Making Every Customer Conversation Successful and Satisfying

As companies expand product portfolios, delivering great customer service has become ever more challenging. Product complexity ratchets up the strain: How can every agent possibly know the right answer to every customer question across hundreds of products? Yet without this ability, customer unhappiness increases—along with defection rates. Unfortunately, the evidence indicates that support centers are not meeting customers’ needs as overall customer satisfaction has dropped 15% between 2006 and 2007.

A key to increasing the standard for customer service lies in the call center’s ability to incorporate service intelligence into every interaction. Service intelligence automatically applies best practices throughout the customer interaction to deliver the best possible resolution in the shortest amount of time. When service intelligence is infused into call center processes, companies can effectively balance customer expectations with the need to achieve higher rates of loyalty and lifetime value while containing service costs.

The resolution process used to resolve the customer’s inquiry is at the heart of every customer call. Intelligent resolution management automates this function by guiding agents through the question-and-answer process, helping them understand the customer’s intent, and using this understanding to find the most appropriate answer as quickly as possible.

Intelligent resolution management is a just-in-time activity that ensures that the right knowledge gets to the right person at just the right moment. This means that typical search engines yielding hundreds of results—often with little relevance to the question—cannot provide the level of support needed to answer questions quickly and effectively. All traditional search solutions do is enable agents to spend more time researching and less time answering.

Intelligent resolution management is distinctly different. It combines multiple guidance methodologies to create a supportive environment that takes into account the individual agent’s skill level and guides the agent to the most appropriate answer. For example, intelligent resolution management uses:

• Clarifying questions which turn natural language queries into conversations to eliminate irrelevant answers. As each question is answered, the results list is refined automatically until the most likely answer is identified;
• Diagnostic scripts that change dynamically depending on the customer’s
  response, and walk the agent step-by-step through a best-practice process for interpreting the inquiry and reaching the right conclusion;
• Dynamic learning that considers successful resolution from past usage to rank solutions so that agents immediately know what solution has worked best for a particular inquiry; and
• Expert modeling which leverages specialists’ know-how to present answers in a predetermined order of relevance.
  Expert modeling takes the guesswork out of knowing which solution delivers the most appropriate response.
  

For example, intelligent resolution management can refine the possible answers to the broad question: “How can you help me save for retirement?” Using a dynamic script that asks such questions as, “What age do you want to retire? Is tax deferral important? Do you need guaranteed income?”, intelligent resolution management filters the results to recommend the best choice for the customer’s specific requirements.

Answers are of even greater value when results match advice to the individual. When an existing credit card customer inquires about a car loan, knowledge of the customer and products owned can guide the process. The solution not only details the requested car loan information, but also recommends an equity line of credit offering debt consolidation, a lower rate and tax deductions. This advice delivers a better deal to the customer while the company benefits from higher
revenue and retention.

The ability of intelligent resolution management to infuse best practices into call
center processes has resulted in dramatic improvements in productivity and customer satisfaction. Call centers have increased first-call closures rates by an average of 25%, back-office escalations have dropped as much as 25% and companies have reduced agent training costs an average of 35%. At the same time, these companies have achieved double-digit increases in customer satisfaction.

When call centers make service intelligence the centerpiece of their operation, customers develop trust in the company’s ability to provide them with quick, smart and appropriate service. The result is a strategic advantage that helps companies build deeper and more profitable customer relationships as well as capture market share from less “intelligent” competitors.

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CEO Profile: With more than 30 years of experience in management of enterprise software companies, Michael Fields has spearheaded successful sales organizations at a number of large corporations, including Oracle U.S.A, where he served as president, and Applied Data Research and Burroughs Corporation. In addition, he was a founder, chairman of the board of directors and chief executive officer of OpenVision Technologies, Inc., which was acquired by Veritas in 1997. Currently, Fields serves on the board of directors of Imation Corporation and ViaNovus. He also served on the advisory board of the Ford Motor Company Customer Service Division from 1999 through 2001.