Does your helpdesk spend all of its time answering the same
questions? You should help them to help themselves, says Liz
Warren
Online customers are becoming increasingly demanding: they want
answers to queries more quickly than ever and they want to be able
to access services when it suits them - day or night. At the same
time, website design is maturing and the average customer is
becoming more computer literate. This means that they're ripe for
the introduction of online self-service solutions.
Companies, too, are ready to embrace the benefits of self-help
solutions. "For the past 25 years, we've been using technology to
wring efficiency out of organisations," points out Bo Wandell,
president of Safeharbor, a company that offers customer support
solutions on an outsourced basis. "One of the last areas is
empowering customers or staff to help themselves." What self-help
solutions offer is the double-whammy of cutting the cost of support
while improving the quality of the service delivered to users.
If figures from Forrester Research are to be believed, then the
cost savings are certainly massive. Forrester reports that it costs
$33 (£24) to handle a customer enquiry by telephone, $10 (£6.90) to
handle it by email and about $1 (£0.69p) to deal with it through an
online self-service system.
So the goal of self-service, says Wandell, is "to drive as many
enquiries as possible away from the telephone to the Web". This is
less difficult than it might seem because organisations usually
find that about 12 questions will account for half the calls made.
A good self-help system should allow users or customers to resolve
most common queries on their own but make it easy to escalate
enquiries to an operator through telephone, webchat or email if
they get stuck or their question is more complex.
"Different users have different levels of tolerance for the length
of time they are willing to commit to self-service," points out
Tony Rodoni, European general manager of self-help solutions
provider Support.com. "At the same time, in a corporate setting,
you may want to discourage highly paid staff from using self-help
for more than a few minutes because you don't want them to be
unproductive."
When dealing with external customers, it's even more important that
your online self-help is integrated with other forms of assistance
and that telephone support is still available as a first port of
call.
"There will be certain times when using the Internet to access
information or services will suit some customers and other times
when it doesn't, perhaps depending on the nature of the query or
the customers' skills or access to the necessary technology,"
points out Steve Naylor, European marketing director of Tower
Technology, which provides technology to manage and consolidate
customer information. "On top of that, if the customer gets
frustrated with the self-help channel, they should be able to
switch to an assisted channel."
Self-Importance
Rodoni also cautions against being
overzealous in your application of self-help solutions.
"Self-service fails when it tries to anticipate as many calls as
possible but ends up delivering 200 responses to the customer, none
of which is quite right," he says. Assisted service is also a major
source of valuable customer feedback, so you don't want to
eliminate that opportunity for communication entirely.
If customers choose self-service, they need to find it quick and
easy to use, and their first experience should be positive, says
Rodoni. Wandell adds that the information available through
self-help systems must also be accurate and up-to-date. "If someone
sees an inconsistency between the answers on the self-help solution
and the service they're trying to use, they will lose all
confidence in the self-help approach," he warns.
Self-service systems - especially ones aimed at staff - certainly
shouldn't be seen as "a just-in-time training opportunity" to turn
end-users into support staff, argues Rodoni. Users don't want to
become experts, they just want to have their problem solved. The
way to do that, he says, is not to dump a load of system
documentation on to their desktop but to create smart content which
carries out the process for them. For instance, one of
Support.com's users, Cisco, has created some 40 mini programmes
which automate tasks such as setting up an out-of-office reply on
the corporate email system.
Do-it-yourself systems
In fact, process automation
represents a general trend for self-help systems to move away from
simply delivering information to allowing customers to complete
whole transactions for themselves. This is what Loop Customer
Management, a Yorkshire-based managed service provider which
handles customer interactions for utilities and public-sector
organisations, is now offering to its clients. Typical processes
which customers can complete online themselves include providing a
current meter reading, paying bills or notifying the utility that
they are moving house.
Loop began offering Web-based self-service when it found that
simply running high-quality call centres was no longer enough to
keep customers happy. "We now have to deliver customer service on
the customers' terms; how they want it, when they want it,"
explains Paul Tasker, Loop's head of business solutions. That meant
offering a range of choices - for example, telephone-based customer
service agents, interactive voice response and Web-based
self-service.
And now that customers are prepared to do some of the work
themselves, Loop can create a win-win situation for both customer
and service provider. "Customers get the satisfaction and security
of seeing the transaction concluded and that [creates] high
customer retention, while the supplier sees much lower transaction
costs," Tasker explains.
He warns that to implement this kind of transaction-based
self-service you need to have efficient front- and back-office
systems in place, together with a consolidated knowledge base of
all the information customers are likely to want to access. You
then have to redesign your systems to take account of the fact that
you are, in effect, letting untrained agents loose on them. You
need to maintain the integrity and security of systems and provide
clear and safe escape routes into assisted service. "It's
definitely not entry-level customer service," Tasker says.
In fact, even developing and maintaining a knowledge base to drive
a simple self-help solution is not a trivial task. Rodoni says it
may take anywhere from 10 to 20 weeks to analyse information in
existing systems such as helpdesk or contact management
applications (determining the type of customers the system must
deal with, the questions they ask, the volume of queries and the
level to which answers need to be customised) and then build a
self-service website. After that, you need to use feedback gained
when customers turn to assisted service to add to and clarify those
solutions on an ongoing basis.
Single point of contact
If you want to offer
transaction-based self-help systems, you face an even bigger
headache because you need to bring together all the information
about each customer into a single, logical repository and then make
it available to each of the customer contact channels. Naylor
suggests that if you're starting from scratch with direct customer
support, it could take up to 18 months and two or three steps to
provide a transaction-based self-help offering. Even if you already
have a call centre in place, he warns, it will still take six to
eight months.
One of the reasons for the complexity of such projects is that, as
yet, no one company provides all the elements you need to deliver a
comprehensive customer support solution with online self-help
capabilities. According to Forrester, companies such as Acuity,
Brightware, Kanisa, netDialog, Right Now, Siebel and Silknet offer
strong self-help elements in their portfolios. It's likely they
will add or extend support for assisted help channels - email, chat
and call centres - perhaps by linking up with providers of systems
for assisted support, such as Business Evolution, Genesys and
Webline.
CASE STUDY: eCharge
Providing support as you expand
internationally is always a major challenge. When eCharge
Corporation, which provides online payment systems to Internet
merchants and ISPs, decided to launch in Europe and Australia, it
knew it needed to provide exceptional customer service if it was to
attract and retain customers. Setting up local support teams would
have been costly and slowed the company's growth, so eCharge
decided to develop a Web-based self-help system to complement the
telephone-based support provided in its Seattle, Washington,
headquarters.
To deliver this Web-based support, eCharge turned to specialist
outsourcer SafeHarbor to provide and operate the necessary
technology. Yet, with the support service branded with the same
look and feel as the rest of eCharge's site, SafeHarbor's
involvement is completely transparent to customers.
Now, more than 70% of eCharge's support incidents are resolved
online by customers themselves. This has kept eCharge's support
costs down, while providing instant scalability as it handles
increasing numbers of customers.
Customers also benefit from a faster response to their queries,
while eCharge's telephone-based support specialists are able to
focus on tough issues. Extremely difficult cases can be escalated
to the eCharge engineering department, without ever leaving the
support environment.
The low-down on self-help
- n On average a dozen queries account for half of the support
calls a company receives
- n Call centres can reduce the average cost of each enquiry from
$33 (£24) to just over $1 (69p) by providing online answers
- n Forrester Research reports that it costs $33 (£24) to handle
a customer enquiry by telephone, $10 (£6.90) to handle it by email
and about $1 (69p) to deal with it through an online self-service
system.
CASE STUDY: Excite@Home
Imagine that you run the
helpdesk of a company employing 1.5 million staff. That's the
challenge faced by Internet service providers like Excite@Home,
which provides high-speed Internet services to consumers and small
business users. With its customer base growing at an explosive rate
and becoming ever more demanding, Excite@Home needs to meet their
needs while keeping its costs under control.
The company turned to Support.com to deliver portal-based automated
support, which gives Excite@Home customers access to a variety of
support channels. Excite has been able to reduce the chance of
problems occurring in the first place through self-healing
technology; cut the number of calls to assisted service by offering
self-service options; and improve problem resolution by giving
support staff the information and tools to solve customers'
problems more quickly.
As a result, Excite@Home has been able to keep the number of
support staff providing assisted support well below the levels
normally needed for this many users, while elevating support to a
competitive differentiator.