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Vodafone
12 August 2008 11:07am
Hi all,
In the online customer service brief -june 2008, there is a statement that says:
'" When deployed properly, selfservice tools can drastically reduce the number of calls and e-mails that companies have to deal with."
I do believe this can be true and our company is moving towards that direction.
My question for you out there is:
How do you support the story that more customers help themselves online instead of offline (= call) in statistics.
Are unique visitors or active online users equal to the amount of calls. Or should you rather use pageviews - number of calls.
Hope anyone has an idea - or better - an experience on this.
thanks! Josine
Director of Product Development at Econsultancy
12 August 2008 16:05pm
Hey Josine,
If you're building a business case for investment then you need to consider how this is working out for other companies, and also the possible upside for yours. Customer service centres are a very labour-intensive business, and as such relatively costly.
I've just published an interview with Royal Mail's Stephen Mitchell that you might find helpful. In some instances he found that the volume of inbound emails fell by a fairly staggering 96%!
Note that you can't really compare apples with apples. It is far more expensive to process a customer service call offline, versus a self-service tool on your website (although this isn't all about cost - customer experience is key). And it is more expensive to answer emails than it is to provide customers with the tools to do it themselves (knowledge bases, intelligent FAQs, etc)
Ultimately you should probably benchmark your performance and run a trial. Maybe limit it to a specific section of your website and monitor the results.
I'd be keen to know how you get on ; )
Cheers,
Chris Lake
Editor in Chief, E-consultancy
Technical Project Manager (MBA, MBCS, CITP, CEng) at Naxtech.com
12 August 2008 16:10pm
Hi Josine,
I do not think there is an easy way to be based on statistics for comparing online vs offline actions/activities.
One could attempt to compare CRM-based actions/contacts with Website visits, but still there is no way of knowing and seeing clearly what means what.
What you could do though is to categorise each new account and classify it as "initial contact made online / or offline" and that way see the popularity of each one. Still though it would not be easy to seperate those who first went on the site, did the self-service stuff, but then decided to proceed with a registration (or another action) offline via the phone. In short there is no easy or simple way to do this.
So, statistics do not necessarily clearly show what you want to see. But where you could see a difference is in the number of new clients coming via the online route, or how long it now takes to "close the deal" either online or offline.
A good example is a site we made a while ago: http://www.translate-to-chinese.com/ where you do not have to make contact with the company to get an idea on cost. As a customer you get all your answers online. Then, the ones who actually do contact the company for an order, are the ones who are 100% sure that they want to make an order. In other words, the self-service functionality functions more as a filter and time-saver rather than anything else.
I hope the above help.
regards,
Denis
www.naxtech.com
director at virtual zone
14 August 2008 14:38pm
Hi Josine
It would be helpful to look at the sector you are working in and the experience others are having and certainly I suspect that online customer service works better in some sectors than in others.
We produce online virtual assistant solutions and in our experience the number of calls and emails to the customer contact centre falls off significantly when these systems are introduced. It is necessary however to measure over a period of time so as to reduce the effect of other factors.
In terms of statistics to back this claim up there are examples to quote where companies have seen contacts reduce by 15% and email by up to 50%, although the manner and the scale of the introduction of self service plays a big factor in what can be achieved.
Tracking the effective use of the systems can be done with analytics that measure the number of times the application has been used, the length of time it’s used and what the user does next. This is however unlikely to be the whole story as how do you deduce that when a customer finishes using the tool and leaves the site they are doing so because they are satisfied or dissatisfied and about to phone the call centre?
Some clients will place a ‘vote’ button at the end of the process to ask the user if they found the tool useful, with our virtual assistants a lot of the answers can be found in the conversations we record. By reading, reviewing and acting on what is stored by the virtual assistant you can gain an insight into what the user is looking for, what they are experiencing and what they thought of the experience. You can also tell if the customer received the best possible answer i.e. the best answer your call centre could have given if they had handled the call.
If you want to review examples of online customer service technologies then I can suggest some examples including taking a look at one that we produce and manage, Lisa on the National Rail Enquiries (NRE) website, who answers over 250k questions a month with about a 95% success rate.
I hope this has been of interest and given you some more ideas to pursue.
Regards
Nick Wilson
www.thevirtualzone.co.uk
Vodafone
14 August 2008 15:02pm
Thanks you!! You all have been a great help and confirmation for my own thoughts about this subject.
I agree that you can not compare calls with online visits. As Denis said, I can categorise and find a way to compare call activities with online activities, like filling out a form to change your address. Goal could be to have a conversion of x% to fill out the onlineform and a drop of x% to change the address via the call center.
About asking other companies: It is very difficult to find out how other companies do this. None of you could tell me, so... I don't think many do so. I have to convince my company to look at this in another way, which is to all activities seperately - fall of x% in calls and x% more activities of selfservice on the web.
Again - thanks from Josine
director at virtual zone
14 August 2008 16:59pm
Hi Josine
If you are interested in some examples from our experience feel free to drop us a line.
All the best
Vodafone
21 August 2008 08:39am
Hi Nick,
thanks for the offer. I saw your website and you can bring solutions.
The thing is that are about to launch our solution and now i want to know how other companies measures the results.
I know that you can't put it like this: 10.000 less calls is 10.000 more online visits.
My question was/is: how CAN I put it in statistics/ numbers? How do I measure the results we are about to have. (or not... ;-)
I am not sure if other companies act like this.
thanks anyway! Josine
asst. Manager - Projects at iORB technologies
21 August 2008 10:39am
Hi,
iORB Information Technologies is one of India's IT & ITES Service Provider specialized in IT & ITES Services, 2D & 3D Animation, Graphic Design, Network Operations, e-mail Marketing, Database Development, Reporting & Analysis (clicks & Impressions), Electronic Data Discovery, ETL Development, e-commerce, Gaming Support (Chat & e-mail), ITES Services, GPS- Vehicle Tracking System & Software Solution.
We are looking for a marketing support from other countries. If interested, please do mail me to
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Best Regards,
Pradeep P Kumar
Asst. Manager - Projects
I Orb Technologies
Direct: +91 9945513686
mail:
web: www.iorbtech.com
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CEO at SciVisum.co.uk
22 August 2008 10:00am
Josine - I think it is way too simplistic to use a metric based on page views.
A better approach, is one based on User Journeys - which we've used successfully with a range of markets: including Mobile phone operators, as it looks like that's your sector.
A User Journey is a multi-page route, that customers follow to perform a particular task.
The most fundamental of all 'money-making' Journeys is the CheckOut one of course! When a company first offers online purchasing, you would create a metric based on the number of times the CheckOut journey is followed, versus how many fewer times customers phone-up to order.
In your case, it sounds like you are adding new functions online to allow self-service.
So these new self-service options would be your new User Journeys.
You can then count how often those journeys are followed: and make a metric that compares that with the number of calls to the call-centre to do the same thing.
Web analytics will give you the count for how often each of the Journeys are followed.
Of course, adding new functionality to a site always has the risk of (i) not working very fast, smoothly, and (ii) the added load making other existing journeys not work very fast, smoothly.
That effect can reduce the take-up of new self-service features.
And even cause weird reductions in self-service take-up despite the increase in self-service features offered!
To address that risk, here at SciVisum we measure for our clients the speed and error rate for their important Journeys: whether money-making or customer-self-service - 24/7
It provides extremely useful hard evidence, that can quickly improve user experience online: showing for example how slow which Journeys get during high traffic times: some Journeys will slow down a lot more than others.
Or what percent of users will experience an error: this too tends to increase during peak times.
It gives you hard evidence that you can take to the tech team, and ask them to fix the problems with sporadic errors at page X of Journey Y: being specific like that really helps the tech guys resolve problems most quickly.
Web Analytics won't show this kind of data: we run 'virtual user' tools that actually visit the site, run through the pages of the journey exactly like a real user 24/7: and thus have real world mystery-shopper type evidence.
For example, our metrics recently one client identify a problem with their product search: 1 in 20 searches were coming back 'nothing matches your query' - when that is not true.
Or another example, a software bug (all web sites have them, some more than others is all!) caused a Registration journey to annoyingly 'jump back' to the homepage for 10 % of attempts made between 7 and 9pm.
In both cases, the problems were 'under the radar', because of their sporadic % nature: neither the tech team, nor the web analytics showed them.
...although the call centre did saw 'we told you so' afterwards... they had been reporting a small but steady number of calls of problems on the website, but felt that no one had listened!
Deri
www.scivisum.co.uk
On 11:07:21 12 August 2008 JosinevandeNobelen wrote: