This document provides best practices and advice for contact center managers on successfully integrating self-service technology. It discusses key metrics like call deflection rates and customer satisfaction that should be measured. It also highlights potential drawbacks like poor user experience frustrating customers and causing them to avoid self-service options. Additionally, it emphasizes the importance of thorough training for contact center agents across all channels to ensure consistent customer service.

1. A contact center manager's guide<br />to integrating self-service<br />Today's contact centers are under ever-increasing pressure to provide<br />great service while keeping costs down. Self-service technology<br />promises a host of benefits, enabling customers to resolve their own<br />service questions without gobbling up agent resources. But deploying<br />self-service technology can also introduce many questions. What type<br />of technology will best integrate into your existing contact center<br />environment? What best practices will help ensure that the self service<br />platform will be usable and useful for customers, and achieve the goal<br />of reducing costs? And what's the best way to calculate the ROI and<br />estimate the impact of deploying self-service technology? This eBook,<br />appropriate for contact center managers with either an IT or business<br />focus, get answers to these and other questions about self service.<br />Read best practices and expert advice to help build a solid business<br />case and implementation plan for deploying self-service successfully.<br />A contact center manager's guide to<br />integrating self-service<br />Table of Contents<br />Finding the ROI in contact center self-service initiatives<br />Thorough contact center training improves customer satisfaction<br />Building a multichannel contact center<br />Best practices to ensure the success of contact center self-service<br />Resources from inContact<br />Finding the ROI in contact center self-service<br />initiatives<br />By Chris Maxcer, Contributor<br />For years, contact center self-service initiatives were launched simply as a way to cut call<br />center and agent engagement costs. Many have since languished under years of neglect. A<br />recent Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA) benchmark study indicates a<br />number on the face of this trend: Successful self-service engagements have dropped from<br />48% in 2003 to just 39% in 2011.<br />How can a beleaguered contact center manager turn this trend around for better ROI?<br />The answers, of course, start with a firm grasp of key call center metrics your organization<br />can use to assess the value of self-service initiatives. Also important is knowing how to<br />propose smarter integration of self-service initiatives to business stakeholders to get those<br />efforts on a path to success.<br />Two key metrics<br />There are two basic, core self-service contact center metrics that most companies should<br />pay attention to, noted John Ragsdale, vice president of research for TSIA. \"
The first is selfservice<br />success, for example, the percent of customers that attempt self-service and<br />successfully find what they need,\"
he said. Companies can use this metric to determine how<br />effective their self-service endeavors are.<br />\"
The second is what percentage of total incident volume is being answered -- or deflected --<br />via self-service channels,\"
Ragsdale explained. If a company has 10,000 calls a month but<br />can deflect 1,000 calls to a self-service application, those costs associated with the<br />deflections could result in the need for fewer call center staffers or resources<br />Measuring customer satisfaction<br />\"
The best metrics are customer satisfaction and contact resolution,\"
said Layne Holley,<br />director of community services for International Customer Management Institute (ICMI).<br />\"
Tracking call resolution, however, seems to be a bit trickier for many call centers.”<br />Calls fielded by interactive voice response (IVR) are just as tricky. Citing the ICMI 2010<br />Self-Service and the Multichannel Contact Center Report, Holley said “more than one-fifth of<br />our survey respondents said they do not measure completion rates for IVR-only calls. Sixtyfour<br />percent of respondents don‟t know if or when a customer has tried to self-serve but<br />then opted for a live rep.”<br />Overall, recent ICMI research finds that 43.6% of organizations don't measure customer<br />feedback on centers' self-service channels.<br />\"
When you don‟t measure completion and transfer-out rates, you also can‟t measure the<br />ROI of your self-service technologies,\"
Holley said.<br />\"
Customers often transfer out of a self-service transaction because they‟re not easily able to<br />get what they need. You‟re not likely to understand why customers are transferring out or<br />abandoning until you track what‟s happening,\"
Holley said.<br />Computer telephony integration (CTI) systems can enable transactional analysis for selfservice<br />channels so that contact centers can know when customers have tried self-service<br />and then opted for a live agent, Holley said. They can also pass customer transaction data<br />from self-service channels back to the agent, reducing customer frustration that can occur<br />when they have to repeat what they‟ve already said to a live agent.<br />Packaging for stakeholder approval<br />To win stakeholder buy-in, contact center managers should start with ROI, followed by the<br />more nebulous customer satisfaction metrics<br />\"
For the most part, it still comes back to the basics of decreasing agent handle time and<br />operational costs, along with improving customer satisfaction by giving self-service to those<br />who want it,\"
noted Drew Kraus, research vice president for enterprise communications at<br />Gartner Inc.<br />Although call deflection rates and reducing agent handle time can lead to hard-cost savings,<br />some customers are increasingly looking at self-service as an expected benefit. For<br />example, some customers prefer Web self-service options over live agents when they are<br />sitting in coffee shops or are up late at night and don't want to wake sleeping family<br />members.<br />\"
For a lot of companies, part of the justification for IVR is to extend the hours they can<br />support their customers without having to extend agent staffing … but there is a downside:<br />Surveys show that most customers just think they're trying to reduce costs. So even if the<br />rationale is altruistic, the customer impression is, 'Ah, they're just still trying to be cheap,'\"
<br />Kraus said.<br />Good knowledge management (KM) has the power to mitigate those pessimistic impressions<br />as long as customers can find answers to their needs. \"
KM is one of the few areas that<br />investment almost always creates strong ROI. Even a poor KM implementation will pay for<br />itself in a year -- a really good implementation pays for itself in as little as six months,\"
<br />TSIA's Ragsdale noted.<br />Consider this: \"
Interaction volumes are increasing year over year by 20% or more for most<br />companies. Since no one wants to fund doubling or tripling the size of support over the next<br />few years, self-service is an easy sell,” Ragsdale explained.<br />VMware, a provider of virtualization and cloud infrastructure technologies recently updated<br />its self-service efforts. It not only kept customers satisfied with instant access to answers<br />but also managed to deflect calls from its call center, said Kate Leggett, senior analyst for<br />Forrester Research Inc. In 2008, 2.5 million customers accessed Web-based content; in<br />2010, more than 10 million customers accessed conten<br />And the results? Since the update, which includes links to a company support blog and a<br />YouTube channel for self-service videos, calls to VMware‟s contact center have steadily<br />decreased. The rate is now below 4%, saving VMware more than $10 million a year.<br />Drawbacks and pitfalls<br />\"
The biggest drawback is that a poorly designed application can end up with customer<br />alienation,\"
Gartner's Kraus noted. \"
The classic is that you spend five minutes in the IVR,<br />get transferred to an agent and then you have to repeat everything.\"
<br />That's irritating enough, but it becomes far worse when speech-based applications go<br />wrong, he said.<br />\"
A poorly developed speech application [alienates more] customers than a poorly developed<br />IVR touch-tone application because now I'm not just pressing the buttons harder, I'm<br />yelling at my phone,\"
Kraus explained. \"
And the poor agent who gets me after this … I'm<br />sure it increases agent churn, plus it increases average handle time because your customer<br />is whining about the application. A lot of companies don't realize the investment and nuance<br />that's required for speech-type testing and tuning.\"
<br />There are risks with Web-based self-service, too.<br />\"
A poor self-service implementation frustrates customers, who after two-to-three<br />unsuccessful attempts will likely never go back to your self-service site again. For customers<br />who prefer self-service -- and that is becoming a large percentage of customers as younger<br />demographics age into the primary target markets -- having a bad self-service site means<br />they will take their business elsewhere -- it is that important,\"
Ragsdale stressed.<br />One last common pitfall is risking the relevance of Web knowledge management effort <br />\"
KM solutions often don't get adequately staffed because companies don't see it as a longterm<br />engagement. They see it as a project to execute so you get executive sponsorship and<br />funding for that project, but there's no funding for the bodies that's needed to maintain it,\"
<br />she explained. \"
As soon as someone accesses information that doesn't answer their<br />question because it's stale, they're going to pick up the phone<br />Thorough contact center training improves<br />customer satisfaction<br />By Sue Hildreth, Contributor<br />Customer service today involves much more than the call center. Today's multichannel<br />contact center may have phone, Web chat, fax, Twitter, text chat, email and self-service<br />options such as user forums and knowledge bases. Customers may use one, two or all of<br />them at one time or another. To manage all these elements, consistent contact center<br />training is vital.<br />\"
Not all interactions are a candidate for every technology,\"
said Lyn Kramer, managing<br />director for Kramer & Associates, a contact center consulting firm. \"
I may use IVR<br />[interactive voice response] now, because I don't have access to the Web, but the Web later<br />in the day, and give them a phone call tomorrow. It's one face to the customer over<br />different channels, which can be a huge problem for some organizations, especially if<br />separate groups own different parts of it.\"
<br />A key area that may be overlooked in contact center management is the hand-off of a<br />customer from one channel to another, said Lori Bocklund, president of Strategic Contact<br />Inc. When a customer moves from email to IVR or Facebook to a call center representative,<br />the tone of the exchange may change as well, particularly if different departments handle<br />them.<br />Worse, all the information about that customer may fall between the cracks, meaning<br />customers are forced to repeat their stories and order numbers, increasing frustration.<br />“It‟s pretty jarring when you spend an hour doing research online and you call the support<br />line for help only to have them take you through another hour of the same research,” she<br />said.<br />A major part of the problem is lack of integration among the technologies. “Unfortunately,<br />there are still siloed implementations out there,” said John Ragsdale, vice president of<br />technology research for the Technology Services Industry Association. “Social media, for<br />SearchCRM.com E-Book<br />A contact center manager's guide to integrating self-service<br />Sponsored By: Page 10 of 22<br />instance, is totally separate from the knowledge base, and there‟s no integration between<br />the two, and no search that encompasses both.”<br />A second problem is lack of consistent policies and procedures for all employees to follow<br />when dealing with customers. The same support agent who answers the phone is unlikely to<br />also maintain the Facebook page, but if both are following the same rule book for tone,<br />language and support goals, then customers at least know they are dealing with the same<br />company.<br />One support representative doesn't fit all<br />Not all support employees are suited for all channels. While many contact center managers<br />have dreamed of having one team handle everything, in reality that isn't practical because<br />of the disconnect among applications and routing and workflow, and the different skill levels<br />of customer reps, Bocklund said.<br />Staff assigned to social media such as Facebook or Twitter should be good at written<br />communication and comfortable with the idea of social media. They should know the<br />company‟s etiquette for providing support that thousands of customers will request. An<br />accidental slip is more damaging on Twitter than on a one-to-one phone call.<br />Additionally, the cut-and-paste style of answering questions, which is common with email<br />support, does not work well in a social media forum where everyone can see different<br />questions receiving the same answers. Social media is a more manual form of support, at<br />least when it comes to interaction between customers and company.<br />\"
Many of the people using social media are customers who are unhappy. Companies need to<br />get the necessary policies together [for providing support over social media] and also decide<br />if that is the right place to have a customer support contact,\"
Kramer said.<br />Cross-channel contact center training is key<br />Although support agents may specialize in one type of support channel, they may still be<br />asked to help out areas that receive a high volume of queries. For example, when a<br />SearchCRM.com E-Book<br />A contact center manager's guide to integrating self-service<br />Sponsored By: Page 11 of 22<br />customer calls about trouble downloading a knowledge base article, the contact center<br />employees have to know how to help.<br />Unfortunately, call center staffers aren‟t always educated on their company‟s other support<br />options. In fact, often a completely different department has responsibility over the selfservice<br />website or the mobile support application, and nobody thought to train customer<br />support on these technologies. What you wind up with is a contact center that appears<br />clueless, Bocklund said.<br />“Say I‟m walking my dog at 5:30 am and doing some online banking on my iPhone, but I hit<br />a snafu and need to call the bank. What may happen is the call center management has not<br />educated the staff on what goes on with the IVR, mobile apps or website, and instead of<br />helping me, the call center says, „Oh, we have a mobile app?‟ We really need to make sure<br />that the call center people have a clue about things the customer is using,” Bocklund said.<br />One approach that some organizations are taking to provide better coordination of customer<br />service policies and people is to create a new C-level position for it. The position of chief<br />contact officer is emerging, Kramer said. \"
It takes a concerted effort to put everything into<br />a single voice. We see a lot of organizations going to a chief contact officer to help pull<br />things together.\"
<br />SearchCRM.com E-Book<br />A contact center manager's guide to integrating self-service<br />Sponsored By: Page 12 of 22<br />Building a multichannel contact center<br />By Sue Hildreth, Contributor<br />Providing customer support over multiple communication channels -- known as multichannel<br />contact centers -- is standard operating procedure these days for contact center managers.<br />Customers are increasingly less inclined to pick up the phone and talk to an agent and more<br />inclined to email, post to a user forum or go on Twitter to get help with a problem.<br />By 2013, at least 35% of customer service centers will integrate community or social<br />capabilities as a part of the contact center solution, according to Gartner‟s Magic Quadrant<br />for CRM Customer Service Contact Centers 2010.<br />Others customers prefer to do their own research and expect companies to have a good<br />search engine and plenty of product information on their sites. Increasingly, customers also<br />assume they can receive this support over their smartphones while shopping or walking the<br />dog.<br />“There is much more emphasis on mobile devices, and we are seeing more vendors doing<br />iPhone apps or Blackberry apps,” said John Ragsdale, vice president of technology research<br />for the Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA).<br />While the interactive voice response (IVR) remains a core feature of almost all contact<br />centers, its use is gradually declining as other types of customer service become available,<br />according to Lyn Kramer, president of Kramer & Associates, a call center consulting firm.<br />\"
We see the IVR declining, just a little, over the past few years, and more pervasive use of<br />email and Web chat integrated with email and co-browsing where an agent helps a person<br />with detailed things on a form or webpage,\"
Kramer said.<br />Taming multichannel contact center chaos<br />For most companies, buying a new contact center system, or upgrading the old one every<br />time a new communications channel or capability is identified, is overly burdensome. Often<br />SearchCRM.com E-Book<br />A contact center manager's guide to integrating self-service<br />Sponsored By: Page 13 of 22<br />the next best thing for these companies is to purchase a new technology separately, usually<br />from a Software as a Service (SaaS) provider. Although that works as short-term solution, it<br />can lead to fragmentation of functionality and data and can make it impossible to route<br />queries among channels.<br />A better solution for the long term is to invest in a modular application suite or platform that<br />allows new modules to be added as needed and as the budget allows. Large CRM and<br />contact center vendors have contact center applications onto which companies can add<br />modules such as those for social media, self-service, virtual agents and monitoring.<br />Optimizing contact center ROI<br />The following are some of the key features call center software should have to optimize<br />contact center ROI and efficiency:<br />Routing and workflow: Effectively routing and handling customer phone calls, chats and<br />email is the primary driver of contact center productivity. Picking a good routing and<br />reporting platform enables contact centers to manage calls, emails, Web chat, Twitter feeds<br />and Facebook from the same interface.<br />“Even if it doesn‟t do dynamic contact to agent routing, it will at least let them say, look out<br />of Web chat and start taking phone calls,” said Lori Bocklund, president of Strategic Contact<br />Inc.<br />Workflow and business rules enable contact centers to handle more complex relationships<br />and transactions automatically based on a set of predetermined rules.<br />Skills-based routing: Manually routing inbound calls takes time and often leads to<br />dropped calls. Skills-based routing reduces the strain on the customer‟s patience and<br />increases staff efficiency. Typically found with multichannel routing, skills-based routing<br />automatically routes calls to the appropriate agent or group of agents based on their<br />expertise and input from the caller.<br />SearchCRM.com E-Book<br />A contact center manager's guide to integrating self-service<br />Sponsored By: Page 14 of 22<br />Pop-up screens: These screens display a customer‟s name and account information and<br />are perhaps the best contact center feature you can have, Bocklund said. They allow the<br />agents to view customers‟ information right before they get on the call with them. “That<br />pop screen isn‟t new but it‟s really the best use of customer information,” she said.<br />Search and knowledge management: Customers can find answers to technical questions<br />in documentation and frequently asked questions (FAQs) on the corporate website as well<br />as in posts to user forums, a consultant's blog or articles on external websites. An agent<br />should have access to the same information as the customer. A good search capability<br />ensures the agents can quickly pinpoint the right information.<br />“There is more emphasis on new intelligent search technologies to allow employees and<br />customers to access information in different locations, in real time, and allow them to<br />access in any format, filter results, work within search, iterative search, to work with the<br />data instead of old Google approach,” Ragsdale said.<br />Automatic callbacks: Companies can program callbacks to retrieve customers who hang<br />up before reaching a service representative. For example, this feature allows customers to<br />leave their phone numbers when they encounter long wait times. When an agent is<br />available, the system calls the customer back. This is particularly useful in contact centers<br />that take sales inquiries.<br />Automated alerts: Customers who have thresholds set for service levels or pricing can<br />receive automatic alerts via phone or email if the threshold is reached. If a customer<br />interested in purchasing a cruise if the price falls below $2,000, then the system can alert<br />the customer when that price is reached. Alternatively, if a company releases a new<br />software patch or upgrade, an alert is a good way to let customers know about it. Alerts are<br />also used for flight delays or when a bank account balance falls too low.<br />Virtual agents: These software services help customers find the right answer on company<br />websites. Using natural language capabilities and guided by internal rules, the virtual agents<br />provide more specific and accurate help faster than a customer simply browsing FAQs or<br />posting to a user forum. In addition, virtual agents potentially take some of the load off of<br />the call center if they are easy to use and accurate.<br />SearchCRM.com E-Book<br />A contact center manager's guide to integrating self-service<br />Sponsored By: Page 15 of 22<br />Operational and real-time analytics: To keep tabs on how successful the contact center<br />is, managers must track key metrics such as:<br />• Call volume<br />• Length of calls<br />• How long customers are on hold<br />• How long email turnaround is<br />• How many customers post questions or answers to the support forum<br />Real-time analytics is aimed at helping the service representative decide the best course of<br />action by, for example, looking at the customer's buying history or the company's refund<br />policy. Operational analytics is helpful in looking at things such as call scripts or customer<br />behavior patterns on a website.<br />The downside of Web 2.0<br />New features are unappealing if they wind up costing more without also increasing customer<br />satisfaction or up-sales. Bocklund noted that while Web chat is a popular feature, it's not<br />always beneficial to the bottom line.<br />“Why waste the money on someone like me who‟s used to doing self-service all the time?<br />Unless they can show it actually drives sales, it will increase the cost from pennies per<br />customer to dollars,” she said, adding that there are some industries, such as insurance,<br />where Web chat might be a valuable addition.<br />Another self-service capability that Bocklund would skip is FAQs made available over the<br />IVR. While some organizations have done that, it‟s not usually popular because few people<br />have the patience to listen to a great deal of information read to them over the phone.<br />Also, although several vendors offer multichannel platforms that include social media, most<br />companies are avoiding this route.<br />SearchCRM.com E-Book<br />A contact center manager's guide to integrating self-service<br />Sponsored By: Page 16 of 22<br />“I‟d say less than 20% of companies have gone this route,” Ragsdale said. “Channels are<br />added one at a time, usually as a side project, and done as cheaply as possible. Everyone<br />added Twitter as a lark, and less than 10% of member companies using Twitter have it<br />integrated to their CRM or customer history,” he said.<br />Contact center needs differ<br />Not all companies need the same features. Those with high volume and low sales per<br />customer may want more self-service, while those with high-end products or service may<br />want to invest in more high-touch services. Generally, the companies that are eager to<br />invest in new technologies are those with the greatest volume of call center traffic, Ragsdale<br />said. If a new feature works well for them, they can save a great deal of money in the call<br />center.<br />\"
If you're AT&T, with an enormous call volume, it pays to try new things,\"
he said.<br />Conversely, B2B firms and high-value, high-touch companies with fewer customers tend to<br />be the least interested in new technologies and services.<br />\"
In B2B world, they're a bit more risk averse because they're dealing with long-term<br />customer relationships and not willing to try a brand-new unproven technology,” Ragsdale<br />said. \"
A new technology may work really well, or it may leave them with egg on their face.”<br />SearchCRM.com E-Book<br />A contact center manager's guide to integrating self-service<br />Sponsored By: Page 17 of 22<br />Best practices to ensure the success of contact<br />center self-service<br />By Chris Maxcer, Contributor<br />When companies think about integrating contact center self-service, they tend to focus on<br />reducing costs and improving agent efficiency, which can lead to short-term gains. Without<br />a smart plan, self-service initiatives that launch with great expectations can often fizzle out,<br />leaving customers confused, angry and looking for new brands. Fortunately, companies that<br />launch with contact center best practices can ensure sustainable success.<br />The first thing to sort out is which tasks are best suited for live agents and which are best<br />handled through self-service. According to Layne Holley, director of community services for<br />International Customer Management Institute (ICMI), self-service is never going to take the<br />place of live agents.<br />\"
What you want is to identify the most repetitive, easily automated transaction types of<br />tasks to shift to self-service channels,\"
she explained. “A good rule of thumb is that if you<br />can do it online in less time than it would take to pick up the phone and complete the<br />transaction with a live agent, it might be a candidate for self-service.\"
<br />In addition, Holley said there are some common tasks that call center professionals tend to<br />rank highly for self-service solutions:<br />• Shopping carts for product and service orders<br />• Order confirmation<br />• Order tracking<br />• Appointment setting and rescheduling<br />• Bill pay and funds transfers<br />• Customer access to personal accounts and account setup and management<br />• Site search<br />• Frequently asked questions or help content<br />• Opening and checking tickets<br />SearchCRM.com E-Book<br />A contact center manager's guide to integrating self-service<br />Sponsored By: Page 18 of 22<br />Although some of these tasks can be completed efficiently over the phone, customers<br />increasingly expect Web-based self-service options, which represent a prime opportunity for<br />deflecting calls from a contact center. \"
Basically, if your question can be answered as a selfcontained<br />answer -- and answered completely -- Web self-service is great,\"
said Kate<br />Leggett, a senior analyst for Forrester Research Inc. She noted that 80% of questions can<br />usually easily be answered by a straightforward Web self-service offering.<br />Still, John Ragsdale, vice president of technology research for the Technology Services<br />Industry Association (TSIA), warned that customers will act in unexpected ways. \"
Today‟s<br />customers use every channel for every problem, including reporting 'priority one' issues via<br />chat, email and self-service [applications]. Would they be better off picking up the phone<br />and calling you? Probably, but you can‟t mandate customer behavior,\"
he explained.<br />The rise of video<br />Meanwhile, according to Drew Kraus, research vice president for Gartner's Technology &<br />Service Provider Research group, there's a lot of change in the contact center space over<br />what types of tasks are best suited for self-service. \"
Self-service video -- corporate video<br />applications that let someone get a visual representation of how to do something -- is<br />changing things,\"
he explained.<br />While video for self-service is still an emerging space, Kraus said the success of self-service<br />videos doesn't have to rely on customers finding them online. Agents can push a Web link<br />to the customer, saving precious time. \"
With video, an agent wouldn't have to walk a<br />customer through a complex task,\"
he noted.<br />There are challenges to connecting video with contact centers, though. \"
In many cases, the<br />contact centers don't own the Web-based self-service activity, so it needs some level of<br />contact and cooperation between the IT Web center and the call center. It's not that they<br />are antagonistic; it's just that it's not standard for the two groups to work closely together,\"
<br />he explained.<br />SearchCRM.com E-Book<br />A contact center manager's guide to integrating self-service<br />Sponsored By: Page 19 of 22<br />Of course, even video doesn't do a good job at everything. \"
Live agents are better in places<br />where you need consultative service or cross-sell, up-sell efforts,\"
Kraus said.<br />Arrows to escalation<br />Poorly implemented contact center self-service applications can come back to haunt a<br />company in multiple ways. Customers might take their business elsewhere, but they may<br />also attempt to immediately bypass self-service applications in favor of finding a live agent<br />immediately. Because much of the point behind self-service solutions is to limit direct agent<br />interaction, what are some of the best practices to handle escalation?<br />\"
The best way to handle escalation is to avoid it … but it‟s bound to happen. With selfservice,<br />it‟s critical to have an escalation path,\"
Holley said. \"
It‟s inevitable that at least a<br />few customers will abandon a channel, but you don‟t want them to abandon your<br />organization.\"
<br />Still, what about avoidance?<br />\"
If you‟re looking to limit escalations, make sure your self-service channels are working<br />properly and that they‟re updated with all relevant information -- promotions, new products,<br />new service or product features -- just as you would make sure that live agents are armed<br />with the latest info,\"
Holley said.<br />While traditional call centers have clear escalation paths built into their processes and<br />service-level commitments, Ragsdale said that many companies are missing ways to easily<br />escalate from unassisted to assisted support. To fix this, do not hide access to live agents so<br />that your customers have to spend 20 minutes searching for contact information, he said.<br />Next, look to Web chat options. \"
Web chat is hugely popular in consumer support and now<br />has growing popularity for enterprise and B2B support,\"
he explained. \"
Chat is a great way<br />to offer customers a quick connection to an agent from the Web, and it preserves where<br />they are on the Web page so the agent has context.\"
<br />SearchCRM.com E-Book<br />A contact center manager's guide to integrating self-service<br />Sponsored By: Page 20 of 22<br />Some smart companies know when it's time to initiate escalation themselves. \"
You can<br />proactively reach out to customers who have been on your self-service site for a long time<br />or who have performed multiple searches and ask if they need help,\"
Ragsdale<br />recommended. \"
A great thing about proactive chat is you can choose to only offer it when<br />inbound volume is low, to keep your idle agents as productive as possible.\"
<br />Of course, managing escalation remains a delicate balance for contact center managers.<br />\"
Customers always want easy escalation paths but not all businesses want it,\"
Kraus noted.<br />\"
Sometimes they really want to encourage you to use self-service -- some businesses are<br />happy to lose a customer rather than have high call center costs.\"
<br />Measuring self-service satisfaction<br />\"
Unfortunately, nearly half -- 43.6% -- of the contact centers represented in our research<br />don't measure customer feedback on their centers' self-service channels,\"
ICMI's Holley<br />said. \"
So the first recommendation is measure, measure, measure!<br />\"
The best way to measure customer satisfaction is to ask the customer to rate the<br />interaction they had with the channel they used. Were they able to find the information they<br />were looking for? Short, direct survey questions are best, and they should focus on the<br />service transaction and include channel-specific questions -- as opposed to general<br />questions about the company or its products and services,\"
Holley explained.<br />In addition, ICMI recommends that organizations deliver customer surveys using the<br />channel the customer used. \"
For example, if the customer comes to your organization via<br />your interactive voice response (IVR), offer them an IVR survey,\"
she said.<br />Accurate measurement is not without challenges, though.<br />\"
The response rates for [survey] prompts are often less than 3% -- sometimes less than 1%<br />-- so you don‟t gather enough information that way,\"
Ragsdale noted. \"
The next approach is<br />emailing a survey to everyone who uses self-service. In the B2B world this is easy -- users<br />typically have a logon or password for self-service in B2B. But for consumers, with no<br />SearchCRM.com E-Book<br />A contact center manager's guide to integrating self-service<br />Sponsored By: Page 21 of 22<br />authentication needed to access self-service, you don‟t know who they are to follow up to<br />with a survey.\"
<br />One way to measure potential self-service success online is to look at search patterns,<br />Forrester‟s Leggett said. Many clicks or abandoned pages might point to a higher likelihood<br />of dissatisfaction in self-service engagements or potential problem areas to enhance.<br />Regardless of what a contact center manager measures, Leggett recommends that<br />companies find ways to put their survey and measurement information to use on an<br />ongoing basis. \"
To have a continuous improvement cycle,\"
she said, \"
you need to route it<br />back to the right people to act on it.\"
<br />SearchCRM.com E-Book<br />A contact center manager's guide to integrating self-service<br />Sponsored By: Page 22 of 22<br />ne proven technique for keeping customers happy is providing<br />them with great service – regardless of the channel they<br />choose to use. Some customers will gravitate to self-service channels<br />such as Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and Web-based tools,<br />while others may lean toward agent-assisted support.<br />The opportunity for companies lies in determining<br />how to optimize their service channels in order<br />to provide great experiences to each customer<br />segment at the right cost.<br />Providing customers with differentiated support<br />is more important than ever. Global competition<br />has ushered in a steady stream of new and different<br />products that consumers can choose from, so<br />it’s become increasingly difficult for companies to<br />distinguish their products from other players. The<br />deal-clincher for many customers is whether a company can offer<br />them distinctive support, explains Zeynep Manco, Manager at Peppers<br />& Rogers Group.<br />Providing customers with a level of support based on the value<br />they bring to a company represents a change in mind-set for most<br />decision-makers.<br />“Historically, most organizations have viewed support as a onesize-<br />fits-all approach for their customers,” says Tim Harris, Director,<br />Professional Services, at inContact. “However, that type of generic<br />approach doesn’t provide companies with a way to match the appropriate<br />level of support to customers based on their value to the<br />company. It also doesn’t offer decision-makers opportunities to reduce<br />support costs through service segmentation,” he adds.<br />In their efforts to capture and retain high-end customers, organizational<br />leaders must determine the most effective ways to deliver<br />consistent support to customers across all channels based on their<br />needs while providing premium service to their best customers according<br />to their value.<br />It’s challenging to strike a balance between providing<br />customers with great experiences across all<br />channels while ensuring that top-tier customers<br />receive premium service. One way is by applying<br />analytics to help determine the needs, behaviors,<br />and preferences of different customer groups and<br />then taking action to fulfill those requirements. By<br />determining the types of support sought by different<br />customer groups, decision-makers can also<br />better determine the cost structure for each channel based on their<br />preferences and usage, asserts Michel Naime, a Senior Consultant<br />at Peppers & Rogers Group.<br />It’s also important for decision-makers to remember that value<br />isn’t simply defined by how much money a customer spends on a<br />company’s products, either currently or on a projected basis, Harris<br />asserts. Executives also need to consider how influential a customer<br />is in referring or recommending a company’s products to friends<br />and colleagues. Here’s where analysis of social media data plays<br />a critical role. It’s critical for decision-makers to never lose sight of<br />the importance of understanding and meeting all customer needs.<br />Because ultimately that’s what customers care is about.<br />“ A one-size-fits-all approach<br />to customer service doesn’t<br />provide decision-makers<br />opportunities to reduce support<br />costs through service<br />segmentation.”<br />— Tim Harris,<br />Director, Professional<br />Services, inContact<br />ne proven technique for keeping customers happy is providing<br />them with great service – regardless of the channel they<br />choose to use. Some customers will gravitate to self-service channels<br />such as Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and Web-based tools,<br />while others may lean toward agent-assisted support.<br />The opportunity for companies lies in determining<br />how to optimize their service channels in order<br />to provide great experiences to each customer<br />segment at the right cost.<br />Providing customers with differentiated support<br />is more important than ever. Global competition<br />has ushered in a steady stream of new and different<br />products that consumers can choose from, so<br />it’s become increasingly difficult for companies to<br />distinguish their products from other players. The<br />deal-clincher for many customers is whether a company can offer<br />them distinctive support, explains Zeynep Manco, Manager at Peppers<br />& Rogers Group.<br />Providing customers with a level of support based on the value<br />they bring to a company represents a change in mind-set for most<br />decision-makers.<br />“Historically, most organizations have viewed support as a onesize-<br />fits-all approach for their customers,” says Tim Harris, Director,<br />Professional Services, at inContact. “However, that type of generic<br />approach doesn’t provide companies with a way to match the appropriate<br />level of support to customers based on their value to the<br />company. It also doesn’t offer decision-makers opportunities to reduce<br />support costs through service segmentation,” he adds.<br />In their efforts to capture and retain high-end customers, organizational<br />leaders must determine the most effective ways to deliver<br />consistent support to customers across all channels based on their<br />needs while providing premium service to their best customers according<br />to their value.<br />It’s challenging to strike a balance between providing<br />customers with great experiences across all<br />channels while ensuring that top-tier customers<br />receive premium service. One way is by applying<br />analytics to help determine the needs, behaviors,<br />and preferences of different customer groups and<br />then taking action to fulfill those requirements. By<br />determining the types of support sought by different<br />customer groups, decision-makers can also<br />better determine the cost structure for each channel based on their<br />preferences and usage, asserts Michel Naime, a Senior Consultant<br />at Peppers & Rogers Group.<br />It’s also important for decision-makers to remember that value<br />isn’t simply defined by how much money a customer spends on a<br />company’s products, either currently or on a projected basis, Harris<br />asserts. Executives also need to consider how influential a customer<br />is in referring or recommending a company’s products to friends<br />and colleagues. Here’s where analysis of social media data plays<br />a critical role. It’s critical for decision-makers to never lose sight of<br />the importance of understanding and meeting all customer needs.<br />Because ultimately that’s what customers care is about.<br />“ A one-size-fits-all approach<br />to customer service doesn’t<br />provide decision-makers<br />opportunities to reduce support<br />costs through service<br />segmentation.”<br />— Tim Harris,<br />Director, Professional<br />Services, inContact<br />