Astute Observations: Astute Solutions' Blog

Multichannel service study affirms best-in-class practices

With the proliferation of the Internet and Web platforms, customers now have the ability to interact with service organizations through a wide variety of channels. And a recent survey conducted by the Aberdeen Group revealed that they are taking advantage of their choices. The use of other channels such as email, chat, and website self-service is on the rise (Table 1).

Aberdeen’s findings point to importance of having an increasing array of customer communication options. But they do not necessarily signal a reduction in the importance of the contact center, where more customer inquiries and requests originate than through any other channel.

 A Blessing and a Burden

For the servicing organization, channel expansion is both a blessing and a burden.

Expanding the reach of service information and updates helps to meet customer demands for faster service. It offers pathways to greater efficiency and cost reduction. By segmenting and directing customer requests to appropriate channels, organizations expedite access to information, while reducing the burden on more costly service-based resources. 

However, the existence of a multichannel support network also increases a servicing organization’s responsibilities. They must ensure the accuracy and validity of information that is disseminated through each and every one of these channels. Organizations surveyed by Aberdeen placed extreme importance on this, indicating that it is a crucial component of effective customer request handling and customer retention. At the same time, organizations must optimize efficiency and improve issue resolution within and across channels.  

Best-in-Class Practices

Aberdeen’s research report introduces common characteristics and strategies among best-in-class service organizations - the strongest performers.

First, executive level service leadership oversees and has visibility into all aspects of customer service.  This is the case at 79 percent of best-in-class organizations, versus at only 57 percent of all others.

Next, leadership takes necessary steps to ensure that the service organization is:

• Eliminating unnecessary processes and steps to customer issue resolution
• Escalating vital customer service issues to the right channel of service delivery
• Evaluating technology solutions to drive knowledge and efficiency
• Empowering front line support workers and customers with the right information and knowledge to ensure that issues are resolved quickly and effectively
• Educating both internal and external stakeholders on the use of available channels and support structures.

With a combined strategy that addresses these five E’s, it isn't surprising that best-in-class companies are the most efficient at routing and resolving customer requests (Table 2).

In the end, the value of the “5E” approach is reflected in improved customer satisfaction, cost reduction and overall profitability numbers. 

Learn more about implementing the “5E” approach and key technology enablers in Aberdeen Group’s detailed report “Delivering Customer Service Via the Contact Center and the Web”. 

Download a complimentary copy by visiting www.astutesolutions.com/multichannelservice

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Many Web self-service solutions provide simple reports on keyword or FAQ usage, or an unorganized list of customer questions. These aren’t very usable for determining if the customers’ question was properly answered, or if there are questions or topics that remain unaddressed. Nor are they very usable for determining customer wants and needs.  Gaining any real insight would require them to manually sift through thousands of unstructured customer inputs, organize them, and draw some conclusions based on that information.

On the other hand, our RealDialog solution helps companies minimize the inference and guesswork involved in determining what customers truly want and need by understanding the way we communicate.

First of all, the system captures more complete customer insights because it enables customers to ask questions in their own words – not keywords.  It understands natural language and meaning behind customer questions to deliver precise answers.  It also engages the customer in interactive dialogs to better understand and clarify their needs, and captures the complete transcript of the dialog.

Using advanced linguistics and natural language processing, it automatically organizes, summarizes, and condenses thousands of unstructured, unfiltered questions and “dialogs” into simplified topics.  This enables managers to quickly identify problems, knowledge gaps, and areas of opportunity, and share this information with key stakeholders.

In addition, managers can drill down to the original questions and transcripts to gain extensive insight into customer interaction patterns, perceptions, needs, and feelings. This capability has revealed critical insight such as:

Unanticipated issues and questions

• Valuable competitor information
• Ideas for improving the customer experience
• Numerous ideas for new products services and enhancements
• Issues that impact conversion rates and purchases online

Additionally, the interaction transcripts provide the direct, unbiased, and detailed information that product and marketing managers need to successfully develop, launch and promote new offerings.

This capability provides so much detail that it reduces the need for expensive market surveys.

Gathering this data is just the starting point. Once a company makes a decision from this data, they must determine what information should be applied to each touch point to support the action, as well as how to manage different customers at each of the touch points.  

A solution like RealDialog that enables companies to delegate content authoring responsibilities to appropriate subject matter experts helps to facilitate this process, while improving accuracy and reducing costs. These individuals can add, modify, and tailor responses, content, and dialogs for all touch points.

As a result of these capabilities, companies have improved: first contact resolution, customer satisfaction and retention, interaction cost, the product management cycle, and the quality of their products and services.

You can learn more about how RealDialog captures and communicates the voice of the customer by downloading this white paper: A Closer Look at RealDialog: Voice of the Customer Reporting. 

Enable highly effective self-service

Studies estimate that it costs just 50 cents for an online self-service interaction versus $5-$25 for an assisted service interaction.  While self-service has the potential to reduce costs significantly, for many companies it has failed to live up to that potential.

This is because many customers find many Web self-service options inefficient, impersonal, and ineffective—particularly when they must spend a lot of time digging through search generic results and FAQs for an answer to their question.  In addition, they lack trust in the information they receive from the website, because it is often inconsistent with that received via other channels. These poor self-service experiences can result in an increase in overall costs due to follow up calls and emails into the contact center, as well as customer dissatisfaction and defection.

By implementing self service that is more effective and efficient at addressing questions, our customers have cut costs significantly while improving satisfaction.  For example, for one of our major CPG customers, they were able to reduce inbound email volume by about 80% with our RealDialog Web self-service solution.  Now they successfully answer many customer questions via the website that were previously handled via email. 

Much like the contact center knowledgebase described on the previous slide, delivering a concise and accurate answer to a customer’s question--rather than a long list of links—results in a better overall experience.  Then, the solution’s ability to engage customers in a “dialog” to better understand or clarify their needs when appropriate ensures more accurate and effective answers.  This is similar to a chat with a “live” agent.”

In addition, with the ability to  retrieve and deliver relevant, personalized information from key external data sources (such as warranty, loyalty, order and shipping systems) in context of the “conversation” with the customer, the solution enables companies to address personal, complex, tier 2 and even tier 3 questions effectively via self-service.

All the while the system captures and analyzes the customers’ inputs and dialogs, helping companies to better understand the needs and perceptions of their customers online. 

Companies have achieved significant benefits from this solution.  For example:

• A major CPG company reduced inbound email inquiries by 80% the day our self-service solution went live
• A reduction in tier 1, 2 and 3 calls 
• Another achieved an ROI of $500,000 in the first year by eliminating 50% of their inbound email interactions
• A major automobile manufacturer launched a major new feature/product based on detailed voice of the customer insights captured via self-service

Empower agents with the right information at the right time

Service representatives can spend excessive amounts of time searching for information and answers, leading to higher costs and poor experiences.   The problem with most contact center knowledge bases is that they deliver too much irrelevant information.  Agents must sort through long lists of links to locate the right information they need to address customer questions. The more products the company has, the more time consuming and frustrating this gets.  And if the agent finds the information they need, they must take time to formulate a response for the customer.

As a result, quality of service suffers because:

• agents deliver incomplete, inconsistent or inaccurate information
• issue resolution is slow
• the number of call escalations is high
• and hold times are long

On the other hand, our customers have vastly improved efficiency, issue resolution and customer satisfaction by delivering clear and specific answers to customers’ question directly to the agent’s desktop.

For example, one of our customers is a global consumer goods leader whose agents must support over 90 brands of home, personal care and food products. Using our RealDialog solution as their contact center knowledgebase, their service representatives simply enter a consumer's question, verbatim--or select a question submitted via email--and they instantly receive a clear and specific answer.  The answer can be a direct response they can read or send to their customers, a paragraph within a document or Web page, or specific data retrieved from external systems. As a result, the company:

• Speeds call processing and issue resolution
• Reduces interaction costs
• Enhances the consumer experience through higher quality, more efficient interactions

Similarly, a major retailer deployed RealDialog in the contact center and reduced:

• Hold time
• Average handling time
• Seasonal  associate training time
• Escalations
• And errors in classifying issues

Read about these successes and more in our resources area.

Improve awareness to better serve and protect

Using a similar approach to improve enterprise awareness of issues can have a massive impact.  Companies have spent millions on lawsuits and recalls, and suffered extensive brand damage and customer loss due to product problems.  This damage could have been avoided if the company had a faster way to detect and address the root cause. 

But because it takes so much time and effort to analyze and organize the unstructured data captured in the contact center or on the web, the company can’t identify and address problems early enough.  Nor do they have enough detail to take action.

We have helped companies save millions by minimizing risk, reducing liabilities, and preventing recalls and crises. Our system provides structure to the data they capture about issues, and enables them to kick off a set of actions and processes to help them respond to issues.  For example:

• They send proactive alerts to key stakeholders when a threshold for certain types of issues are met
• They automatically generate and send reports to managers across the organization with the detailed information they to detect and monitor trends
• They can send proactive, mass-targeted communications warning anyone who previously contacted them about a specific issue, protecting the customer and the relationship

The results are significant.  For example, a major lawn care products manufacturer saved significant recall costs-about $20 million—with an early warning they received from monitoring customer feedback.

Take a moment to learn more about how we have helped companies mitigate risk and reduced the impact of recalls. 

Collaborating between the contact center and the field

Some aspects of customer service are more effectively addressed locally, such as at the store or restaurant level.  But there is often a tremendous disconnect and information gap that exists between the corporate contact center and the field, costing the company valuable insight, damage to the brand and lost customers. 

For a global restaurant chain with thousands of franchises and corporate owned locations, bridging the gap and delivering consistent service is crucial to the brand.  They leverage our solution to capture and manage interactions in the contact center, and cost effectively communicate issues to the local manager for resolution. 

Our system helps their contact center agents quickly capture highly specific yet structured details about the caller’s issue, identify the specific restaurant location involved.

Using this input, it can automatically send alerts to the individual restaurant location manager or franchise owner for certain types of issues.  Upon receipt, they can call into an IVR system, listen to a recording of the caller describing their issue, and receive information that enables them to contact the customer and take appropriate action. In addition, the system provides them a means to update the contact center on their interaction with the customer. 

This automated process enables the company to add a personal touch that really ‘wow’s the customer, building brand advocacy, while protecting the business—all at a minimal cost. 

For more information about this and our restaurant solutions, download our white paper: Service Recovery that Keeps your Customers Coming Back. 

Leverage business process automation

Business process automation is a source of tremendous efficiency gains and cost reduction.  In our system, powerful workflow capabilities can automate complex, cross-departmental processes. 

In fact, the global airline I mentioned earlier leveraged our automation capabilities to reduce lost baggage claims and other complex customer relations processes from weeks down to less than an hour. Not only did they achieve an efficiency gain exceeding 1000%, but they can make better use of underutilized resources. 

Now, when resources are overloaded in the UK, the system can route required tasks to Sydney or India, and approve it at headquarters.  As a result, they’ve vastly enhanced the customer recovery process, improved resource utilization, and drastically reduced costs.

You can download their case study and read more about it here. 

No single person in your organization is a subject matter expert on everything your customers, employees and partners want and need to know. Your knowledge management system should take that into consideration.

A system that allows administrators to identify knowledge gaps, systematically request input from Subject Matter Experts to real questions, track the status, and easily push new information out to the knowledge base is critical.

This helps to reduce bottlenecks and ensures better and more accurate information. This also helps you to improve Marketing by capturing a lot of knowledge formerly held in departmental silos.

Another important consideration—many knowledge management solutions require skilled (expensive) and overworked programmers for updates. Enabling business users to update the system keeps costs down while significantly improving the accuracy of the organization’s knowledge.

This is the final entry of this series, but we'll cover more on this topic in other blog articles--particiularly around social media.

Integrate CRM and interaction management applications

A critical piece to enabling a unified view of the customer in a cost-effective manner is the integration between the CRM and the interaction management applications. 

A number of our customers benefit from the integration between our ePowerCenter application and Interactive Intelligence’s interaction solution.  First of all, it provides a range of on-screen controls that enable contact center agents to initiate and transfer calls, conference, view directories, listen to voicemail, initiate interaction recordings, and change their status for others to see—all within a single interface.

In addition the integrated application can:

Pop customer identification information to the agent, reducing time on the front end of the call or chat

• Prepopulate fields with details from an email message or from data entered in the IVR system by the customer
• Route contacts to the best fit agent based on skillset
• Transfer case and contact information together, providing next agent all the details they need to pick up right where the previous agent left off.

All of this reduces average call handing time, hold time, and costs, while improving issue resolution and satisfaction

There’s also a significant cost savings and benefits for companies that leverage this integrated solution to enable at-home agents and seasonal workers.  In fact, one of our outsourced contact center customers enables a 100% work-at-home agent workforce in this manner.

You have heard it before—knowledge should be centralized in a single knowledge base so that information is consistent. Yet with so many systems and data types—loyalty systems, transaction data, Web content, PDF files,spreadsheets, sound files, videos and more—this is unrealistic. Not to mention it would be exceptionally difficult to manage.

The reality is, you don’t need a single knowledge repository. The right knowledge management system should provide a single user interface to access key information. This should be transparent to the end-user, whether it’s a customer or contact center agent. The system should also leverage your existing content (not force you to recreate or duplicate it), and point to the right information so that the content can change and/or be updated in its native location, and the knowledge base can deliver the updated information automatically.

Ideally, the knowledge management system should provide a central knowledge source and point of administration for your channels—Web site(s), intranet portal(s), email, chat, phone and IVR. You should also be able to differentiate responses by
channel and by user roles.

In part 10 of our series, we'll describe how effective knowledge management tools can help your company collaborate to develop better content.