Customer Experience Solutions/Project Management

AMC Help Center

Without easy, navigable access to information about the Appalachian Mountain Club online, the organization’s customers struggled to find answers to their questions, resulting in more calls to AMC’s Customer Service Center (CSC). More callers to the CSC clog up phone lines, resulting in more dropped calls, dissatisfied customers, a drop in membership and lodging revenue, and overwhelms staff.  

Our solution was to develop a community help center through Salesforce, with a database of informational articles and a chat bot that would allow customers to self-service their questions.

As project manager, I collaborated with the CSC mangers to determine what their frequently asked questions were, and developed a project roadmap to create articles that would answer those questions. Articles were organized into broad categories to ease browsing and assure customers could easily find answers to their questions.

We launched our first phase in January 2023 and continue to add and update articles. For phase 2, I led the collaboration with departments outside CSC to determine how this site could support their work and outreach, and continue to update our project roadmap to accommodate those ideas.

Since launch, AMC’s Help Center has an average of TK number visiting the site each month and a decrease in calls to CSC by TKpercent.

Location:

AMC Help Center

Project Duration:

6 months phase 1 development; Currently in phase 2 production

Lessons Learned:

This was my first dive into Salesforce’s Knowledge and Community capabilities, and was an exciting project to take on. Learning how the program is built allowed me to cater the database to support our customers and to collect information on how AMC can best respond to inquiries in the future. It also alleviated CSC’s stress on managing customer calls so they can focus on building their resources.