Customers Are Doing It For Themselves

The key to successful self-service applications is understanding exactly what users need and building in flexibility for change

Thexton.com.au is determined to become the number one health and nutrition Web site in Australia and New Zealand, selling quality products and providing complementary "wellbeing" services. Absolutely everything it does is directed at furthering that aim. It is not surprising, then, to find its Web site is extremely content rich, incorporating 6000 product listings, full pricing details, legal disclaimers, archived newsletters, assorted linked articles, plus an online encyclopaedia covering thousands of health topics.

But Thexton director David Thornton also knows that today's wired customers increasingly demand the kind of sales and service environment that caters for what researcher, consultant and analyst Aberdeen Group has branded the "self-serviced customer". Self-serviced customers expect choice and control. As Aberdeen puts it, they may expect the same seller to hold their hands in one instance, yet refuse to be touched in another. That means preconfigured options are out. Self-serviced customers expect to be able to self-configure a solution to whatever issue is currently on their minds.

So as people turn away from the "sickness industry" towards the "wellness industry", with health and nutrition industry sales growing almost exactly the same rate of growth of Web site sales - about 25 percent a year - Thexton needed a software solution that was intelligent enough to answer simply and rapidly any health-related question its customers might care to put.

"We cover everything from toothpaste through to vitamins through to body building supplements through to bandages. When you've got a product range that is that great, the customer has to be able to find information quickly, because on the Web their span of attention seems to be very short," Thornton says. "If they can't get what they want very, very quickly, then they move on to something else or another Web site."

Compared to their US counterparts, analysts say Australian businesses have yet to make effective investments in self-service technology. And there may be good reasons for their inaction: Thornton says when Thexton went looking it found relatively few products around to justify such an investment, eventually settling on iPhrase's self-service technology as seemingly providing the best match to needs, although that jury is still out. But readily available product set or not, Australian businesses may find they need to move fast on creating self-service environments, and possibly even end up going much further than Thexton has to date.

"Customer service and technical support seem to be following Moore's Law of computing: customer expectations are doubling every 18 months," writes Tom Tobin, senior business analyst with ServiceWare's Decision Integrity Team. "While this may not be exactly accurate, it does describe the reality of customer expectations that customer interaction centres currently face.

"Companies today not only have to deal with clients' increasing demands for support and service, but they also have to do so over multiple channels. No matter how great your call centre or help desk is, if you're not offering support on the Web your customers are wondering 'why?' Is there an intrinsic problem with this company? Don't they know how to help me on the Web? Why am I not offered the convenience of online support? Customers are increasingly seeking out self-service."

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Selling to the Empowered Customer

To retain its customers, a company must be able and willing to answer questions and resolve issues with the same prompt attention it gives to closing sales.

"Savvy companies let customers reserve hotels, book airline tickets, order products, track shipments and find for themselves answers provided in a well-managed and targeted knowledge base. Really savvy companies reward these self-sufficient customers with lower costs and improved service," says Patrick O'Neal, the CEO of US customer service consultancy Sento.

Providing high-availability, high-quality customer service is neither easy nor inexpensive, however. Many companies find customer satisfaction decreasing, even as they pour ever-increasing resources into their customer service operations. Actually, according to Aberdeen, many IT suppliers offer solutions that can create self-service environments, yet only a few understand self-service is just a means to an end.

The real end goal, as described by marketing guru Seth Godin to Massachusetts-based Art Technology Group's ATG Insight 2004 user conference in February, is to develop proactive service strategies that can profitably serve the empowered customer. Godin's keynote emphasized that the empowered customer is the key agent of change transforming go-to-market strategies. Customers know that they are in charge. Any company that ignores this reality is living on borrowed time.

Today's wired consumers care little about a seller's product and excel at ignoring pitches. Because they believe the world revolves around their unique wants and needs, they expect "me-mail" - not e-mail for the masses. "They expect personalized experiences whenever or wherever they interact or transact with a seller," Aberdeen says. "Marketers must accept that these dynamic environments are now must-haves, not nice-to-haves."

Since today's customers demand remarkable products even though not every company has a remarkable product to sell, the idea, at least in ATG's eyes, is to do the next best thing and create a remarkable customer experience online. Dynamic online self-service environments promise to lower costs and deliver more loyal customers. However, to appeal to customers, Fariborz Ghadar, director of the Centre for Global Business Studies at Penn State University in the US, says such self-service environments must feature facile user interfaces that quickly deliver relevant answers.

As organizations move to get customers to do more things independently, they must recognize that customers generally do not want to spend a lot of time hunting down information or being shunted from one Web site to another, Ghadar says, echoing Thornton's thoughts. Unless they can get what they want within four or five clicks - or you can find a way to make the hunt compelling for them - many will lose interest and leave your site. "If we have to ask a customer more than four or five questions, he or she basically goes away," Ghadar says.

The convenience of online self-service is already actively determining which sites customers elect to do business with. Jupiter Research recently found 17 percent of online buyers surveyed said the existence of online self-service search would determine which sites they would make future purchases from. "The attitude that drives do-it-yourself behaviour is born from a desire for convenience," reports Jupiter in its Search Technology Buyer's Guide. "Ultimately, self-service frees consumers from having to wait for an answer to a query. Yet, such convenience has hardly been realized; searchable service options continue to frustrate online consumers."

While Jupiter has found that for now, customers are likely to blame themselves for not knowing what keywords to type or how to use advanced queries, such self-deprecation will not keep them on your site.

Customers will not linger if they cannot get what they want, Ghadar points out. If they cannot find what they are looking for after four or five clicks, chances are you have lost them. It is no longer good enough to just post the information and expect them to find it. Information must not only be timely, accurate and easy to locate, it must be delivered the way the customer wants.

Research firm Gartner estimates that more than one-third of all customers or users who initiate queries over the Web eventually end up phoning in for answers to their questions. Yet ServiceWare's Tobin finds most customer queries are similar in nature and often inefficiently satisfied.

"Does someone really need a live agent - the most expensive method of support - to know your hours of operation, whether you sell widgets, or if there is a new driver for the peripheral they just bought?" Tobin asks in a white paper called The Value of Online Self-Service. "Of course not, and nor does a customer want to wait in a queue for five minutes to get an answer. So, the inflection point is providing this type of support online or via the channel that is most convenient for the customer."

Tobin says delivering the information in a timely way that is easy for customers to find and in the format they want requires that you "knowledge-enable" your online support. "You may or may not have already provided knowledge to your agents in the centre. In either case, your customers want access to that knowledge," he says. "The win-win here is that the customer is happier with your company, you've reduced your support expenses and the knowledge-enabled self-service solution conveys economies of scale that even your best agents could never match. The more a self-service tool is used the lower the transaction cost to you."

Tobin points out the ROI from knowledge-enabled self-service can be significant, as borne out by a recent Hewson Group [which, by the way, should be the poster child for flash but frustrating and impossible-to-navigate Web sites - ED] report that noted "by improving online experience to match the best competitor, the average grocer, for example, can increase online sales by a minimum of 54 percent".

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Challenges Aplenty

Spruicking self-service ROI is all well and good but challenges nonetheless abound, not least that servicing today's customer is very information intensive, and delivering relevant content remains tough, requiring a blend of both static information and transactional content. And as Aberdeen notes, to understand the empowered customer you need systems that continuously monitor how different customers use Web sites, and also let marketers execute, rather than simply monitor, aggregate and analyze. "To address these challenges, smart sellers are building online 'answer repositories' that not only expose corporate knowledge to the customer but also better manage back-and-forth collaboration between subject matter experts and interested customers," Aberdeen says.

So while many organizations are already gathering data and putting it into a customer relationship management system, the tricky bit is gathering and consolidating all the information about a customer's activities - not just what he or she clicked on or responded to, but how much time elapsed between the first question and the second question, and whether they read the pop-up ad that appeared between questions.

"Can you or can you not gather the data that [customers] are basically providing you by going through those clicks? In other words, one set of information that you gather from the customer is what he has ultimately done. [That is, he] . . . went into the Charles Schwab account, went into the Merrill Lynch account, got this, got that, the following things occurred. But you also want to know where the customer stayed, how long he stayed, what decisions he made, if he went back and forth. All of that kind of stuff is available to you on the Web, but it is very difficult to gather, so that is also a challenge," Ghadar says.

Although eBay and other organizations are already doing such analysis, Ghadar says it will take 18 months for such business intelligence and reporting capabilities to really take off. Implementation is currently a big issue, he says.

So is integration, according to advertising and search company Sensis CIO Dr Len Carver. Sensis - which Carver says is probably one of the largest face-to-face sales forces in Australia - looks after some 42,000 advertisers, all of whom are reflected in its Siebel databases. There is a range of self-service offerings that Sensis is investing in its self-service model, including the ability to change White Pages records online and to view ad proofs and bills.

"I think self-service is the direction that the industry is moving, particularly as the industry becomes more e-oriented," Carver says. "I think the challenges are in the integration to your back-end systems, and I think it's fair to say we have our challenges in much the same way that any of them do. If I look at my time in the banking industry, integrating your CRM solution into the back-end account management system is just as challenging as it is for us to integrate it into our back-end content management system where we manage the content of customers."

Sensis has had Siebel implemented for almost four years, and Carver says it now has a basic self-service environment, which it is growing. There are currently perhaps 9 percent of customers doing self-service, and the intention is to move most customers onto self-service over time. But Carver warns against the dangers of focusing too much on self-service delivery. "You still want to manage your more profitable relationships face-to-face," he says. "Not only does the customer expect it, you want to be able to do that."

You also have to give consumers choice, Carver says. Sensis believes the power is vested with the consumer, and although the company might have a view of where it would like to take the market, ultimately it recognizes it is there to serve the customer, not the other way around.

And those customers have very particular notions of how they want to interact with companies. Recent research studies have revealed that consumers have very low levels of satisfaction with online FAQs and automated interactive voice response systems (IVRs). But US-based online self-service technology firm Conversagent CEO Stephen Klein says the research indicates that consumers do give high marks to online chat with live support, and recent customer deployments and analysis of the performance of their product Automated Service Agent (ASA v3.0) indicates a very high level of satisfaction and repeat usage.

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"The most successful self-service environment is one that not only delivers rapid and accurate responses to customers, but one that also is sensitive to customer expressions of frustration and the need to escalate customers who are not being helped - whether due to their inability to properly use self-service, or the unique nature of their question, which may require attended support," Klein says. "Properly implemented self-service solutions present a highly sensitive interface to the customer, and via that interface delivers a seamless integration to attended support channels."

Sento's O'Neal agrees, arguing that while Internet chat is an option significantly more effective than phone or e-mail, it remains the most under-recognized and under-utilized communication method available to man. Whereas phone agents live in the world of "let me tell you", chat agents live in a world of "let me show you" or "let me do it for you". Phone and e-mail cannot compare.

O'Neal says chat allows customers to continue working on the Internet without cutting the connection to make a phone call. Even with broadband, talking on the phone while navigating the Web is a hassle. While using chat, customers can multitask. This increases their satisfaction. And the chat agent can push URLs, co-browse Web pages, download files and (with permission) even take over control of the PC.

"Since there is a transcript of the entire text conversation, if a customer is dissatisfied, the customer and the company avoid the 'he-said, she-said' scenario of the phone world," O'Neal says. "Chat agents can handle two to three customers simultaneously, without the customer being aware of this. Companies can use domestic or offshore agents, wherever Internet is available. First-time resolution rates are significantly higher than e-mail and at least equal to those obtained over the phone," he says.

If customers have their own preferences, they are also responsive to carrot and stick approaches. One company deploying Conversagent's ASA system has chosen to reward customers who first turn to the ASA for self-service. Users who use the ASA, and ask questions that require attended support (for instance, help changing their password or personal account details) are passed to live online chat, at the front of the queue, ahead of customers who simply click into live chat support directly. By implementing this rule set, the company rewards customers for using the ASA, and adds a level of extra support to the ASA experience that will lead to the customer turning to the ASA for help at their next need for support.

Comcast deployed an interactive agent support site it calls "Ask Comcast" in mid September 2003 to deliver customer support to its broadband service customers. Initially presented at the bottom of their support options, after two months of availability Ask Comcast was surpassing attended e-mail and live chat support channels for customer cases handled each month. And unlike attended support channels, which cost the company multiple dollars per customer session, the interactive agent cost less than $US0.20 to resolve a customer case.

"After two months of deployment, Ask Comcast was moved to the top position in the company's help menu, and to the upper-left-hand corner of their support page," Klein says. Ask Comcast is saving the company significant sums per month by deflecting customer support sessions away from attended support channels. At a total first-year cost of under $US350,000, Ask Comcast returned its investment in less than one month of service, according to Mitch Bowling, the vice president of customer service at Comcast

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Perils and Pitfalls

The greatest peril for companies deploying self-service support environments is the tendency to be lulled into management satisfaction by the deep sets of data being generated on the back end by self-service applications, Klein says. The reports generated by self-service software systems very often do not reveal the most important element of the story: the customer service experience.

"The most important element to be evaluated when selecting and implementing a self-service solution is for company management to assume the role of a customer and honestly ask: 'Is this how I would like to be treated as a customer?'"

Klein says the problem with browse-based and search-based self-service tools is that they force customers into unnatural modes of interaction, making it difficult for them to find the information they need. Unable to make a simple request, a customer must feel his or her way through a complex maze of topics, or guess at the proper search terms to express his or her problem - either way, an effort-intensive process with a high likelihood of failure. Even in the unlikely case that the customer navigates directly to the right category or hits upon the perfect set of search terms, the customer must still pick the answer he or she needs from a list potentially numbering in the hundreds - another daunting task, for the right answer may not be in the list at all, or may be depicted in a form that he or she fails to recognize.

In a customer service scenario, these are fatal shortcomings. A customer with a pressing question or complaint understandably has no patience for a difficult discovery process, and will quickly resort to an attended service option. As far as the ideal customer service experience goes, it is easy to see that typical self-service tools fare well in terms of availability, but fail miserably in all other respects.

A customer who has engaged in a poor self-service experience is extremely unlikely to try self-service tools in the future, opting instead for a more expensive attended service channel. In the worst case, a poor self-service experience may drive a customer to take his business elsewhere. Attempts to calculate the total cost of ownership for self-service tools seldom take into account the hidden costs of damaged customer relationships and increased per-incident costs, Klein says. If they did, the true cost of browse-based and search-based tools would be far greater than most companies believe.

Some companies find they have to battle resistance from within before getting their self-service offerings off the ground. For instance in 1997 when antivirus provider McAfee began exploring Web self-service to handle customer support for the Dr Solomon software with Sento, then senior manager of WW McAfee consumer support Scott Lessard found the greatest opposition to the idea came from inside the company.

Sento is a proponent of a concept the company calls "customer choice": Guide the customer to a series of solutions and at every juncture offer them the option of live support if they want it. Generally speaking, if the customer can get a good solution, they will choose the self-service alternative and will feel good about having done so, Sento maintains. Yet the notion of moving from live voice to Web-enabled self-service and chat had the senior executive management, and particularly the CIO/CTO executives, worried that the quality of support would slip. The sales-people were even harder to convince because they were certain as soon as word got out that the company was no longer providing free phone support, they wouldn't be able to sign any deals.

As it happens, those worries proved baseless. After the initial rollout, Web support instantly surged to 85 percent of transactions, leading to early cost savings of 87 percent, and has now settled in to a consistent savings of 60-65 percent in overall costs. And the icing on the cake is that The Association of Support Professionals (ASP) named www.mcafeehelp.com one of the "Top 10 Best Support Web Sites" for 2002.v

SIDEBAR: The Push-Back to Talk

How to divert customers from the phone to other, less-expensive service channels

Phone service is undeniably the most expensive form of service, says Sento CEO Patrick O'Neal. Why offer it at all? To start with, it may be the only option available to a customer at a given point in time - for example, when the customer is travelling or does not have access to the Internet. Or the Internet service could be down. Or the kids may be monopolizing the computer to chat with their friends. Since written communication (chat and e-mail) does not always provide the perfect forum for expressing emotion, customers may just want to speak with someone.

"With that said, I submit to you that customers generally do not prefer the phone," O'Neal says. "In Sento's experience, customers choose non-phone options at least 80 percent to 90 percent of the time. Too often, companies position self-service, chat, and e-mail as ways of pushing the customer away."

O'Neal offers these tips for successfully diverting customers from the phone towards other options:

1. Create a self-service environment that parallels the ATM model: deliver those features that are used often and will be used successfully in this environment.

2. Provide customers with a simple transition to a live agent. Too many companies create a robust self-service engine and hide their phone number deep within the site.

3. Give the customer enough information to make an informed choice as to what live option they should use (for example, queue times and handle times).

4. Reward your customers for using your less expensive service options. For example, if your phone hours are Monday-Friday, 8am-5pm, provide 24x7 Internet chat service. If wait times for the phone are typically three to four minutes, provide chat service within one minute.

5. Require customers to first visit your Web site before calling. Eliminate inbound phone numbers altogether, and instead have the customer request a call back via the Web. The request is routed to a contact centre that makes an outbound call. Or provide the customer with a PIN that they are required to enter into the IVR when calling. Customer rewards include no phone charges and more accurate skills routing.

6. When you have successfully moved most of your traffic away from the phone, consider positioning phone as a "value-add" service that includes a per-minute or per-incident charge.

SIDEBAR: Listen Well

TIPS FOR IMPLEMENTING customer self-service . . .

• Learn everything about your customers.

• Conduct focus groups to ensure that they want self-service.

• Define clear business goals.

• Evaluate the technology for its technical and financial merits.

• Does it match your customer base? Will it boost profitability?

• Work as a team. Have customer support, IT and other departments involved every step of the way.

• Offer training to employees.

• Expect this to be an iterative process that requires making changes as you learn more about your customers.

• Develop an effective way to measure results.

• Under promise and over deliver.

THINGS TO AVOID knowing that customers want personalized attention, whether they're contacting the Web site or the call centre . . .

• Don't leave customers hanging. Tell them when you'll respond to their questions. And give them an easy way out of the Web site.

• Don't implement Web-collaboration tools such as chat until your call centre representatives are adept at using the technology.

• Don't reduce everything to ROI. Look instead at the bigger picture of creating customer value.

• Don't try to predict what the end results will look like.

• Don't try to do everything at once. Implement in stages.

REQUIREMENTS for effective customer self-service . . .

• Technology, such as a search engine, that helps customers find what they need quickly.

• Knowledge management software that identifies each customer and his lifetime value to the company.

• Marketing software tools that let you track customers and target them with relevant offers.

• Tools that integrate all your communications channels.

• Links to the back office so that you can confirm orders and availability.

• Integrate everything. Consider letting an ASP handle the integration.

• Make sure your customer self-service strategy dovetails with your overall service strategy.