InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
Web-Based Customer Care
Continued... page 3 of 3
AFI president Jack Rodgers expects the product, called Webline, to increase the ratio of customer inquiries that result in actual sales. The company's current medium for communicating with Internet users, E-mail, is too slow, Rodgers says. "People come on the Web site, and the only thing they can do is E-mail us," he says. "If we're really good, we get back to them in an hour. But then the feeling is gone. We don't have a contiguous sales cycle."
Mutual fund manager Putnam Investments also uses Webline. The company has embedded the product in a custom application called Contact, whi ch makes customer records such as account balances and correspondence available to customers over the Web. "We've taken the customer service desktop and extended it out to the user," says Mark McKenna, group director of communications at Putnam. Opening internal information to customers changes the culture of customer service, McKenna says. "Suddenly, you have an empowered end user calling into the service organization," he says. When customers see the same information service agents see, the agents are no longer gatekeepers. Instead, they must be skilled advisers.
Managing cultural change is a task companies shouldn't take lightly if they're serious about Internet-based service, adds Alan Boehme, director of customer access at DHL. "There's a whole series of support issues behind the scenes that people forget," he says. For example, as part of its aggressive Internet service initiative, which includes a new tracking software product early next quarter, DHL had to train its call-center staff to ask caller s whether their computers are behind firewalls, which can prevent them from doing secure transactions with DHL.
Web-based service is causing Michelin North America to change its sales staffers' job descriptions. The tiremaker this year rolled out an extranet to 280 dealers that lets them look up inventory, order tires, check order status, and get answers to questions that would ordinarily require a salesperson. As a result, Michelin will reduce its customer-service staff to 175 employees from 240. "This does change the culture of our company internally," says Tom Hall, the company's manager of electronic commerce.
Another potential barrier to Web-based service is scalability. "What if all your customers come in at once?" says Rick Hunt, VP of electronic media at Columbia House. "We want to make a sufficient service promise and then outperform it, not the other way around."
Motorola Semiconductor Products faced such a dilemma when it chose call-center software from Siebel Systems. "Siebel is very good at call centers," says Mike Zill, director of the information gateway at Motorola Semiconductor. "If you look at what they're missing, it's scalable Web support." Siebel offers an add-on product called Internet Self Service that enables its applications to support up to hundreds of thousands of Internet users, says Kevin Nix, director of product marketing at Siebel. But Motorola selected Web-based customer-service software built to scale from Smart Technologies Inc. and linked it to the Siebel system via Microsoft's distributed component object model technology.
Of course, supporting multiple systems isn't ideal. Says Aberdeen Group analyst Hugh Bishop, "The long-term aim is to have one system for self-service on the Web, for field service, and in your call centers."
As Web-based customer service goes mainstream, that unified support may not be far off.
--with additional reporting by
Tom Stein
,
Karen M. Carrillo
, a
nd
Clinton Wilder
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