October 2002

By Markus Zirn

Whenever I think of 'balancing,' I think of my Sunday newspaper. Only when I meditate over my paper on a sunny Sunday morning, do I have deep thoughts about balancing 'family and work,' 'church and state' or, believe it or not, 'self-service and the human touch.' During the week, I am far too busy making things happen. But looking back, I might actually do my best work on Sunday mornings. That's when I feel I really move things forward.

I would like to invite you to such a Sunday morning reflection on today's contact center, the term we use to lump together the traditional call center and various other forms of online support. It's actually good timing, as there is clearly a need for reflection. Traditional call center operations are a matured industry, where new efficiencies are only realized in small doses. We feel almost paralyzed trying to get more and more out of the call center. On the other hand, immature online self-service technology is giving us headaches. The promises salespeople make sound so compelling that we rush right into the next adventure, only to wake up with a hangover the next day. So, let's breathe, brainstorm what's going on here and then figure out how to best spend our next busy week.

Perfecting The 'Human Touch'
For many years, the support organization's sole mission in life was 'the human touch,' the interaction between support agent and customer on the phone. A huge industry was created, driven by one core question: 'How can you design phone interactions so customers are fully satisfied while the company spends the least amount of money?' 

To value the accomplishments of the call center industry, it's important to define what the 'human touch' is really all about. Why do customers like to talk to an agent rather than use a Web site, even if they might have to wait on hold? Two distinct reasons come to my mind: the first is the feeling that an agent has the expertise to solve a problem. After all, humans are still smarter than machines, especially when it comes to problem solving. But, at least as important, customers like the feeling that they are helped along and 'taken care of.' If you have a problem, it's a natural emotional reaction to reach out for the attention of another human being. 

The call center industry did a great job of perfecting the 'taken care of' aspect of the human touch. It might not gel with a 'romantic' view of what human touch is all about, but the benefit of military-style operations in modern call centers is that there is simply no chance for breakdowns in the process of 'taking care of' a customer. Reliability is ensured. Call-routing mechanisms minimize the hold time. Call-tracking applications ensure that follow-up calls happen. Managers carefully watch an abundance of metrics to find and eliminate the smallest bottlenecks. 

The 'expertise' aspect of the human touch is clearly the harder nut to crack, because it's in direct conflict with reducing costs. Today's dominant solution is to create several levels of support. Less experienced agents or even outsourced resources handle the mass of calls. 'Expert' agents are concentrated and only brought into the game if the first level of agents can't solve the problem. That's today's best compromise of providing 'expertise' to customers while keeping labor costs down. A smart, new generation of knowledge management applications attempts to create a 'collective brain' of all support agents. The idea is to re-use expertise that has already been put to use. But to realize any benefits requires upfront effort and agent time. This is why such efforts have not always been fruitful in the hectic call center environment. It's just hard to change the wheels of a car that's driving at 60 mph. Additionally, the benefits are marginal, as the savings are only in avoiding escalations, the minority of support incidents.

The ATM Model, A Breakthrough For Customer Support?
When the Internet became ubiquitous, CEOs put pressure on the support departments. The vision: replicate in customer support what the ATM had done for the financial services industry. The goal: deflect as many calls as possible through online self-service. 

This is when the wild rush started. The first wave of services implementations was about e-mail support and some chat implementations. No wonder. That's the closest to a call center you can get on the Web. The savings, however, were incremental: $6 instead of $10 for a customer incident. This was nice, but far from a revolution. To create a breakthrough in the cost structure of customer support, everyone agreed: the 'human touch' had to be taken out of the equation. It had to be fully automated, just like an ATM. That's why the second rush is all about self-service knowledge bases. 

So why hasn't the industry seen the expected breakthrough? Why are there so many self-service CRM failures? Well, let's first look at why the ATM was such a hit. I think it's another success story of the 'keep it simple' principle. The ATM basically performs three operations: get cash, transfer money, deposit cash. Fortunately for banks, these three operations probably make up 99.9 percent of their business. Not so in customer support. Take technical support, for example. Think of all the different questions a PC or software vendor is asked. How do I upgrade my sound card? Why does my game crash since I got my new optical mouse? How can I exchange data with software XYZ? 

The reality is that customer support is complex. It's a fact that today's self-service alone can't resolve more than 50 percent of all customer issues. That's what causes frustration, both for customers and companies. Maybe support is so complex, that we have to wonder: will it ever work without a 'human touch'? 

Think 'AND' Not 'OR'!
As the theme of this article is 'balancing,' and we are in a sunny Sunday morning mood, here's my suggestion: Let's step back for a moment from the big plans to revolutionize customer support with ATM-like 'Web machines' alone. Let's try to think more holistically. How can we best use self-service technology in combination with the 'human touch'? What elements from the 'human touch' have we hastily discarded and should bring back into a complete e-support strategy?
Here are some thoughts for a next generation of e-support.

More 'Service' In Self-Service
Imagine that your neighborhood garage has made you responsible for coordinating your next service visit. You have straight access to the mechanic, the electrician and the warehouse. Now, go and figure out yourself how to get your car serviced. You might go to the wrong person first and will have to backtrack. If the mechanic doesn't have the parts, he won't get them himself. Not his job! 

Does that bring back memories of your last online self-service experience? Isn't that exactly how customer self-service works today? It's free access to a hodge-podge of tools. You figure it out yourself. If something goes wrong, it's your problem. 

What is needed is more 'service' in self-service. Customers should have a single point of access for online support, just as you would deal with only the service consultant at your garage. There has to be a seamless process guiding you from pure self-service to the next level of support, if needed. If a breakdown occurs on the way ' let's say an initial answer doesn't really resolve your problem ' the self-service platform should 'take care of' you and make sure you will get a better answer.

This concept of 'taking care of' the customer is certainly not new. That's part of the 'human touch.' It's what the call center industry is doing such a good job at. Let's combine the different forms of online support we have into one seamless, staged e-support channel. Also, let's do what call center applications have done for many years: identify possible breakdowns and ensure that the customer is 'taken care of.'

The Power Of The Feedback Loop
Engineers will tell you that systems, which combine several components, always benefit from a feedback loop. It's about using all the information you have as early in the process as possible. 

I believe that e-support is the real 'killer application' for knowledge management. While knowledge management has marginal benefits in the call center, the benefits in e-support are huge. Imagine you could capture every 'human touch' right into your self-service knowledge base. Then, no similar question would be asked twice. The second time, immediate self-service would kick in. Now, we can avoid calls altogether, not just second-level escalations. All this just because we built in a feedback loop from the 'human touch' back to self-service.

It seems so simple. Funnily enough, that's not how it works today. Today, we create support content for self-service in a separate, very bureaucratic 'knowledge engineering' process. While the customer self-service transaction might be for free, filling the knowledge base with content costs plenty. 

We would all love to totally avoid the costly 'human touch.' But please, if it's unavoidable, let's make the best use of it and re-use it over and over again via self-service.

Do We Define 'Human Touch' Too Narrowly?
What if we were all wrong and the real breakthrough of the Internet was not about providing ATM-like self-service, but about expanding 'the human touch'? The Internet can do what the telephone can't: connect a large, disparate group of people. So, what if we tried to do the opposite of the ATM model? What if we involved even more people in support to increase rather than to reduce the 'human touch'? These could be 'volunteers,' providing 'human touch' at no cost. 
Honestly, do we think too narrowly if we think of our support agents only, if we think of 'human touch' in support? Aren't there other knowledgeable folks out there? What about the people who use a product every day? The PC and software industries have actually cultivated user conferences, user groups and support newsgroups for a long time. Peer support does have a tradition among technical users. In those industries and in many others, I can see how peer support, as another layer in a holistic approach to e-support, can be a powerful approach to avoid support calls. Let me know what you think!

Markus Zirn was most recently vice president of marketing at QUIQ, an innovator of online support solutions. He can be reached at [email protected].