January 1999

The Call Center And E-Commerce Convergence

BY ZOLTAN POLERETZKY, NORTEL NETWORKS

By introducing new channels for transactions and customer care, the Internet is profoundly changing the way business is conducted. Web-based electronic commerce (E-com) has enabled Internet-based companies like Amazon.com and e*Trade to capture market/mind share in such mature industries as retail and financial services; new Web-based alternatives have also emerged in the travel industry.

E-com helps lower cost structures while offering the potential for superior access and services to global markets. It is also revolutionizing customer care, particularly in the call center, by offering a visual, interactive medium for finding information and solving problems.

Customer satisfaction is always important, but is even more so when opinions get wide distribution, as they can over the Internet. In a recent article in the San Jose Mercury News, Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com, was quoted as saying, "In the physical world, if I make a customer unhappy, they'll tell five friends…on the Internet, they'll tell 5,000." Of course, positive word of mouth on the Web can have similar impact.

Web-based E-com is changing the dynamic of customer interaction and the kinds of assistance and support customers expect. One example is the wave of e-mail companies now receive via their Web sites. IDC projects tremendous growth for e-mail and Web response - Nortel Networks, which has experienced roughly 100 percent year-over-year growth in Web inquiries, is a great example.

This flood of e-mail is a symptom of a larger issue that's both a problem and an opportunity. Customers who use the Web are ready to interact, if given the chance, but many businesses have been caught off guard. It is easy to enable customers to send e-mail from a Web site, but it is much harder to handle the messages when they arrive. This article describes a solution, while offering a complete digest of available technologies and a step-by-step view of how to manage Web interactions.

Step 0: Get Your Facts Straight - The Data Repository
A vital element of electronic business is the data repository. It is the source of meaningful content upon which Internet Call Center (ICC) agents will rely. Without consistent, timely and meaningful data, even the most elaborate customer interaction schemes will fail. A central repository makes it possible to offer customers consistent information across every communication channel. For example, if a customer orders a product over the Web and then phones the call center to check the status, the agent can provide an accurate, up-to-date report.

The data repository can be spread across disparate sources, including legacy hosts and relational databases. Through careful planning and execution, these can be presented to customers and ICC agents as a seamless resource. Web-to-database and data mining technologies can help.

Step 1: Self-Service - Helping Customers Help Themselves
E-com and Web-based customer-care applications are broadening dramatically. Retailers are successfully selling books, CDs, flowers and clothing over the Web. Online brokerages are gaining market share by offering powerful research tools for individual investors, while also giving deep discounts. Many customers are shifting to the Web for product inquiries, purchases and support.

The de facto expectation among Web users is that they'll essentially help themselves. But enabling effective self-help goes beyond providing simple FAQ (Frequently Asked Question) lists. Intelligent search engines should be employed to provide context-sensitive information to the customer based on where they are on the site, their account profiles, their buying histories and new offerings. Images, voice, screen cams, animations and video clips can also add tremendous value to textual information.

When implemented properly, self-help reduces person-to-person interaction. Since the Web exposes a business to a huge population, it would be inadvisable to place a "call-me" button on every page of a Web site. The call center would be swamped with calls. By optimizing the principle of "self-help," the ICC can focus its human resources on helping high-margin customers and those with unique problems.

Another important implication of self-help is that customers will be roaming around your Web site. Click-stream-tracking technology monitors and records a customer's movement around the site. Moreover, the click-stream-tracking server can identify and target specific customers for human interaction, based on:

1. Customer information in the data repository,
2. The customer's path through the Web site,
3. The price of the products in the customer's "shopping basket,"
4. The time the customer has spent on a specific page.

Make sure, though, to implement click-stream-tracking with care, to eliminate the possibility of customers feeling spied on.

Step 2: When Self-Help's Not Enough - Human Interaction
However, the Internet and Web do not mean an end to human interaction. Both real-time and non-real-time interactions play very important roles.

For example, a click-stream-tracking server might identify a customer as "high margin" by looking up his or her buying history. To "close the deal," this customer would be offered real-time interaction with a "call-me" button. Conversely, a low-margin customer might be offered non-real-time interaction via a Web form or e-mail button. This customer is still important, but the inquiry can be handled at a lower priority during traffic lulls.

Studies have shown that customers expect immediate response from a knowledgeable representative who understands the customer's prior interaction on the Web site. Real-time interaction technologies include:

• Circuit-switched Callbacks: Computer-telephony integration (CTI) enables sophisticated processing of customer requests for callbacks to available phone lines. Software on the Web site communicates with a telephony application server to identify an agent who is available and skilled in the subject at hand. Then the telephony application server can send a message to a PBX or a carrier switch to launch the callback.
• Voice-over-IP Gateways: Most people who surf the Web from home are likely to be using their only phone line. If the customer's PC is equipped with an Internet phone that accepts Voice-over-IP (VoIP) calls, he or she can get a callback while still connected to the Internet. In some applications, the Internet call is placed from the customer's PC immediately, and the call is terminated on a gateway. The gateway converts the call into a circuit-switched call and routes it to a call center where it is queued for an agent. H.323 is an accepted standard for Internet telephony. It has been implemented and widely deployed in applications such as Microsoft's NetMeeting. Internet telephony gateways play a critical role in connecting packet-switched H.323 Internet calls with circuit-based call centers.
• VoIP Internet ACD: Another option is to keep the customer's VoIP call in the "packet" domain by delivering it to an Internet phone on the ICC agent's PC. These calls enable more elegant coordination between the voice connection and the data session. However, current standards and end-points (Internet phones) do not adequately support important call-control features such as hold, supervised transfer, conference and observe. These and other issues are the focus of significant research and development.
  
  Call centers are evolving toward "blended" architectures, in which circuit-switched and VoIP calls are centrally managed by moving call-routing and reporting functionalities from switches, gateways or routers into centralized call center servers. These servers are media independent and network agnostic, so they can be used to implement business rules and routing logic for all types of calls. They also have consolidated management systems with single interfaces for real-time and historical reporting.
• Real-Time Text Chat: More and more people are familiar with virtual communities and chat forums. These people use real-time chat effectively and are comfortable with it, and they are the ICC customers and agents of the future. Real-time text chat can be very effective in facilitating Web-based customer service - in many cases, a targeted and instantaneous response to a simple question will satisfy a customer.
• Visual Collaboration: These features include agent-led Web tours, file transfers, assisted forms, agent scripts, application demos and application sharing. These features can significantly enhance real-time text and voice interactions and enable an ICC agent to dynamically send relevant content to the customer. For example, an agent might push a promotional Web page as a "deal closer" or do a split-screen comparison of his company's product with that of a competitor. Collaboration servers usually log details about interactions from cradle to grave, which is useful for agent training and identifying Web site improvements. The response times of visual collaboration severs will be constrained by the bandwidth of the subscribers' access lines, particularly when using VoIP and simultaneously pushing pages over a single 28.8-kbps line. However, new access technologies such as Digital Subscriber Line (DSL), 1-Meg Modems and cable modems will help take Web-based collaboration and E-com to new levels.

Visual collaboration servers have to implement some special "tricks" to provide consistent and reliable experiences for customers. Visual collaboration servers must use special applets that run on the customer's PC. These applets manage a communication session between the customer's browser and the collaboration server. This opens the door to persistent "sessions" between ICC agents and customers over the Web. Firewalls and proxy servers also present a challenge for visual collaboration servers. However, smart techniques such as "HTTP encapsulation" allow the browser and the visual collaboration server to communicate using standard protocols which firewalls and proxy servers can handle.

Customers, however, don't always interact with companies during regular business hours. They're likely to submit requests 24 hours a day, and the arrival rate of those messages in the call center may be sporadic. Non-real-time (or "asynchronous") interaction like voice messaging, e-mail and fax may not have the sizzle of VoIP or visual collaboration, but they're familiar parts of our lives. Budget and headcount restrictions will require that call centers process Web requests throughout the day to ensure the quickest possible responses. Managers will need to fill lulls in inbound activity with outbound customer retention calls or asynchronous messages, thus ensuring agents work at peak capacity all day. Here are two methods of non-real-time interaction:

• E-mail Response: Many products have emerged to deal with the deluge of e-mail from Web sites. Auto-response servers use artificial intelligence to formulate responses automatically, while other systems route e-mail based on agent skills and provide response "templates" to reduce handling times. E-mail response systems also provide reporting tools vital in measuring performance.
• Web Messaging: This is more sophisticated than e-mail. Customers can post inquiries publicly or privately and either return on their own to the Web sites to pick up responses or be contacted by the ICC via e-mail, call or pager. The technology for this is readily available. Call center servers route inquiries to the appropriate agents, and desktop tools help agents assemble multimedia responses - text, images, screen-shots, hypertext links, streaming audio and video. These interactions must be carefully tracked to completion, since customers may ask for additional information and multiple agents may be required because of schedule and skill constraints.

Important Points: For both real-time and non-real-time interaction, the user interface will be critical to a customer's satisfaction. It must be intuitive, efficient and fast. Customers will not tolerate confusing graphics, cryptic instructions and long delays. Conversely, positive first experiences will bring customers back.

Sometimes, the customer and agent may conduct a single transaction that requires multiple interactions across multiple communication channels. Managing these transactions requires that they are "threaded" - that is, some common information element, such as a transaction identifier, must link the interactions. If the customer is to receive consistent service, ICC agents must be able to see the entire interaction thread.

Step 3: Knowledge Feedback To The Repository
After satisfying a customer's request, the work is still not complete. Other customers may encounter the same problem or question, so the knowledge gained should be returned to the knowledge base. This has several benefits:

• The knowledge base keeps improving.
• Subsequent customers can help themselves, lowering the requirement for expensive person-to-person interactions.
• Other agents can leverage the knowledge and become more effective.

Step 4: The Magic Of Delighted Customers
The benefits of a well-designed Internet call center are enormous:

• Revenues increase because the business can address a large volume of customers over the Web,
• Costs decrease because of customer self-help tools and more efficient handling of transactions,
• Customer satisfaction results in increased loyalty, which drives repeat business.

While the benefits of Internet call centers are compelling, implementation is challenging. Disparate data repositories are difficult to aggregate, and it's never easy to coordinate separate organizations and business units - that is, customer service, marketing, information technology and operations. Many call centers are turning to outsourcers, systems integrators and consultants to help.

Electronic commerce stands to transform business everywhere. Potentially, every business function will be impacted. Web technologies open the door to streamlining processes in all these areas and helping foster more direct and effective relationships with customers. For slow-moving enterprises, this will mean the beginning of the end, as non-traditional competitors start nipping away market share. For innovative businesses, it will be a portal to growth and success.

Zoltan Poleretzky is senior manager in Nortel Networks' Call Center Business Management group, where he is focused on Internet Call Center solutions. He is an electrical engineering graduate of the Georgia Institute of Technology.

BY RUSS COHN, BRIGADE SOLUTIONS, Inc.

Customer support is in a state of crisis. As corporations deploy new support technologies, they run the risk of alienating the very customers they hope to serve. Years ago we simply walked into a store and met face-to-face with the person who sold us the product in question. We resolved our issue on the spot, and that was it. Then came the toll-free help line, which provided little more than a new outlet for elevator music. The norm today is a recorded voice which instructs us to press an endless sequence of telephone buttons, followed, of course, by an encore of elevator music.

The Internet is bringing a new twist to the customer support saga: self-service. Also known as "surf service," we may now answer our questions on our own by wading through dozens, sometimes hundreds of hastily organized help pages on a corporate Web site. When we send an e-mail in the hope of reaching a real "live" person somewhere in the bowels of corporate America, we often receive a robotic guess at the answer, which is sometimes neither accurate nor timely. After all, there's a reason for the oxymoron "artificial intelligence."

Occasionally, we receive a 10-page list of frequently asked questions in our in-box, which is tantamount to the previously described surf service. A recent industrywide benchmark survey shows that 87 percent of companies fail to provide adequate e-mail responses to simple customer questions. Embarrassing articles in The New York Times (July 6, 1998) and The Wall Street Journal (October 21, 1996) confirm what we already know to be true. A recent e-mail to Compaq, for example, was returned to me 57 days later, with the following opener: "Let me begin this e-mail with our apologies."

The Internet, despite its peril, has the potential to recreate the personal touch of customer service. Tools and technologies readily available today can enable an efficient team of human operators to respond to individual pleas for help. For the first time in history, we are on the brink of greater levels of personal service. The promise of one-to-one customer communication, on a massive scale, is within reach. The following step-by-step shows how.

1) Define Your Mission
While all companies are, in principle, committed to providing great support, most ultimately focus on financial benefits alone. World-class Internet support can be defined as providing the right answer the first time in 24 hours. Decide if you want world-class support, or if a generic auto response will suffice. Be honest about your dedication to quality, availability of budget and timeline for results. Know what you're trying to accomplish.

A reasonable goal might be to have customers try at least once to find their own answers on the Web. A good Web site should list frequently asked questions and should have simple navigation tools. If customers can't find an answer quickly, chances are the answer isn't there or it can't be found easily. A segment of the population has absolutely zero patience for surfing. These individuals tend to complain loudly and repeatedly, and coincidentally they tend to spend a lot of money. They may be good customers, but they're difficult to serve. Be aware that on any given day a segment of your customers want a "live" response from a live representative of your organization.

2) Define Service Levels
Clarify your mission by defining a "service level." A service level is a quantitative measurement of performance. The most current framework is a certain high percent completed within a reasonable time period, for example: "95 percent completion within 24 hours." Mission-critical products and services will probably need a higher service level, for example 99 percent completion within several hours or minutes. Avoid extremes, such as 100 percent completion or average completion, since these can be easily biased and they don't provide a comprehensive picture of performance. The good service level should also have a quality component, such as "the right answer the first time," or "I'd be proud to show this to my customer." Advanced service levels incorporate some form of customer satisfaction feedback, usually through survey methodologies.

Keep the service level simple and standard so others can use it. At some point you will transition the support function to another manager or to an outsourced agent. Such transitions invariably take place at the worst possible moment, so it's nice to have an industry standard service level already in place.

3) Build The Business Case
Internet support has extreme cost advantages over conventional phone support: compare $10 for a typical phone-based incident to $2 for a typical Internet-based incident. Automated systems can be even cheaper if they reliably provide the correct answer the first time. Unfortunately, most auto-response agents are accurate only 30 percent of the time. The downside of automation is that if it doesn't work well, customers tend to call in to the help line. That scenario not only misses the savings opportunity, but it incurs an extra expense in implementing the new, unsuccessful automated technology.

Be aware of auxiliary expenses. Systems, training, IT support, ongoing management, foreign-language support and quality control can have serious budgetary impact. Initial setup costs can easily exceed $250,000.

4) Map The Interface Points
Support affects the rest of the business. Certain difficult questions will need to be "escalated" to an appropriate expert elsewhere within the organization - in marketing, product development, or investor relations, for example. The converse is true, too - activities elsewhere will impact the volume and type of support required. Be proactive about activities in other parts of the company that will impact the service level, for example product launches or technical glitches. Clear support policies with the appropriate product managers to validate accuracy. It's bad enough that support already has a poor reputation - be prepared to upgrade the role and reputation of support within your organization. A monthly support strategy meeting will resolve many of these issues and will provide a clear channel of communication for future discussion.

5) Select Systems
This is the death trap for many. There are so many systems out there, one can easily spend a full year testing them, only to discover new versions are out and hence the need for another round of tests. This phenomenon is known as "analysis paralysis." It sounds silly, but I've seen it happen many times. Give yourself a timeline - two months should be enough - and stick to it. If you can't finish it by then, your best option is early retirement.

When selecting systems, you should first decide on a workflow engine to keep track of all that e-mail whizzing around. Next, choose a knowledge base engine to keep track of the 200 or so most frequently asked questions, along with their updates. Both the workflow engine and the knowledge base engine should interface with the Web site to create a single support architecture.

There are too many vendors providing these kind of solutions to list here. My own advice is to keep it simple. Since most systems in this category are in version 1.0, be prepared to upgrade to newer and better systems every few months. Be sure to test systems against your particular needs. Whatever systems you choose, check that their reports adequately support your service level reporting needs. Ask about any capabilities you will want in the near future, such as foreign languages, or allowing CyberReps to work remotely from home. If you are considering outsourcing, be sure your systems support that option.

Always see a live demo, or better yet, conduct an extended evaluation. In the end, be prepared to spend $100,000 to $300,000 for a full suite of systems. Implementation typically doubles the ultimate price tag, and can take up to six months. More than half of all large-scale systems installations fail to meet their original objectives, so once again, keep it simple.

6) Build The Knowledge Base
A strong knowledge base greatly improves the quality and efficiency of support. Invest the time to build a thorough list of common answers, and be sure to check the answers for internal consistency, spelling and grammar. It's wise to elicit input from other groups such as product development, sales and even PR. Develop a writing style that is consistent with your company's image. Regardless of your stylistic tendencies, use crisp, clear communication as outlined in Strunk and White's timeless book, The Elements of Style, Allyn & Bacon, 1979 (available on Amazon.com).

A good knowledge base is the key to scalability. Once the answers are in place, it's relatively easy to hire and train new reps to handle sudden increases in volume. Once your support operation is stabilized, as much as half of all your effort will go into updating and refining the knowledge base. Without a knowledge base, quality and throughput will never improve, CyberReps will fatigue and turnover will have a detrimental and sudden impact on performance. Management attention will be sucked into keeping up with the daily workload, and no energy will be left to make fundamental improvements to systems and procedures.

7) Hire And Train CyberReps
Customer support is inherently labor intensive. Hire the best people you can afford and keep them as long as possible. Simple mistakes, like accidentally canceling a valued customer's account, can be costly and embarrassing. Support is extremely visible: expect the CEO, board members, investors and client prospects to have their own firsthand experience with your new support operation. Customers remember the worst support mistakes, so hire staff who are reliable and consistent. The best approach to hiring is to seek out responsible individuals who have an interest in the product or service at hand. Test all applicants for their knowledge of the product, the Internet, writing style, typing skills and genuine interest in the role. I strongly recommend avoiding individuals with telephone call center support experience, as they tend to bring with them old-style thinking about customer support.

Training is far more complex. There is no secret here, other than to expect a learning curve of two to four weeks. Training is best done "over the shoulder" initially, when the support staff is small and the support issues are new to the entire group. Informal start-up meetings each morning will keep everyone informed of the latest decisions. As volume increases over time and support issues are fully documented, formal instruction on support procedures starts to makes sense.

8) Pilot Extensively
Beware Pandora's box. Once you open the floodgates of Internet-based support, it's easy to get inundated with e-mail. I'm aware of one company that unexpectedly received over 100,000 e-mails in a single day! Be sure that policies, systems and people are ready for life on Internet time.

One way to test your offering is to run a pilot program. Start with a small volume of messages for a period of one month or less. Measure performance against your service level. A good pilot program will reveal unexpected challenges, and will bring confirmation of many of your initial assumptions. Once the pilot is complete, you may want to spend several weeks tweaking your offering before going to prime time.

9) Scale up
You now have systems, staff a knowledge base and pilot experience. The last remaining challenge is to expand the program to accommodate the entire volume of incoming messages within the constraints of the service level. If all previous work was done correctly, scaling up is easy. Focus on daily performance levels and daily improvements to the knowledge base.

10) Repeat
As luck would have it, the moment the first iteration of Internet support is in place and stable, the world will change. Someone in the organization will want to include foreign languages, additional products and functions, the ability to allow CyberReps to work from home, etc. New products will need new support, competitors will exert new pressures, customer expectations will rise, systems will crash, and the Internet itself will evolve. Be prepared to reinvent your Internet support program every six months.

But some things won't change. New products will still go to market before they are truly stable and customers will still want personalized service. Let's just hope elevator music never comes back in style.

Russ Cohn is CEO of Brigade Solutions, Inc., a leading outsourcing provider of Internet-based customer support operations. Based in San Francisco, Brigade has launched turnkey support operations and processed hundreds of thousands of support transactions on behalf of leading corporate clients. The company's Web site is located at www.brigadesolutions.com.

BY STEVEN M. GIMNICHER, CNT ENTERPRISE INTEGRATION SOLUTIONS GROUP

1. Seek a solution with a customer-centric, not a company-centric, design. The agent should navigate through the information in response to the customer. This will speed customer response time while reducing agent time on the phone.
2. Think scalability - is the architecture of the solution you are considering designed to meet tomorrow's needs - even if that includes a merger, doubling in size, etc.
3. How manageable is the solution? Call center environments are constantly changing, and your technology infrastructure must be able to change with you. Centralized management of Web solutions eases management and can provide significant cost savings.
4. Assess your redundancy and security needs, and make sure the capabilities you need are available.
5. Seek a solution that offers reliability and real-time integration. In Web-enabled environments, response times are critical, down-time is unacceptable.
6. Does the solution support industry standards and open systems tenants? To be cost-effective, the solution should integrate with your existing infrastructure.
7. Evaluate all the options, especially when considering the fate of your older legacy systems. Middleware solutions can bring real-time legacy-based customer information to the Web quickly and cost-effectively and extend the life of your costly legacy systems.
8. What impact will the new solution have on your employees? Evaluate the "cost" associated with training your employees.
9. The solution should offer an intuitive format. Make sure the new solution isn't so complicated that your agent's focus is now on how to handle the application, rather than how to address the customer's needs.
10. Evaluate the company that provides the solution. Can it provide a total solution, including systems integration and professional services as needed? Partnering with vendors that have the experience can mean the difference between success and failure.

Steve Gimnicher, vice president of the Reengineering Business Unit for the CNT Enterprise Integration Solutions Group, joined the company in November 1997 with more than 20 years of experience in the software industry. Mr. Gimnicher oversees the ongoing development, support, marketing and strategic direction for the products comprising this business unit.