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Customer Support: Keeping Up with the DIGITAL MIGRATION [Customer Relationship Management](Customer Relationship Management Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) The phone is losing ground as a leading communication channel. Can you meet customers where they're going? When it comes to customer service, sim- plicity Companies can im- prove primarily by limiting the amount of effort it takes for customers to find answers to their questions and accomplish their tasks. Therein lies the appeal of Web self-service, which for many consumers has become the preferred commu nication channel. Instantly available, 2411 online customerself-service portals are gaining ground over conventional agent-assisted support, marking a significant shift in con- sumer the technology. And contrary to popular belief, in- terest self-service technologies gies is not just coming from consumers. The technology is so disruptive that it is changing the behavior of consumers of all generations. In fact, a recent study by Forrester Research found that 72 percent of consumers - regardless of age -prefer self-service to picking up the phone or sending email when it comes to resolving support issues. "Like it or not, customers are moving to nonphone, non-email channels," says Ashley Verrill, a CRM analyst at Software Advice, based in Austin, TX. This certainly is welcome news for organizations looking to cut customer service costs and maximize revenue. "You want to handle low-value customer interactions as much as possible with self-service and automation, saving your best agents and resources for higher-value customers," says Doug Overton, vice president of consulting and analysis at WDS, a business process outsourcing services firm acquired by Xerox last year. However, industry insiders suggest it's not only about cutting support costs anymore. When it's done well, customers will recognize the value of lower-cost automated and digital support. "Think of it as customer empowerment rather than call deflection," says Mike Hennessy, vice president of marketing at IntelliResponse, a provider of virtual agent technology. PREPPING FOR THE WEB There are several elements to consider, though, to fully support customers through digital channels. Regardless of the company's motivation, ultimately, the success of Web self-service depends on the quality and quantity of the information available and die ease with which it can be accessed. Online customers are extremely impatient and information-hungry, so the material available to customers through self-service needs to be succinct and direct, even in response to queries that aren't. But, as anyone who's ever tried to use Web-based self-service knows, it can be a bit overwhelming: Pages and pages of questions and answers, reference materials, articles, videos, links, topic discussions, social media streams, blog posts, and more can be difficult to navigate for even the most Web-sawy consumers. That's a problem that has been going on for years. As early as 2010, the Corporate Executive Board found that a full 57 percent of incoming calls to contact centers were from customers who first attempted to resolve their issues on company Web sites but couldn't. Those customers were 10 percent more likely to be disloyal than customers who were able to fully resolve their issues in their channel of choice. Little has changed since then, many industry sources contend. Web self-service has also been plagued by companies that expect too much of it at once. "You can't just flip...a switch and expect to start getting value," Verrill advises. Verrill and others stress that the self-service option first and foremost has to be easy to find on the Web site. To call more attention to the portal, organizations can prominently place a link to the self-service portal on the homepage and other common support pages that feature company, product, and services information. And, since a self-service portal is an extension of a company's Web site, it should have the same look and feel as the rest of the site. Once on the portal, many experts advise that the 80/20 rule applies: Assume that 80 percent of site visitors are looking for about 20 percent of the content, so that 20 percent should be easy to find. As for the content itself, it should be dear, to the point, and easy to understand. TTiis can be achieved by including graphic elements, such as diagrams, charts, and bullet points. When doing so, though, make sure the graphics are optimized for the Web. If the/re not, the Web site could take too long to load, which might cause some customers to abandon it for a more costly agent-assisted channel. Many experts suggest keeping content to an eighth-grade reading level, so the average 13- or 14-year-old can make sense of it. Ensuring accessibility also means the site should support a variety of Internet browsers, operating systems, assistive technologies for the blind, and, of course, mobile platforms. The latter is becoming more important, especially when one considers that almost a third of all Web traffic today comes from mobile devices, up 73 percent from just a year ago and up 244 percent since 2011, according to the Walker Sands Quarterly Mobile Traffic Report. HELP WITH SEARCH To make a self-service section even more effective, it can be combined with an automated guidance system that enables site visitors to enter questions and then takes them to specific responses without forcing them to scan an entire database for the answer they need. One such system is marketed by WalkMe, a San Francisco start-up that enables Web site owners to enhance their online self-service options with interactive on-screen step-by-step instructions displayed as pop-up balloons. The balloons can be programmed to appear automatically when the site visitor rolls his cursor over certain items or when he clicks on a help button. The appeal of such an app, according to Rami Sweary, the company's president and cofounder, is that it enables customers to continue self-service on the Web without having to leave the Web site to watch video tutorials, browse through special help pages and forums, or, worse yet, send an email and wait for a response. "People do not want to wait twenty-four hours for a response to an email. By that time, they have already gotten their answer somewhere else or given up," Sweary says. Customers who can't find answers on their own in a self-help knowledge base might be inclined to call a customer service line, but they are more likely to type their question into a Google search bar, and companies have no control over the results that the Google search returns. Verrill says, "Google is becoming the default help channel for a lot of people." This presents a number of problems for a company. "Not only has [the visitor] left your site, but he can find information that you may not want him to see," Sweary cautions. WalkMe has helped several companies, including Adobe, Autodesk, Cisco, Clarizen, Deloitte, and Planet Soho, with their Web support. At Planet Soho, a provider of small business management platforms, CEO Ron Daniel credits WalkMe with saving the company 50 percent on support representative costs and increasing user engagement by more than 10 percent. Ariel Utnik, vice president of research and development at Clarizen, a provider of online project management software, said in a statement that WalkMe "revolutionized the way we teach our users how to utilize our software, saving us hundreds of hours of expensive documentation writing and video tutorial production." VIRTUAL AGENTS FOR REAL-UFE HELP Virtual agents are another option companies can use to help customers find what they're looking for. Kobo, a Toronto-based firm that provides e-reading mobile apps and its own line of e-readers, uses IntelliResponse's Virtual Agent technology to simplify its Web self-service options. The software helps site visitors find the single right answer to their questions. To keep information current and relevant, it strips outdated FAQ entries, learns over time how to group and respond to questions, and captures data about customer service queries to find precisely what customers need so Kobo can fine-tune how it presents information on its Web site. According to Hennessy, the market for virtual agents to assist with Web self-service is growing rapidly and constantly improving as natural language understanding becomes more robust. "Now, with virtual agents, [customers] can ask [questions naturally] and have intelligent answers delivered back to them," Hennessy says. Overton expects to one day have virtual agent technology that can handle questions coming in through any number of channels and treat them all the same way. "In the future, questions can be captured through email, an IVR, or the Web, and we will be able to find the answer and get it to the customer without ever tapping into an agent," he says. Companies can also use Web chat to help customers through the self-service maze. It's a tool that's already widely accepted by consumers and businesses alike. "It's an excellent mode of communication for our customers to ask a quick question or receive immediate assistance," says Chelsea Rowles, a support communications specialist at CircuiTree Solutions, a camp management software provider and user of Pure Chat software from Axosoft. "A lot of people don't want to take the time to call, but Pure Chat expedites our support services," Rowles adds. Nick Aristou, executive director of the Four Seasons Hotel in Limassol, Cyprus, uses the LiveWeb Assist chat offering from IceWarp to help customers navigate the many pages of information in his five-star Mediterranean resort's knowledge base, all with the goal of increasing bookings. In addition to the basic chat functions, LiveWeb Assist enables agents to push prepared content (such as the hotel's cancellation policy), photos, graphics, or Web links, to customers on the site with a single click. According to Aristou, this has helped standardize responses and quicken the interactions. Along with chat and virtual agents, companies can use assisted browsing, or cobrowsing, to move self-service interactions along. This functionality lets the agent-or possibly the virtual agent-temporarily take control of a customer's computer screen. Not only does this improve the self-service experience, but, when interactions move to the contact center through either phone or chat, cobrowsing can reduce the average handling time. MEASURE RESPONSES Nonetheless, Verrill and others argue that while it's important to measure average response time, additional metrics need to be used as well. "Companies are using all sorts of metrics [to determine] how the/re performing in the contact center," Verrill points out. "The same monitoring that you're doing in your call center should transfer to these digital channels." Perhaps the most effective measure, she says, is the number of customer questions that are submitted and get a response. This can apply to those questions where the customer finds the answer on her own as well as those that are answered through a social community or by a representative of the company. And then, as with any customer service channel, it's important to collect user feedback about the self-help experience. As with any other customer service channel, this can be done through customer surveys, Web analytics and search logs, customer interviews and focus groups, usability testing, and collaborative design processes. In the end, "for self-service to be done right, it should be in the interest of the customer," Sweary states. "You do not want people to use self-service because they are forced to. You want people to use it because it serves their needs." (Jfc "For self-service to be done right, it should be in the interest of the customer. " What's Web Self-Service Worth? To help companies calculate the value of their self-service channels, Ashley Verrill, CRM analyst at Software Advice, suggests considering the following elements: * The number of issues resolved per month through social communities. This includes the number of new questions posed to and answered by the community, the percentage of issues resolved by members of the community rather than company employees, and the number of "this article helped me" votes received. * The number of issues resolved every month through FAQs and company knowledge bases. This includes the number of page views that both receive per month. * The average cost to resolve issues through channels that involve a company employee. These include phone, email, and chat. News Editor Leonard Klie can be reached at [email protected]. (c) 2013 Information Today, Inc. |