WebRTC and Webification: Driving Feedback in the Contact Center

WebRTC to WebComm

WebRTC and Webification: Driving Feedback in the Contact Center

By Phil Edholm, President & Founder, PKE Consulting  |  September 23, 2014

I have written a bit about how WebRTC enables a new paradigm in customer interaction, Interaction Experience 2.0. One major point of this discussion is that more than 70 percent of calls into a contact center are preceded by a website visit and, increasingly, customers are looking to resolve these issues on the website as self-service customers. In Interactive Experience 2.0, the concept of using the website contextual information to first get the right agent and then to optimize the resolution of the issue were primary factors of the value of web/contact center integration. As WebRTC enables this process to be intimately integrated to the website, context connections are easier.

However, the biggest value of integrating the real-time human interaction tightly to the website may be the use of feedback from the contact center to optimize the website experience. To understand how this changes customer service, we must look at the types of customers arriving to the typical contact center. There are three types of customers: Concierge Class (10-15 percent), Web Class (70-90 percent), and Loss Class (10-15 percent). Concierge customers are those who would prefer to talk directly to an agent and have the economic business value to enable that. Self-service or Web Class customers would either prefer to use the website or are willing to if pushed by an economic incentive. Finally, Loss Class customers are those who do not have sufficient business value to enable going directly to an agent, but do not want to use the website.  

The service goals are different for the three classes. For the Concierge Class, always having direct customer access to an agent is critical, while the Loss or Low Value Class needs to be pushed to an IVR to enable business transaction at lowest cost. The goal for the larger Web Class self-service group is to complete the transaction on the website, and most of the users would prefer that as well; any transaction that results in the customer leaving the website to talk to an agent is a major issue. In Six Sigma terms, a self-service web customer opting to talk to an agent is a defect in the website, as the goal is to have 100 percent of the transactions completed on the website.

Contextual information is gathered on the website and continued in the contact center to identify and categorize the defects.

Data suggests that the Web Class is increasing as both the Concierge Class and Loss Class are shrinking. The Concierge Class is shrinking due to education and web awareness growth in the members as well as older members aging out. The Loss Class is shrinking as more members get access to the technology through new devices like smartphones as well as leaving for easier places to do business. The result is that over the two to six years of webification, the Web Class will probably grow to more than 90 percent of the customers.

The combination of these factors can have a major impact on the number of calls that come to the contact center as well as the time required to resolve them. If context information from the website for the 70-90 percent of customers generates a 15 percent reduction in time to resolution, and that 25 percent of the defects going to the contact center can be eliminated, the impact on the call volume in the contact center will be dramatic. The combination of all of these factors could be a 40 percent reduction in total agent time in a typical web integrated call center over the next six years. 

While this journey will not be easy, the combination of WebRTC, the web contextual information, and Six Sigma analysis and feedback techniques can generate huge cost reductions, while dramatically increasing customer satisfaction through rapid problem resolution on the website. The impact of Interaction Experience 2.0 is something that must be considered when evaluating your contact center investments going forward.




Edited by Maurice Nagle