10,000 to one - how smart design boosts customer support performance

When you're managing (or planning) a high-growth online service, one of the key considerations is customer support.  While you can increase the capacity of your servers and boost the bandwidth to meet demand, your reputation could fall apart if you're not able to support growing numbers of visitors.

While banks and retailers often plan on a visitor to customer support ratio of 500:1 and a typical ISP may achieve 1500:1, many online services aim much higher.  Here are two essential features of customer support:

• it can help delight customers and win loyalty - especially among those who initially have a problem
• but it contributes the highest share of variable cost to many online businesses

So, customer support is important, but expensive.  And it can be very hard to scale up.  If you want to scale fast you may have to accept that your service level will drop, and that your bond with some of your visitors may begin to fray.  Some organisations with millions of users respond by making it difficult to reach their customer support (when did you last talk to someone at Skype or Google?), while others swallow the costs of 24 hour call-centres and watch margins shrivel.

But with careful management it is possible to give your visitors accessible customer support without impairing growth.  The key is to provide the support, but minimise the chances that each visitor will want to use it!

This is a risky process - get it wrong and your customer support team will be under pressure - but the secret is to use poka-yoke design principles to ensure that visitors don't need any additional help.

Poka-yoke (roughly translated as "mistake avoidance" or "idiot-proofing") involves designing processes that reduce the chances of problems arising during a process - in this case the experience a visitor has of the service they are visiting.  Here are some design considerations that can help reduce the chances that visitors will need human customer support:

1. keep site layouts simple
2. minimise the number of options and decisions in the process
3. use logical steps to break down the process into intuitive components
4. use automated verification and form checking wherever possible and give real-time feedback

With careful design it is possible to manage and predict the load on your customer support resources by applying these principles in a continuous process.  As certain visitor patterns emerge, design can be modified to anticipate and address common concerns or complaints.  And it's worth remembering that visitors prefer not to have to contact support since it costs them time and effort too!

To serve the needs of 10,000 visitors with a single customer support team member, each visitor can occupy only 2.9 seconds of an 8 hour working day assuming that their support requests are evenly spread!  Since they never are evenly spread, and since the typical support request takes longer than 2.9 seconds to deal with, it's worth applying a queueing model to assist with analysis and preparation.

So, even assuming even distribution, if your customer support requests typically take 5 minutes (300 seconds) to deal with, you need to ensure that fewer than 1% of your visitors need help.

When we first launched Bmycharity we had a tiny fraction of the visitors that the service now enjoys, but we were very cautious about offering any real-time phone or online support, relying on webforms and email instead.  But over the years we systematically redesigned the site.  We made real-time phone support prominently available, and we addressed the design of every process element that feedback indicated caused visitors trouble.  We never perfected the process, but we were able to sustain dramatic growth in visitor numbers without increasing our customer support resources - and we regularly received recommendations for our prompt response to support requests.

Thin client lunch! A lesson in robust infrastructure

I met a friend for lunch today at a Thai restaurant in Isabella Street near Southwark Tube station.  The chicken satay was delicious and so was the green curry, but as I relished the flavour I noticed an unfamiliar spicy smell.  It became quite strong and eventually a waiter asked us to evacuate the restaurant since the building next door was on fire.

We took our plates with us and enjoyed the remainder of our meals in the street outside while the fire brigade took control of the situation and a crowd gathered to spectate.  As we forked down coconut and chili infused chicken and rice standing on a street corner, a distressed man rushed up and asked if we worked for BT - begging some big questions about BT's public image...

Once we'd finished our meals we tried to return the plates to the restaurant and settle the bill.  The staff waiting outside the building accepted the plates but wouldn't allow us to pay - they were unable to get into the building to process the payment.  We left them smoking disconsolately.

The friend I was meeting is responsible for some of the critical systems of RBS, ensuring that traders have reliable access to information and analytical tools under all circumstances including fire, terrorist attack and flooding.  As we walked along the south bank of the Thames past Tate Modern and the Millennium Bridge we discussed the effects that cloud computing are having in reducing the risk of single-site failure, reducing cost and increasing processing power.

It's not yet clear that cloud computing will help us determine genetic therapies to cure cancer and other illnesses (though there are reasons for optimism) - but if your infrastructure is vulnerable to single points of failure then you're accepting a huge risk which you can almost certainly eliminate - and save money.

Here are some simple questions about infrastructure which every business should consider - unless it wants to provide competitors, customers or criminals a free lunch:

• Is there any single server cabinet, room or building the loss of which would put us out of business?
• If workmen dig up our main internet connection are we unable to recover?

The answer to these questions does not need to be "yes" - even small and medium sized businesses can now enjoy the security and robust infrastructure traditionally associated with major banks like RBS.