Self-service Ideas for Premium Support

As we discussed last week creating a special collection of knowledge base documents for premium customers may not be a great approach — but there are other ways to provide premium levels of service online. Here are some ideas, in no particular order:

– premium forums (communities): for instance, the forums may be monitored more attentively by your staff, guaranteeing fast responses.

– private webinars for new releases or other technical discussions. An interesting idea here is to record the webinars and make them accessible to all customers later, giving the premium customers early and interactive access to the speakers and materials but leveraging the information for everyone.

– customized portals that include personalized information such as the contact information for the account. Such portals are fairly easy to create and maintain, especially for the larger accounts (and if you need more proof ask the account team: chances are that it maintains such information already, so why not roll it into one coherent whole?)

– account-wide case tracking: instead of allowing each contact to see only his or her cases, it’s very helpful to allow contacts to view everyone’s cases (with permission.) Fortunately this feature is becoming routine in many case-tracking systems so should not be too hard to implement. It happens to be particularly attractive to the larger accounts that are more likely to take advantage of premium support.

– account metrics. Many times premium customers receive regular metrics on their support activities through an account manager. POsting the metircs online (or even better, allowing the customer to generate custom metrics at will) is an easy step up.