When discussing customer self-service portals with other people, inevitably the subject of online case management comes up. "The knowledge base and discussion forums are fine", they say, "but we really need a web form to help customers initiate a support request".

Often, these requirements are coupled with complex work flows, auto-responders with ticket numbers, dynamic routing, and escalation rules. It's as if some people are eager to have their work day interrupted with support requests from the web portal!

But customers often do not perceive the ability to enter a support request via the web as a benefit. In fact, of all the multiple self-service resources available via the customer portal, a support request form has the longest time to resolution (see graph below).

In the customers mind, having to fill out a support request form is anticlimactic and an inconvenience. They entered the web portal session with hopes of immediate gratification and then leave feeling that it may take days or hours until someone gets back to them.

While many support cases can be attributed to "human error", customers still expect suppliers to anticipate common problems and strategically invest in publishing FAQs, KB articles, and other online resources.

Now, I wouldn't recommend removing support request forms altogether, but I would suggest that Marketing and Support Executives view this as simply a tactical option that reinforces "reactive support" over a more strategic approach that promotes preventative support with an investment in self-service materials and content.

The astute observer may notice that "publishing documents" appear in the "preventative but tactical" quadrant in the above matrix. The reason for this is that web pages are documents and customers consider it an inconvenience when new browser windows and applications suddenly pop-up and take several seconds to load (my Adobe Acrobat plug-in still takes about 10 seconds to load! Forcing me to install Foxit Reader instead).

When the web became fairly ubiquitous, organizations already had several Word and PDF documents on hand and the tactical approach to self-service was to simply make these documents available online. Today this is largely unacceptable, except in rare cases when an alternative to HTML must be provided for printing.