The most popular part of the service and support area is the company's solution-search database of over 10,000 cases, in which customers can solve their own problems based on the experience of other customers. The move to customer self-service has paid off handsomely for The MathWorks. Now 90 percent of the company's technical support happens over the Web. Users visit the site at least once every one to two months. Our Web site includes full service and support.
Service is the secret.
If you do a good job at it, loyalty and repeat business will increase. Getting a customer who just purchased something to fill in that registration card is a major challenge for manufacturers. Yet if the customer does so, the company collects customer data that can be used for further promotions. Then, within a minute of registering, the customer receives a personalized email with a link to a Web page offering a coupon for an additional, related purchase. This process, says the report, moved the company's registration rate from 5 percent to as high as 20 percent, while registration costs fell almost 90 percent.