Customer support: opportunity, not cost

June 28, 2010

By driving customer satisfaction and engagement consciously and consistently at Yahoo! we can drive up revenues and reduce costs. The next step: creating customer delight.

Anita Sharan

MUMBAI:

Jeff Russakow, executive VP, customer advocacy, Yahoo!, is its official troubleshooter. He manages the problems and issues in Yahoo!'s interaction with customers and advertisers through its products and services. The kinks are located on a cross-functional basis and dealt with swiftly.

"The idea is to create great customer - 600 million Yahoo! users - experience. We look for customer 'pain points' in our products and content and address them. The same goes for our advertisers and their ad targeting, production values and ease of doing business," said Russakow. "By driving customer satisfaction and engagement consciously and consistently, we can drive up reduce costs."

In the one year since he joined, Russakow said, Yahoo! has reduced total customer technical support issues by 40 per cent, and customer complaints on content posted by other users by 25-40 per cent. The time taken with advertisers from initial quote to a committed ad campaign orders has been reduced "from as much as 14 days sometimes to four." Also, Yahoo! now blocks over 60 million inappropriate ad views per month on publisher pages.

Product changes have included reduction in e-mail access errors; a speeding up of e-mail performance; elimination of most of the glitches on Yahoo! Messenger; and enabling of new accounts registrations through mobile devices. Advertisers are happier too, Russakow said, "with the increased speed and agility of our account management teams, as well as greater speed and clarity of billing."

While the past one year has been about tightening business operations, "starting now, we are moving increasingly into true customer advocacy, focusing on programmes to help customer discover our products and product changes, to explore them, and to engage with them more often. This is geared toward customer delight, versus merely customer satisfaction," Russakow said.