Keeping customers happy: mixing e-service and live help. (Customer Relationship Management).

Web-based e-service is quickly taking hold because more and more companies are grasping the benefits of enabling customers to find answers to their own questions via the Web and/or automated e-mail systems. Such solutions lower costs by eliminating the need for human support operators to handle routine queries and they improve service by letting customers get immediate answers via the Web--24 hours a day, seven days a week.

However, as the first wave of e-service implementers learned, these solutions cannot be isolated. Companies must integrate e-service into the broader context of customer interaction. Deploying an e-service "FAQ" section on a Web site, for example, is certainly a start. To engender highly bonded customer relationships and deliver competitively superior customer service, however, service interactions must become part of a 360-degree view of the customer.

In fact, when e-service and human touch properly integrate, the resulting synergies create even higher levels of customer satisfaction while maximizing the business value realized from dollars spent on both e-service technologies and call center personnel.

Here's why:

E-service shields service reps from routine questions. The "human touch" is not necessarily important for simple questions like, "Is the product available in blue?" or "Can you ship today?" Customers simply want these questions answered as quickly as possible. In fact, if they're on your Web site already, they would rather answer them with a click or two of the mouse than pick up the phone and make a call.

At the same time, by ensuring these mundane questions don't clog the call center queue, e-service frees service reps to address the questions that most warrant their personal attention and people skills. These higher-level inquiries concern issues like special customized orders, complaints about botched deliveries, and similarly sensitive topics. Thus, customers can rely on e-service as the most efficient technique for ensuring that the "human touch" is delivered where and when it is needed most.

Easy escalation to a human operator increases e-service rates. This may seem counter-intuitive, but it's true. If a company's e-service web content area is a trap from which customers can't easily escape, then they will probably get turned off to it and not use it any more. If, on the other hand, customers know they can quickly access an operator as a "fallback" in case of a roadblock, they are more likely to use e-service again and again--depsite the occasional failure. Easy escalation to a human operator, therefore, helps maximize the return on investments in e-service technology.

This is one reason that online chat and collaboration functions are gaining in popularity. These functions give customers the ability to quickly escalate their issues to a human operator without terminating their online e-service session. By the same token, such functions allow operators to interact with the customers to get him or her on the right track and then terminate the interaction to support other customers.

Emotional alerting can proactively escalate issues to satisfy unhappy customers. One of the biggest concerns customer service managers have is their automated e-service solutions won't necessarily allow them to give special attention to customers who are particularly angry or frustrated. There's an easy solution to this problem. These concerns can be overcome through the use of "emotional alerting."

Emotional alerting uses cues in customer messages--such as the use of profanity or excessive punctuation--to spot situations that warrant immediate personal attention. By notifying customer service managers about such situations, human representatives quickly respond with an e-mail, chat session or phone call as required.

This is a classic example of how negative situations are actually opportunities to demonstrate exceptional customer service and win a customer for life. As most customer service veterans have learned, it's the big" turnarounds" that score the most points with customers. Customers are, of course, satisfied when a company does things right all the time. But if a company demonstrates its ability to quickly and personally respond to a critical problem when it occurs, the customer is often more impressed than if no unfavorable situation had ever happened. Emotional alerting demonstrates that a company cares enough about its customers to respond proactively even when the customer is using an automated online system.

Technical Considerations For Effective Cross-channel Integration

Emotional alerting is just one of several technical capabilities that are critical for effectively integrating e-service and human contact channels. Others include: Common knowledge base access. If human operators don't have access to the same e-service knowledge base as the customer, there is little chance that they will be able to successfully address an escalated issue. There's also the possibility of sending the customer a conflicting message.

The only way to avoid these problems is to implement a common knowledge base for all customer interaction channels. An integrated cross-channel information repository empowers both customers and service reps with accurate answers, while ensuring the consistency of those answers across all channels.

The other advantage of a common knowledge base is it relieves content managers of having to build and administer multiple systems. This is the kind of work that can end up not getting done at all--resulting in knowledge bases that quickly become inaccurate and out-of-date, Poorly managed knowledge bases do more harm than good, so it's important to keep maintenance work to a minimum.

Auto-updating, self-tuning knowledge base. In addition to being shared across e-service and operator channels, the support knowledge base should also respond to behavior in both of those channels. That is, the knowledge base should have the ability to add knowledge items as they are created by operators responding manually to customer queries, and attune content based on the behavior of customers in the e-service channel.

The first of these two key knowledge base attributes ensures that operators need not answer the same questions repeatedly. When they answer a question for the first time, they automatically create a knowledge item that then becomes part of the combined operator/e-service knowledge base. This process fully leverages the responses of operators and maximizes the probability that any future customer with the same issue will be able find the answer to his or her question on the Web.

The second knowledge base attribute--automatic tuning based on customers online behaviors--ensures that "hot" support issues bubble up to the top of the knowledge base, where they can be easily found by customers for quick, effective e-service. At the same time, rarely asked questions remain further down on the list. Such rankings boost the success of e-service channels. They can be very useful for documenting chronic problems so product managers can address their root causes.

Integrated incident tracking and metrics. One of the things customers like about dealing with human beings is their accountability. E-service can provide the same sort of accountability through incident tracking. Typically, this will be done using some sort of site personalization. A customer should be able to return to the sire after submitting a question and check under a "my account" link to see the status of his other query. This creates the same feeling of accountability that customers have with service reps.

A good e-service system will also give the customer the ability to provide feedback when the service incident is closed, This way, the customer service team can determine if customers feel they are getting timely, helpful responses from the system.

In cases where customers express dissatisfaction, a customer service rep can quickly step in to contact the customer and address the situation. This is a critical link between e-service and human touch, because it lets the customer know that interaction with the e-service system doesn't totally shut them out from human contact should it become necessary. Customers feel satisfied about the current incident and will be mote likely to use the e-service system again--further increasing the associated cost savings.

Chat and session control. As noted previously, e-service and human touch can directly intersect through the use of chat and session control functions. These functions enable live operators to intervene during an e-service session, and then quickly handle other calls when the situation is resolved or the customer continues to use the online knowledge base.

Other collaborative functions are also emerging -- including the use of "click-totalk" VoIP functions that let online customers quickly toggle from online e-service to call center channels. As with chat, this type of functionality both enables the human touch to be brought into more automated customer interactions on an as-needed basis, while at the same time it boosts customers' comfort levels with e-service.

Automated e-mail "pre-empt." Another important technique for shielding service reps from unnecessary routine e-mail is pre-emptive automated e-mail response. Using this approach, the text of any e-mail that a customer sends from the Web site is automatically scanned before it is actually forwarded to the service staff Using the appropriate textual clues, one or more knowledge items already on the site can then be suggested to the customer. If those items are helpful, there is no need to forward the e-mail for human intervention. If the auto-response does not satisfy the customer, the e-mail is routed to an agent. With sufficiently intelligent software, this technique has been shown to reduce e-mail volume by 60 percent or more.

Many Channels, One Customer

Eventually, capabilities such as click-to-talk may lead to a blurring of the current distinctions between human and automated channels. We have already seen this in the call center industry, where IVR applications capture data for operators so they already have information such as account numbers and credit card validation for customers before they begin a live call. Customers are more interested in the speed and accuracy of the service than they are the particular technology by which that service is delivered. So, companies need to leverage all of their channel resources to ensure that customers get the help they need quickly, precisely and courteously.

Channel integration, therefore, isn't just a technological issue. It's also an issue of process and culture. For example, many companies are now promoting their ice channels on their call center "hold" messages. Since customers can often get to their computers while they're still on the phone, they can actually initiate an e-service session on the spot -- and even complete it before the operator has to respond.

Or, if they haven't quite found the answer they seek, the operator can talk them through the rest of the process. This allows the customer to experience personal service while at the same time become acclimatized to the company's e-service resources.

In fact, customer service reps support e-service initiatives in several ways. As a matter of routine, they should inform customers about the availability of online help. They should also play a lead role in gathering information about customers' previous attempts to find their own answers online -- noting any expressed shortcomings in the e-service system so they can quickly be addressed. This quality control is a useful supplement to any automated feedback mechanisms built into the system itself.

E-service and human touch aren't two separate approaches to customer service. They are, instead, highly complementary and synergistic aspects of any complete service strategy. The better job that companies do of integrating them, the better the results they will get from both their automated channels and their customer service staffs.

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Sean Forbes is vice president of marketing and business development of RightNow Technologies (www.rightnow.com). RightNow provides e-services solutions and engineering business solutions designed to deliver rapid time-to-benefit and quick return on investment RightNow's multichannel e-service suite supports Web-based self-service, e-mail response management live chat and collaboration and service analytics.