Are you being served? - Web-based customer services market - Industry Trend or Event

Integrate Web-based customer service for greater success.

It began in the summer of 1994 with a simple CD purchase from an on. line mall. No one then could have predicted the wave of on-line purchases and e-commerce transactions that followed, wiping away traditional distribution channels and making way for innovative companies that do business solely on the Web.

In fact, even market researchers and industry analysts got it wrong. Forrester Research projected in 1995 that on-line retail revenue would hit $6.9 billion by 2002--a figure that seemed staggering at the time. A study just out by Cisco Systems attributes $101 billion of revenues to e-commerce in 1998.

Businesses no longer can ignore the power and reach of the Web to win new customers and retain existing ones. They also no longer can ignore the customer-service implications that come with that power and reach. In the world of on-line commerce, customers are more demanding and less forgiving.

Companies learned that the hard way during last year's holiday season. Jupiter Communications found that 46% of online customers left a Web site because of technical problems and slow service. Many of these customers went to a competitor's site instead.

These statistics, supported by well-publicized tales of poor on-line customer service, are forcing companies to evaluate the way they manage their Web presence. Consumers today contact companies through the medium of their choice--telephone, fax, Web site, e-mail, kiosk. They switch from one contact medium to another and expect information about their buying patterns, their value to the company, and the nature of their current transaction to move with them.

Gone are the days when companies dictated when they were available to respond to customer inquiries. Today, companies must be prepared to respond to customers on their terms.

For companies, the Web offers a new way to reach customers and increase sales, broaden their geographic coverage without actually expanding physically, and shift customer interactions to a less-expensive medium. For network managers, the Web offers an integration challenge.

At its best, the current state of Web technology has only made the existing way of doing business faster and more immediate. To achieve the full potential of this new customer-service channel, network managers must integrate the Web into their companies' underlying business processes and systems. If they don't, the Web might ultimately create more problems than it solves by duplicating information sources and systems.

A company's Web site should offer all the features and functionality of a traditional call center--full-service and self-service options, load balancing, intelligent contact routing, knowledge management, computer-telephony integration (CTI). However, today's Internet customer-service channel is designed as a self-service solution with little or no option for direct, real-time customer service. Very few Web sites--if any--deliver a true interactive experience.

So, how do companies get from today's state of static Web-based customer service to one that supports seamless, multimedia customer contacts and interactions? They need to develop a contact-center architecture that:

* Integrates the various customer contact channels;

* Maps to a common set of business logic and processes;

* Relies on a central database of customer and product information; and

* Supports and adapts to evolving business objectives and technologies.

DEVELOPING THE ARCHITECTURE

One of the biggest Web-based customer-service challenges that network managers face is the e-mail messages that flood companies today. A Jupiter Communications survey of 125 Web-commerce sites last August illustrates the challenge. Twenty-three percent never responded to e-mail; 3% took five days or more to respond. A follow-up survey in January showed worse results. Twenty-six percent never responded; 15% took five days or more to respond.

Companies initially thought that giving customers the ability to communicate through e-mail would decrease the call volumes at their call centers. In many cases, the reverse has happened, bolstering the need for making the Web part of a company's overall customer-service delivery architecture.

With an integrated architecture, companies can tailor their service based on a customer's value to the business and deliver the same level and quality of service to a customer across all contact channels. Today's intelligent routing software also supports this personalization of customer service. It helps network managers balance and distribute incoming calls and e-mail messages more effectively across pools of customer-service agents, creating a virtual call-center environment.

The ability to distribute and treat all forms of customer contacts in a manner means the business rules and logic that define the delivery of customer service should be separated from the delivery medium itself, whether it's an interactive voice-response (IVR) system, Web site, or kiosk. However, most existing customer self-service systems, such as an IVR or Web site, have the business logic embedded in the platform, requiring a redundant set of business logic and rules to govern other forms of customer contacts.

Companies should separate the logic from the IVR platform and develop a single set of business logic and rules, which can reside on the network or a company's site, to govern all types of customer contacts.

A common set of logic and rules that reside on the network eliminates the need to develop parallel sets of rules to support each contact channel. It also makes it easier to make changes. For example, if an airline wants to route its most valued frequent fliers to a live agent, regardless of the contact channel or nature of the transaction, that business rule can be changed once--and it will be reflected across all contact channels.

The ability to quickly make changes and updates that are reflected across a company's customer-service delivery architecture is key in this multimedia environment. Developing a common set of business rules is one way to do that; another is creating common access to product-and customer-information databases.

Companies often maintain separate databases and limit access to these databases to a narrow set of contact channels, making it difficult to keep product information current. In fact, a Dataquest survey of 50 Web sites found that 22 had "last update" dates greater than 60 days. Eleven were greater than a year. If the product information is outdated, customer information can't be far behind.

An architecture that provides common access to the databases across the contact channels simplifies the management and maintenance of this critical information. When combined with CTI software, the information helps customer-service agents to upsell, cross sell, or deal with a complaint more effectively. Hewlett-Packard's CTI software. Customer Contact Manager, monitors all incoming contact channels (telephony, email, facsimile, Web) and performs customer-account lookups before the contact is ever delivered to an agent.

This integrated customer-service approach will continue to be a differentiator for companies. After all, the number of contact channels has increased--not decreased--over time. New technologies like the Internet still have not replaced telephony. Companies need a flexible customer-service architecture that can adapt to contact channels that are in their infancy and others that we haven't even imagined yet.

ADAPTING TO NEW TECHNOLOGIES

Today a significant amount of voice traffic is carried using voice over IP. In the near future, it is how a majority of voice traffic will be delivered. However, quality-of-service (QoS) issues still stand in the way of it being used in most customer-service environments. The public Internet does not offer the same reliability as a private data network or the existing public switched telecommunications network. Insufficient bandwidth results in congestion, typically at the dial-up points of presence, causing delays in delivering voice data packets.

In a customer-service environment, where companies strive to deliver the best customer experience in the least amount of time, that delay could mean a lost sale or a longer call. Instead, some companies are using voice over private IP networks where they can manage the bandwidth more effectively and deliver QoS levels comparable to the public switched network.

By taking advantage of a phone line that is separate from the Internet connection, companies can provide more stable QoS and start using the Internet for customer-service applications. A common sales application enables a customer to launch a toll-free call to an agent from a company's Web site. The agent, who can view the Web pages the customer has accessed, calls back and can "push" additional information to the customer's PC while they speak, creating an opportunity to upsell and cross sell. A similar application can be used for help desks. Because technicians can "view" the customer's screen, they can work with the customer to resolve problems more quickly.

Companies can maximize these new Web-based technologies if they have an integrated, flexible customer-service architecture because these technologies represent multimedia contact channels that provide customers with a rich, collaborative experience. In fact, a Gartner Group report shows that companies increasingly will take advantage of the Web's power and reach. The Gartner Group estimates that 25% of Fortune 1000 companies will use the Web for their customer-retention and -extension strategies by 2000.

If recent history is any indication, that figure could be surpassed this year.

Circle 254 for more information from AT&T Solutions

Anderson is responsible for marketing alliances in interactive networking applications for AT&T Solutions, AT&T's networking professional services unit, Florham Park, N.J.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Nelson Publishing
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group