InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
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October 23, 2000 |
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Web Call Centers Benefit Customers And Businesses
Linking web sites and call centers can improve service and customer retention
By Candee Wilde
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ompanies hope that by linking Web sites and call centers, they'll improve customer loyalty, attract new business, and cut costs. Those are all compelling reasons. But another driver behind the Web call center is more persuasive: Customers want it.A Web call center can improve customer service and retention by providing a variety of self-care applications online, then backing up that convenience with the ability to communicate with a person in the call center. Furthermore, handling contact with less-strategic customers via the Web and the Internet can free agents to provide costly hands-on care to a company's most profitable customers.
The ideal way to link a Web site with the call center is to use common infrastructure technologies in both the call center and the Web site and deploy applications that are designed to work together, says Ashok Sathe, a VP of the telecommunications practice at Kanbay LLC, a systems integrator in Rosemont, Ill. In an integrated environment, the customer application will have an interface similar to the one customer-service representatives use in the call center, allowing data to flow directly between them without passing through middleware.
But few businesses have that option because the larger service centers have a hodgepodge of legacy systems, Sathe says. Most companies take a modular approach to the process by deploying new systems in the order that will deliver the best results.
The Web call center has a variety of tools that link service reps with online customers so they can browse together, work simultaneously on the same form, run voice or text chats, or talk to one another on a separate telephone line. During the past year, online customers have started seeing Web sites that feature these tools, says Glenn Morin, senior VP of online services at Citizens Bank in Providence, R.I.
"When customers go to a Web site to buy a shirt, for example, and they see the traditional brick-and-mortar business is integrated with the Internet and the phone bank, they expect that from all of their experiences," Morin says.
Citizens Bank began providing online customers access to customer service information in March when it deployed an automated E-mail response and customer knowledge base system from ServiceSoft Corp. The bank added customer-service reps, but soon realized that E-mail volume was growing faster than staff could be hired to deal with it. The bank also realized that the service reps were answering the same questions several times a day but might not be providing consistent answers.
To solve these problems, many companies set up an E-mail response system to take care of the overload, then create a knowledge base that will make their employees more productive and consistent. "Once they become proficient in the knowledge base, many of our customers turn it on in the customer self-service mode," says Jeffrey Whitney, ServiceSoft's VP of marketing. Using the knowledge base, customers can answer as many as 80% of their questions online, he says.
ServiceSoft's E-mail management system starts at about $50,000, and enterprise installations of the company's entire suite of products range up to $1 million. With the E-mail management system, Citizens Bank can handle its growing message volume without increasing the number of service reps at the same rate, Morin says. It has also helped the bank cut the response time to messages from 24 hours to the low teens. The bank's next goal is to drop response time to less than 10 hours.
"Ten or 11 hours is a lifetime in the Internet world and the customer might not want to wait." Morin says, which is where ServiceSoft's knowledge base helped out by guiding customers through the Web site so they could answer many of their own questions. "ServiceSoft let us structure the solution so when a customer gets frustrated, we're always accessible," Morin says. "For us, [the Web] isn't about driving customers out of higher-priced channels, but allowing customers to interact with us however they want to."
As the oldest manufacturer of sporting firearms in the United States, Remington Arms Co., prides itself on its relationship with customers. However, when the Madison, N.C., company created a simple informational Web site, it was flooded by a barrage of E-mail that threatened to overwhelm call-center agents. This prompted the company to look for automated solutions that could curb the number of E-mail messages coming in and improve the information on its Web site. "We were looking for two solutions," says Ned Moore, Remington's E-business development manager. Moore found one product for the job, RightNow Web from RightNow Technologies Inc. The software combines customer self-help tools that guide Web-site visitors to the information they seek with E-mail management that includes a workflow system letting users route and prioritize inquiries. This will let fewer service reps respond to more questions, Moore says.
RightNow Web uses a proprietary knowledge-management system to generate information for an database of frequently asked questions that grows based on the questions customers ask. If they don't find the answer they are looking for, a workflow system guides the customer to E-mail the call center, or initiate a live chat feature, says Chuck Dourlet, RightNow Technology's VP of marketing. The system also makes it easy for customer-service reps to publish an E-mail answer or the conclusion of a live chat session back to the knowledge base.
More than 120,000 people have visited the FAQ section of the site since Remington implemented RightNow Web in April. Fewer than 1% of those have had to ask service reps questions because they found the answers on their own, Moore says. Remington is looking at different ways for service and sales reps and even dealers to use RightNow Web to further improve customer service, Moore says. A entry-level version of RightNow Web is priced at about $50,000; customers can also pay a monthly subscription fee for a hosted solution.
The call center is the backbone of business for Benefit Resources Inc. and the Mt. Laurel, N.J., company has leveraged this tool onto the Web using systems from Apropos Technology Inc. Call-center agents at Benefit Resources, which manages companies' employee benefit programs, can chat with a client company's employees about their insurance benefits on the telephone, over the Web using text, or via E-mail, says company president Jack Petcove.
Benefit Resources' agents can browse an extensive knowledge base with employees, push Web pages to the person's workstation or home PC, or retrieve information from a central repository that houses the content from all Web chat, E-mail, and voice transactions.
Says Ernie Wallerstein, Apropos' director of product marketing, the product's offers a central point of administration from which IT managers can oversee E-mail, Web, and voice interactions. "Many other companies segment the reporting and management of different media types and require users to maintain multiple databases and multiple user interfaces," Wallerstein says. "Our system works with one database infrastructure for all media types." Apropos' product suite is a customer-premise solution that can be connected to a conventional PBX or an Internet PBX. A new release introduced in August lets call centers migrate from traditional voice systems to voice-over-IP.
Benefit Resources is adding Web technologies to improve the service it provides to customers, Petcove says. The Apropos' systems lets the company provide more benefits services than most companies could give their employees themselves, he says.
As companies integrate customer service from brick-and-mortar operations with the Internet, one of the more important challenges will be to break down the silos of information, Citizens Bank's Morin says. It will take time and effort for companies to develop a uniform view of the customer among the people and systems that run the enterprise. "There's no silver bullet here," Morin says. "There's no one solution that will fix all our problems, but there are solutions that fix a lot of our problems." Citizens Bank's customers have told the company they like doing business at any time of day and using PCs or telephones. Most important, Morin says, customers expect all companies to follow suit--and soon.
Photo of Morin by Jesse Nemerofsky
Photo of Moore by Bob Rivers
Photo of Petcove by Chriss Wade
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