Customer 360 Summit in Orlando (#GartnerCRM).
If you can’t be at the Gartner Customer 360 Summit, click here to view Eric McKirdy talking about Ask.com's commitment to customer care.