Winning Strategies for Web Self-Service

Use the information you receive from analytics and surveys to continuously tune and modify your self-service processes to your customers' advantage.

The Bottom Line

Web self-service adoption depends heavily on delivering the right customer experience for every interaction. If customers have successful experiences through the Web self-service channel, they are more likely to continue using it. If customers cannot quickly and easily complete a transaction that adequately meets their needs, they will either escalate to assisted service channels, or worse, they will seek out alternative means to meet that need, perhaps through a competitor. Provide your customers with an exceptional self-service experience and they will embrace that channel.

A Customer-Service Solution Suite: InQuira 8

The InQuira 8 suite of business applications improves companies' Web self-service and assisted-service resolution processes. With applications for knowledge management, Web self-service, agent-assisted service, email deflection and customer experience management and analysis, InQuira 8 delivers a complete solution for resolving customer-support issues online and in the contact center—applications that can infer the user's needs and intentions and provide the right information, tools, recommendations and assistance in an efficient, orchestrated interaction that will resolve more issues and deliver greater satisfaction and higher ROI.

Knowledge management. Many customer-support issues require research to resolve, either by the agent in the contact center, or by the customer in the self-service channel. A core function of support organizations is to capture enterprise knowledge to create content designed to resolve customer issues. InQuira 8 provides full knowledge management capabilities, including:

• Capturing content and content requests from within the resolution process;
• Innovative authoring process that removes the burden of unnecessary tagging and increases content reuse;
• Full version control, with the ability to revert back to a previous version, compare versions or view versions side-by-side;
• Robust publishing workflow to ensure content is effectively managed through user-defined stages of development and publication;
• Task management ensures that each task is being completed by someone with the right role and skill;
• Configurable email notifications for all tasks in the system directing attention to complete work;
• Multi-lingual content and translation workflow to update and distribute content in multiple languages;
• Embedded natural language search (InQuira Intelligent Search) for more effective and useful retrieval of information from within the knowledgebase and forum content;
• Discussion forums for community-based support;
• Embedded reputation models to support performance evaluation for knowledge engineers;
• Tokenization to secure content and sections of content for specific user audiences; and
• Configurable subscriptions to categories of content and specific content items, including newsletters and content from specific authors.

Web self-service. Customers and companies increasingly demand more sophisticated and effective Web self-service capabilities to resolve customer support issues. InQuira 8 delivers a rich and effective Web self-service experience. Key capabilities include:

• Unique ability to determine user intent from search and navigation behavior, and use that insight to manage the customer experience intent-by-intent (in other words, InQuira 8 empowers companies to deliver a personalized resolution experience based on an understanding of what the customer is trying to accomplish);
• Packaged horizontal and vertical Web applications to accelerate implementation;
• Industry-specific Intent Libraries to map the resolution experience to pre-defined customer needs;
• Intelligent search and retrieval capabilities based on patented natural language processing technology;
• Industry dictionaries to improve search effectiveness; and
• Diagnostic process wizards to troubleshoot and resolve customer problems.

Agent-assisted service. Contact center managers are under constant pressure to deliver effective, loyalty-inducing customer service at reasonable cost. InQuira 8 for agent-assisted service includes the following productivity-enhancing capabilities:

• Embedded intelligent search, retrieval and navigation from within the agent cockpit;
• Integration into leading CRM packages, including Siebel and Clarify;
• Ability to associate retrieved content to case resolution;
• Web self-service session history captured on service requests escalated to agents via email; and
• Integrated links to trigger knowledge creation workflows from specific cases.

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InQuira, Inc. (www.inquira.com) provides Global 2000 companies with integrated software applications for knowledge management, and intelligent search and retrieval; for both web self-service and agent-assisted support.

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