Automated Service Agents, CRM & the New Customer Service Challenge
1 May, 2005
By: Steve KleinIn recent years, the Internet has radically transformed the way consumers and businesses interact. Commerce now moves at a pace heretofore unimaginable: Customers shop online or by telephone at all hours of the day and night, and companies fulfill orders as quickly as they are placed. Many types of products and services can be delivered electronically in an instant, and physical goods often reach a customer within hours of being ordered.
As a natural consequence, customers now expect and demand much more responsive customer service. To retain its customers, a company must be able and willing to answer questions and resolve issues with the same prompt attention it gives to closing sales. Providing high-availability, high-quality customer service is neither easy nor inexpensive. Many companies find customer satisfaction decreasing, even as they pour ever-increasing resources into their customer service operations. This trend needs to be reversed – but how?
Why Basic CRM Isn’t Enough
Core CRM features—multi-channel service, centralized knowledge management, customer tracking—can help to improve efficiency, but they do very little to improve the customer experience. Too often, a customer avoids time in a phone queue only to spend even more time waiting for a response by email. If the response doesn’t solve his problem, he will most likely pick up the phone and make the call that both he and the company had originally hoped to avoid. When he calls, chances are good that he’ll end up talking to an inexperienced CSR who can do little more than read him an answer from the knowledge base (assuming, of course, that the CSR can find the appropriate answer in the knowledge base). Needless to say, this scenario bears little resemblance to the ideal customer service experience. Though the customer is offered a number of simple ways to request help, he faces lengthy service delays and cannot be confident that his request will be answered to his satisfaction.
Ultimately, basic CRM features don’t do enough to reduce costs. While serving customers over alternative channels—such as email or live online chat—costs a company considerably less on a per-session basis than serving them by phone, each interaction still requires a CSR’s involvement. Scaling the company’s service capacity therefore requires a proportional increase in headcount. And while efficient knowledge management can reduce the cost of hiring and training CSRs, increasing headcount is nonetheless expensive.
The Next Step: Self-Service
Momentarily setting aside concerns about service quality, the most obvious way to achieve more substantial cost reductions is to reduce the number of customer inquiries requiring CSR attention. Consequently, most CRM solutions now include some form of self-service functionality, letting customers attempt to resolve issues without a CSR’s assistance. Self-service tools draw upon the CRM solution’s existing knowledge base, providing customers with a Web-based interface for accessing information.
While there are many subtle interface variations, virtually every customer self-service tool on the market employs one or both of the Web’s standard methods for finding information: browsing and searching. In a typical browse-based interface—FAQs, for example—the customer clicks his way through a hierarchy of common questions or topics, “drilling down” until he finds one that matches his situation. In a search-based interface, the customer types a set of keywords (or, less frequently, a naturally phrased question or statement) into a search box, clicks a button, and receives a list of potentially matching topics sorted by estimated relevance. As with the browse-based interface, he then scans the list for a topic that suits his needs and clicks the associated link.
Why Most Self-Service Tools Don’t Work
The problem with browse- and search-based self-service tools is that they force customers into unnatural modes of interaction, making it difficult for them to find the information they need. Unable to make a simple request, a customer must feel his way through a complex maze of topics, or guess at the proper search terms to express his problem—either way, an effort-intensive process with a high likelihood of failure. Even in the unlikely case that the customer navigates directly to the right category or hits upon the perfect set of search terms, he must still pick the answer he needs from a list potentially numbering in the hundreds—another daunting task, for the right answer may not be in the list at all, or may be depicted in a form that he fails to recognize.
In a customer service scenario, these are fatal shortcomings. A customer with a pressing question or complaint understandably has no patience for a difficult discovery process, and will quickly resort to an attended service option. Typical online self-service tools fare well in terms of availability, but fail miserably in all other respects.
The Missing Piece
Companies are missing a crucial piece of the puzzle as they strive to meet the customer service challenge. The key to managing costs is to increase the percentage of customer inquiries that can be resolved without the involvement of a human CSR. The current crop of self-service tools is not up to the task.
To succeed, self-service must ultimately supersede attended service as the customer’s channel of choice. Self-service has an inherent advantage over attended service in that it eliminates hold time and response latency, but today’s self-service tools squander this advantage by making it too difficult for customers to get the help they need. Until the usability of self-service crosses a critical threshold, customers will continue to reject it in favor of attended service—and companies will fail to meet the customer service challenge.
What companies need is a new class of self-service technology, one that greatly increases the quality of the interaction between the customer and the self-service tool.
The Automated Service Agent Solution
Automated Service Agents™ represent the next generation of self-service, combining the best traits of attended service with the best traits of traditional self-service tools. An ASA is a virtual CSR who “talks” to customers via a text-based chat interface, typically on a company’s Web site.
Like other self-service tools, ASAs:
• are available to customers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week
• can serve a virtually infinite number of customers at once
Like human CSRs, ASAs
• allow customers to express questions and problems in their own words
• respond immediately and accurately, answering questions, engaging customers in dialog to solve problems interactively, and offering to take actions when appropriate.
• recognize when a customer should be escalated to the next level of support (human), seamlessly passing along the details of the customer inquiry.
Unlike traditional online self-service where companies attempt to discern customers’ intentions by analyzing a click stream or other rudimentary measures, ASA’s capture customers’ actual intentions. The robust reporting and analytical tools enable an ASA to continually “learn”—answering more questions, deflecting more calls, and freeing support professionals to focus on higher-value cases. At a cost of $0.15 to $0.20 per session versus a cost of anywhere from $4.00 to $35.00 for attended support, an ASA solution usually returns a positive ROI in the first three months of deployment.
Using ASAs and CRM Solutions Together
While we’ve focused on the shortcomings of CRM solutions and their self-service tools, it is important to note that ASAs are fundamentally complementary to, rather than competitive with, the basic functionality of most CRM offerings. The core features of CRM solutions—multi-channel service and centralized knowledge management, along with additional features like systems for tracking customers and individual incidents—do yield significant improvements to the efficiency of a company’s attended service efforts. Whereas the efficiency efforts of CRM systems are focused on reducing the cost-per-attended-session, an ASA reduces the actual number of attended sessions by deflecting more inquiries to the self-service channel.
From a deployment standpoint, an ASA is easily assimilated into a company’s existing toolset and workflows. The personnel who oversee and contribute to the company’s main CRM knowledge base will generally perform the same roles in maintaining the ASA’s knowledge base; in fact, some or all of the answers an ASA delivers may come directly from the primary CRM knowledge base.
Sidebar: Automated Service Agent in Action
Comcast deployed an Automated Service Agent, or ASA, to power AskComcast in September 2003. AskComcast is handling hundreds of thousands of customer interactions a month surpassing both live chat and email. “Comcast’s customers are experiencing a higher level of support since launching AskComcast, and we are realizing considerable cost savings,” says Mitch Bowling, VP of Customer Service at Comcast. “AskComcast paid for itself in approximately one month.”
