Where to with web-based customer (self) service?

Below an article I've written as part of a series on eCRM - the topic focus in this case is customer service. Interested to extend the debate to anyone has views on this...

In our service-driven economy, it has long been recognised that the ‘intangible’ qualities of a company are becoming increasingly important as points of competitive advantage and differentiation. In many sectors (e.g. financial services) there is little difference between the products so the battle for customers is fought more on brand and other intangibles, customer service being a key component.

Customers are time poor, their service expectations are growing quickly and on the web they demand quality and immediacy, knowing they can go elsewhere if they do not get what they want. At the same time, and particularly in current harsh market conditions, companies are striving to cut costs. So the challenge becomes to both improve the quality of customer service and yet make it more cost efficient. Can this be done?

*The Theory*

Web-based customer servicing is less about growing revenues and market share, rather its attractions are:

- Reducing customer servicing costs by using more cost effective channels. Depending on whose analysis you read it is claimed to be $10-$110 more expensive to handle a customer enquiry by phone than via the web.

- Faster and more effective customer service means increased customer satisfaction means lower customer churn.

- Global 24X7 support at a fraction of the cost of face-to-face and local support.

- Closer customer relationships, giving customers control

- Frees staff resource to work on more complex customer inquiries and more valuable strategic initiatives

*The Practice*

The realities of implementing web-based customer servicing have thrown up the following challenges:

- Customer expectations are rising faster than companies’ ability to meet them leading to disappointed customers.

- Companies are typically behind on the skills, technology and processes to manage the internet channel in an efficient and integrated way

- Companies are avoiding e-service because they fear it will overload their call centre, swamping already stretched customer services staff

- Automation may work 90% of time but the 10% where it does not work can create frustrated and angered customers who spread the bad word. As Tom Rearick, vice president of product strategy at eGain comments, “The most expensive form of service is self-service that doesn’t work – you simply train the customer to pick up the phone, assuming that you don’t lose the customer altogether. “

- Customer data is still not integrated meaning delivering a seamless cross-channel service experience is extremely hard.

- Customer queries are often not stored and analysed leading to a lot of unnecessary rework as staff respond to the same questions

- Organisational and process challenges e.g. should you have different agents for voice and data enquiries because of the different skills required? How long can an agent spend on e-mails and text messages? Which should be prioritised?

*The Way Forwards*

Faced with these challenges, how should web-based customer servicing be approached to ensure both the customer and the business benefit?

1. The 80/20 rule. It is important to look at ways that the internet can help improve the quality of customer service you offer but perhaps more importantly you should be seeing the web as a way to reduce the need for a customer enquiry in the first place. Customer service demands typically follow the 80/20 rule – most service demands are for the same things. Use the web to try and address these most recurrent questions. Do not delay and try and cover everything. You can add and iterate later.

2. Focus on site usability. If you’re asking customers to proactively service themselves online, you must be proactive in ensuring that their experience is as positive as possible. Before you think about buying expensive software, you should ensure that the web site itself is doing its job properly. In many cases the fastest ROI will come from improving site usability and content: update your FAQs, analyse customer click paths through key areas of the site to identify bottlenecks, improve your product information, improve your search function, cross link between sections more effectively, give clear and ubiquitous contact options, make sure your ‘contact us’ page has clear links to your online support content etc. These measures may not help reduce the number of offline customers’ enquiries but they will certainly reduce your web site visit-to-enquiry ratio.

3. Capture customer needs & build a knowledge base. So many times I have seen customer e-mails routed off to separate members of staff without being centrally stored for tracking and analysis purposes. These explicit customer needs must be captured in order to begin the building of a knowledge base that can then be made available to customers online. Further enhance the knowledge base by analysing implicit customer needs such as terms used in site searches. This knowledge base does not need to be big, complicated and expensive to start with but it is a hugely valuable asset that you should start building and updating as soon as you can.

4. Automation – how far can you go? Automation is clearly desirable in reducing unnecessary repetitive work for staff. However, if handled poorly, it can be one of the most annoying things for a customer to be confronted with. Clearly, you should automate processes such as ‘forgot password’, sending registration details, confirming orders etc. but where a customer has made a specific enquiry, the only decent way of handling it is through a human. For email inquiries, agent review of auto-suggested answers provides a better level of service than pure auto-respond and retains much of the benefits of automation. If you are going to interact with a customer using an automated tool you must tell them up front that it is automated and let them know how to contact a human if they wish. By all means automate, but manage expectations very clearly and offer alternate options.

5. Recognise and reward best customers. Retaining high value customers is a key CRM concept and customer service has a large part to play. As a first step you need to define, identify and then recognise your ‘best’ customers online. In terms of rewarding them you might offer them guaranteed response times, special ‘hotline’ contact numbers, access to premium support content, more personalised responses, a dedicated service representative etc.

6. Offer multi-channel contact options. I have heard clients say “Why put our call centre number so prominently on our site if we’re trying to divert customer servicing to the web to reduce costs and relieve call centre backlogs?” Offering clear, multiple (in particular, phone) contact options to customers online reassures them. This sense of reassurance, that if they need help from a real human being it is always at hand, actually emboldens customers to try and succeed in getting what they want using the web site first – often they are online at home and need to disconnect to phone which is undesirable. Incidentally, the sense of trust this approach engenders also improves browse-to-buy conversion rates. Some may still want to use the phone route (which is fine as you do want their business don’t you?) but increasingly many site users will not resort to calling unless they become frustrated with your site. In which case, you need to know about it and quickly improve things.

7. Cross-channel customer data integration is vital. As Alf Saggese, Managing Director, EMEA with KANA points out, “One of the most frustrating aspects of customer service is the need for customers to repeat their account details and the nature of their query at every turn. Cross-channel and inter-departmental integration has long been regarded as ‘blue sky’ technology, but customers are increasingly expecting it and leading vendors are now providing solutions that address this issue. Integrated, enterprise wide, cross-channel CRM will become increasingly important as a competitive differentiator in 2002.”

CRM software vendors vary in their approach to this goal, and it’s an area where some CRM deployments come unstuck. A system architecture based on open standards (e.g. Sun’s Java 2 Enterprise Edition) is key to successful cross-channel integration. The easier you make it for the various components of your organisation to relate to each other, the easier it will be to create a truly seamless customer service operation.

*Conclusion*

The bottom line is that you cannot afford to do customer service badly. You cannot make excuses that introducing e-servicing would overburden you. This would only be so if your site was poorly implemented. It should in fact reduce burden on all fronts as customers begin to help themselves. And, frankly, even if it did increase the load, if customers want to begin a dialogue with you then that should be welcomed and prioritised, not avoided.

There is much that can be done in the short term to address customer needs. Companies can devise appropriate and cost-effective customer service by analyzing and categorizing their customer inquiries, and investing in ways to address those inquiries via web self-service and email. Such strategies should always offer escalation paths to agent-based service.

As ever with CRM, the biggest longer term challenges are not technological but centred around bringing your people and processes up to speed. It must be done because customer service is ultimately about customers’ trust in you - about your brand – and that is increasingly vital for business survival and success.

Ashley