Four Tips for Great E-Service

E-service is great—when it works. Unfortunately, that is not always the case. JupiterResearch reports that bad e-service is driving more costly phone contacts, predicting that incremental off-line contacts due to failures in online service will grow annually by 18% through 2010.

The 2007 KANA-IBM "mystery shopper" survey of more than 70 financial institutions found that 95% of websites could not answer a simple question; 67% did not provide satisfactory email answers; only 6% offered escalation to email or telephone channels and 17% failed to respond to an email inquiry at all!

So how can e-service work better for your customers and your company? These four tips, based on KANA’s many years of experience implementing multi-channel service solutions, will help you start delivering the levels of e-service quality and convenience your customers demand.

1. Start at the heart of e-service—knowledge management.
Using knowledge management to model the issue resolution techniques of your most experienced agents is a key enabler of customer satisfaction and e-service efficiency. Begin by ensuring the consistency of answers with a unified solutions knowledgebase that can be shared by agents and customers across all channels. Customers learn to trust the e-service experience when they are sure the answer is the same on your website, in an email or on the phone.

Combine consistent content with multiple search and retrieval methodologies that can mimic a one-on-one interaction with a highly knowledgeable agent. For example, augment search with step-by-step diagnostics and dynamically generated FAQs that help users efficiently express the intent of their questions and guide them to the most relevant answers.

Don’t stop with just the answer. Increase the value of e-service—and reap higher loyalty and sales—with personalized advice. For example, when a credit card customer inquires about a car loan, guide the process of finding the most appropriate answer. Then, use knowledge of the customer and products owned to suggest an equity line of credit that provides debt consolidation and a lower rate. This advice-driven response delivers a better deal for the customer and an effective up-sell for your company.

2. Treat email as the mainstream channel it has become.
When it comes to email, what really counts is the speed of response. According to the SSPA, customers expected an email response within 24-48 hours in the 1990s. Now, surveys indicate a two-hour response window is best, with younger users growing impatient after one hour.

To ensure fast answers, you must give email service as much attention as you do your phone service. Set expectations for response and shorten reply time using automation tools such as:

• Auto-acknowledgements that immediately establish the timeframe for response;
• Intelligent queuing, business rules and language detection to route an inquiry to the most qualified agent;
• Message analysis and categorization that analyzes an inquiry before it reaches the agent’s desktop and recommends the best answer; and
• Back-end system integration that automatically includes relevant data, such as billing or account information, in replies.

3. Deliver a seamless escalation experience.
"I can talk to a person when I want to" is still the number-one factor in creating a positive self-service experience, according to Harris Interactive. Customers must always be able to reach you with simple, easily discovered paths to live communication built into your self-service strategy.

Ensure that no matter which escalation channel the customer chooses, the experience is seamless. The key is to preserve the context of the customer’s self-service session across channels. With the session history maintained, agents know what has been tried and do not ask the customer to repeat failed solutions. The session history can also be used to analyze the incoming inquiry for efficient routing and auto-responses suggested to the agent.

4. "Right channel" your customers.
With e-service, you can selectively match channels and service levels to customer profitability. For example, you may choose to offer email as the primary escalation channel for lower-value customers, while reserving more costly live chat for long-term or high-value customers.

Proactive chat invitations can drive more sales and forestall online abandonment. Business rules can automate the process of extending chat invitations at opportune moments, such as when a customer’s shopping cart reaches a certain threshold, or the customer has spent an unusual amount of time completing an online account application.

Let customers tell you how and when they want to hear from you. Offer subscriptions to email or SMS alerts for topics of interest, such as unusual account activity, schedule changes or new product availability. These proactive messages convey your understanding of your customers’ needs, while presenting a great opportunity to deliver relevant offers within the context of asked-for operational messages.

Using these tips, you can significantly enhance the quality and efficiency of your e-service. Our customers have improved agent productivity by more than 35% and cut email response time by 50%. Customer satisfaction has grown 12%, while call deflection to self-service has increased by 25%. As these results illustrate, thoughtfully implemented e-service can lead to significant improvements in customer satisfaction, while reducing pressure on other service resources to deliver the level of service customers want.