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Introduction
Atalvo Systems develops and markets software that enables organizations to add
online customer service and support (CSS) to their business. This paper builds
on the background presented in Considerations
for Your Web-based Customer Support Solution by detailing the
considerations and differentiating the alternative choices. One of the choices
for a software platform is IOS/Support, an online, CSS automation tool. Using
IOS/Support organizations provide a balance of self-help and interactive CSS
that may include inquiries and resolution, problem reporting and tracking, and
service request processing. Customers have their choice of communication
channel: email, Web forms, or telephone. Central to the application is a CSR
console where agents receive incoming communications and dispatch responses and
outbound marketing.
The Online CSS Problem
The growth of the Internet has caused the online segment of the economy to
expand in size and definition. A large number of businesses have put their
product information, brochures and catalog content online. A growing number of
these businesses have established online order processing for their customer's
convenience and to add speed and accuracy to the shopping experience. Top
reasons for deploying e-business applications include improving customer
satisfaction and reducing operational costs. e-business initiatives that were
formerly a competitive advantage are now a necessity.
Because the Internet has greatly expanded participation in e-business, the need
to provide online CSS has likewise grown. For instance, if one can purchase
goods and primary services online it is reasonable to assume that customer
support functions would also be available online. Before e-business attained
strategic significance within the enterprise, the task of deploying Internet
infrastructure and content was handled at the project level within a marketing
or IT department. This led to poor coordination with the existing customer
service organization. A Web designer might put a mailbox on the site, but there
was no high level plan for handling the volume of contacts generated. Depending
on email for receiving and logging customer contact might work for a small
company with only a few employees. However, most businesses now require an
infrastructure that combines traditional telephone based methods with Web-based
forms and email.
At the same time, organizations were hoping to use the Internet to make
information more accessible and useful. It was known that most of the customer
contacts that were received concerned the same routine topics. Having the staff
directly handle these types of contacts was not efficient or cost effective.
For advertising purposes, and to aid in the selling process, brochures and a
list of frequently asked questions (FAQ) could be posted to the Web site. To
move beyond static content, businesses search for ways to gather the knowledge
about the product and service and then make it dynamically available across the
Web to the customer. In this way access to key information is improved.
Internet connectivity combined with open data sharing now allows a customer to
track the progress of orders, shipments and service requests. This suggests
that as organizations move their operations online, customers have a open view
of the internal workings of the organization. The result is precise
accountability and a strong motivation for organizations to select and operate
only efficient internal processes. While this pressure to organize business
processes might be an annoyance to some, it could be exactly what is needed to
stay competitive in the online world.
Customer service is an important part of customer satisfaction. Since
competition on the Web is only a few clicks away, the standard for CSS should
be higher for the Web than it is in the offline world. However, just the
opposite is true for a lot of businesses. An explanation for this is that
implementation of e-business applications creates new requirements for staff
skills and experience and increases the complexity of their cross-functional
responsibility. As a result, fundamental standards that are typically applied
in the offline world are not consistently applied to online business. An
example is the lengthy time that some organizations use to respond to email
inquiries. The influence of the Internet on both the customer relationship and
internal processes motivates a realignment of the customer service and support
function. In gaining the benefits of conducting business online, quality of
service should not be traded away. By retaining proven standards and
selectively merging the capabilities of the new media we should expect to see
an improvement.
Finding A Solution
Let's say that after surviving the technology sector's
down turn, your organization is now set to implement an e-business strategy to
improve profitability and secure growth for the next decade. Your organization
has already deployed a Web site and you want to improve the customer support
facilities found on your site. You may also want to transition your call center
staff from a pure computer-telephony integrated (CTI) environment to also
handle online correspondence and support. How would you proceed to evaluate the
alternative CSS choices and implement a plan?
The approach to providing online CSS depends on the goods and primary services
marketed, the size of the business and the business model. For any specific
situation there may be several approaches and solutions, but there is no single
approach or solution that works for every circumstance. The range of Customer
Service and Support solutions include full CRM suites, helpdesks, call centers,
email applications, and interactive chat applications. Some vendor solutions
are suites targeted at large enterprises and may be overly complex and
expensive for smaller operations. The costs of these applications can range
from hundred thousands to millions of U.S. dollars to purchase and install.
Other solutions may support some of the online CSS business processes but lack
the complete support required for this application.
The full CRM suite genre, typified by Siebel brand
products, is targeted at the large enterprise business-to-business market. Such
products are strong in the areas of sales force automation (SFA), and marketing
automation, but are not targeted specifically at online CSS contacts generated
by conducting business online. The call center application genre traditionally
relies on an investment in CTI and phone support staff that must scale with the
volume of calls. Recently these solutions have broadened to handle online
contacts, but the focus of these contact management applications is on
routing rules (to agents) and response mechanisms. Some of the more progressive
developers are busy adding interactive chat, voice-over-Internet-Protocol
(VoIP) and live video to the customer-facing interface. However there is less
emphasis placed on minimizing the volume of contacts through status reporting
or other self-help mechanisms, and little or no support for back-end processes
for resolving customer service actions. Finally, there are applications that
come out of the helpdesk genre, which focus on problem tracking and resolution,
and perhaps offer directed knowledge base searches geared towards self-help.
While this is useful for handling the large percentage of frequently asked
questions, these stand-alone functions assume that the customer is a patient,
analytical thinker. These helpdesk functions need to be integrated into the
larger online environment that supports escalation to a customer service
representative (CSR). And finally, there is the issue of data connectivity.
While each of these solutions may contribute in specific areas of CSS,
connections into customer profiles tend to be weak or non-existent except in
the high-end, unified and expensive suites. Successful deployment of your
e-business initiative will combine solid up-front customer service and follow
through with tight back-end data integration.
What if your organization is one of the large number of small to medium size
businesses that want to deploy a practical, full range, online CSS solution?
Products from these other categories do not adequately serve the needs of this
market. Either they fail to provide full coverage focused on the needs of the
customer or they are expensive suites more suitable for
enterprise-to-enterprise selling. One leading alternative for deploying a
practical, full range, online CSS solution is IOS/Support from Atalvo Systems.
This Web-based application is designed to provide the CSS functions that
complement the activities of the small to mid-sized organization.
IOS/Support satisfies the needs of many
businesses ranging in size from a few dozen employees to several thousand
employees, and from brick-and-mortar retail outlets to service providers to
dot-com business models.
IOS/Support combines customer-facing support, with self-help knowledge base,
back-end process management and e-commerce data connectivity. These features
and functions are most in demand by many small to medium size organizations.
One example business is a VAR that has a small business office, operates an
e-commerce Web site, and supplies customer service and support for its
products. Another example is a call center that contracts with other
organizations to supply telephone support but also responds to email and other
online inquiries. Finally there is the example of a mid-sized international
manufacturer that internally manages a global arrangement of customer support
workgroups. Each of these businesses can use IOS/Support to build online CSS
leading to greater customer satisfaction.
Deployment Alternatives
Successful deployment of a CSS solution in an online environment starts with a
commitment to providing the highest quality of customer service. Although there
might be an example of business that proceeds for a time without the benefit of
prompt and accurate customer service, this would simply be an example of how a
competitive advantage is being forfeited away. Much more typical is a goods and
service package that includes and encompasses customer service and support.
This is key to customer loyalty and growing sales. The question is not whether
to deploy a CSS solution but how to effectively deploy a solution into the
online environment.
Commerce activity may occur offline in a traditional brick-and-mortar manner or
be Web-based (a class of e-commerce). Web-based e-commerce is hosted on a
server that is either owned by the merchant organization, operated by an
Internet Service Provider (ISP) or outsourced to a contractor. Similarly the
Web-based CSS function may be internally managed or hosted by an outsourcing
organization.
Merchant organizations make business decisions regarding whether to own and
operate their own servers and Internet connections or whether to outsource the
hosting to an ISP or ASP (Application Service Provider). They might also decide
to outsource the entire design and management of both the e-commerce site and
the CSS service and instead concentrate on their core competencies. The flip
side of this is that a service organization may, as its primary business,
contract to provide e-commerce or CSS services to merchant organizations.
To best support the range of business models, IOS/Support is available either
as packaged software or as an Application Service Provider (ASP) hosted
application. The packaged software license allows locating IOS/Support onto a
local server or onto an ISP host.
In addition, both the e-commerce and CSS function has a customer-facing
interface visible to the Website visitor and an agent-facing interface where
customer activity is processed. The customer-facing interface may be hosted on
a different server than the one used for the back-end processing. This division
may provide security or performance benefits.
Needs Analysis
The second step in deploying a CSS solution is performing a needs analysis. At
the top level your organization's business model and e-business strategies form
the basis of an analysis that addresses, scale, scope and cost. IOS/Support
supports business models ranging from complete outsourcing of all operations,
to complete ownership and control of the infrastructure and staffing. A second
level of analysis covers levels of service required, style, performance
characteristics and security. A third level would tackle individual features
and functions.
Availability and Accessibility
The great promise of the Internet is that information is available anywhere,
anytime, and this sets a level of expectation from your customers. For many
Customer Service and Support functions this can be achieved using automated
information access. However, for services requiring real-time interaction with
support staff, this ideal may have to be tempered by the reality of work
shifts, language barriers and other investment considerations. One method is to
categorize and clearly identify the support features according to temporal and
geographic availability. For instance some highly interactive feature like
phone support may only be available in English and only from 8AM to 5PM EST.
Both email and Web forms can help greatly lower the cost of support and
increase the market coverage, at the sacrifice of real-time interactivity.
Responsiveness
It is more important to meet customer expectations for responsiveness than to
achieve some arbitrary response time. An irrelevant answer, even returned
instantly, is still non-responsive. Rather than pick an arbitrary standard for
responsiveness, the best approach is to link results to customer expectations
and make investment decisions accordingly. For example, on the phone a person
may not want to wait even a minute to speak with an agent or technical support,
but this same person may be satisfied with an online response that is returned
in an hour or more. By soliciting customer expectations on the Web input form,
the CSR can gauge and schedule the proper response time.
Personalization
Another great promise of the Internet is that it rewrites the economics of
scale. In the Internet world, mass communication (TV, radio, print) is replaced
by one-to-one marketing, and mass production is replaced by mass customization.
The purpose behind personalization is relationship building. The three key
parts of personalization are learning about and remembering the customer,
anticipating the customer's needs, and tailoring the commerce relationship
accordingly. Both CTI and CRM style products provide this capability by
accumulating personal data and observations, applying logical rules and then
customizing a response. Data collection and observations made about an
individual require deductive rules. The other common (but more controversial)
approach is to associate an individual with a group (a process either called
marketing or stereotyping) and apply inductive rules. The most trivial
personalization of response would be to repeat a customer's sign-in name. A
more powerful approach anticipates needs and restructures the relationship
accordingly, in real-time. When planning a personalization style, it is
important not to misuse information that is collected or synthesized.
Volume & Scalability
Volume is a measurement of demand capacity, while scalability is the degree of
flexibility in achieving that capacity. Volume is the most important but most
difficult factor to plan for. In the dry humor spirit of a well known curse
("May you live in interesting times"), may you have a wildly successful Web
site. If you happen to be the largest online toy store during the Christmas
holidays, too much success, leading to a system breakdown, could land you on
the evening news as well as annoy a customer or two. All planning methods
require the development of a demand model. A successful business might model a
constant growth in demand over a five year period, while another, like the toy
store, might expect great seasonal variation with dramatic peaks following
promotional campaigns. Both businesses are planning for change, but the first
business designs for trends, while the second plans for peaks. IOS/Support
conforms to the tiered hierarchy of networked resources and therefore inherits
all the scalability benefits of this architecture. Small business operations
can collapse the architecture down to a single server handling the page server,
the business logic and the database. Enterprise level applications can expand
the server support on each level of the architecture.
Level of Integration
While it is possible to operate CSS as a stand alone partition of the online
solution, the functionality will be limited. The greatest utility comes from
data sharing between the service function and online activity. For instance a
warranty function in the CS partition becomes viable only when sales data and
the customer profile is known to the service staff.
Security & Privacy
If customer relationships are built on trust, then privacy policy and security
measures form the basis of this trust. Legal considerations and public opinion
are converging on a privacy policy that allows customers to retain control of
their personal information. In this model, personal information, regardless of
whether it is in the public domain, belongs to the individual and organizations
should not sell this information or use it out of context unless given specific
permission to do so. Security measures are the means taken to insure a privacy
policy can be implemented and enforced. In a Web-based application security
measures should cover forms, communication channels, database integrity and
access rights.
Back-end Processes
Some organizations might expect to provide support for their business
operations using front-line CSR's, but larger organizations selling complex
products may require assistance from technical, shipping and accounting
personnel to investigate and resolve lengthy, complex problems. This division
of tasks optimizes the skill set of the staff and presents options for
balancing the processing with front-line support. Unlike traditional
call-center applications, IOS/Support offers support for back-end business
processes relevant to the CSS function. This includes tracking features for
technical investigation of complex issues and also RMA (Return Materials
Authorization) that involve interaction with the e-commerce data.
Organizational Considerations
As discussed previously, online CSS should not be implemented as a stand alone
project but instead be coordinated with staffing, training and other
organization resources. IOS/Support recognizes several important job functions
relating to CSS. Most important of these is the Customer Service
Representative. There may be more than one and perhaps many CSRs. A CSR Manager
monitors the CSR staff and may get involved in balancing or otherwise managing
the workload. A support staff may assist the CSR by handling technical
investigations, or service action requests. If a product is being marketed,
product management and sales management might also monitor and report on the
CSS activity. IOS/Support provides support for all of these functions. The CSR
desk has been designed specially to handle the fast paced interactive
requirements of this front-line position. A CSR Managers console helps to
organize the crew into workgroups and according to job function, and an
Administration console provides a means to configure and maintain the
application.
Understanding ROI Drivers Deployment of a CSS solution
requires an investment of time and resources. The return on the investment
will, of course, depend on the costs and payback. But while the costs are
simple to quantify, the return involves such intangibles as goodwill. You will
be able to quantify this too, but only after the fact. The cost of the CSS
solution will include the infrastructure, which is the hardware and software,
along with the staffing and training costs.
Customer service contributes a return in four ways. An immediate quantifiable
return is that customer service and support enables the sale of the primary
goods or service. For instance, what value is a load of concrete unless it is
delivered? Secondly there may be inherent value associated with the customer
support service itself. An example of this is the lucrative service contracts
that are sold along side enterprise level computing systems. The third way it
contributes a return is in providing customer contact opportunities which
result in cross-selling and up selling. The fourth way customer service
contributes a return is in the building and nurturing of the customer
relationship. The concept here is that loyal customers are the key to the
future growth of your business and quality service is the key to
fulfillment.
Great Customer Service Rules
The successful companies are those that can blend traditional and online CSS
functions while carefully maintaining customer data. Within the customer
service function there are fundamental rules that never change, but there can
also be improvements on old methods. What is always true is that great CSS
consists of service that is accessible, prompt, accurate, and relevant. Great
online CSS retains and improves on these fundamentals, but also adds a degree
of control missing from traditional methods. Using online CSS the customer can
start, stop, limit or bound, and otherwise manage personalized customer service
as desired.
IOS/Support supports this philosophy of adding improvements to traditional CSS
fundamentals. Using IOS/Support your organization's service offering integrates
with whatever e-commerce offerings you may have and is accessible through Web
forms and email as well as through traditional phone support. As with any
online application the customer-facing interface of the CSS package is
available everyday, twenty-four hours a day (24x7x365). The IOS/Support CSR
consoles and agent-facing interfaces are Web-based and therefore support a
service organization distributed globally across time zones. However, depending
on the type of support required and the Customer Service staffing arrangements,
not all of your organizations service functions may be handled personally, in
real-time.
The growth of the Internet is synonymous with the increased use of both the
HTTP (Web) and SMTP (email) protocol. In most cases email has replaced faxing
as the preferred means of electronic messaging. While most CSS operations are
still performed in person or over the phone, Web forms and email channels are
growing in importance and volume is building quickly. The growth of Web-based
e-commerce makes this especially true. While procuring or shopping online, it
is easy and natural to also choose the Internet as the communication medium for
accessing customer service resources. Email has traditionally been used as an
economical means of messaging in a store-and-forward metaphor. Supporting
customer service in a real-time, e-commerce environment is a relatively new
application for an old technology. Unfortunately some site designers give no
more consideration to this communication channel than setting up and publishing
an email box. A description of the resulting disconnect has been thoroughly
captured by press pundits and need not be repeated here. Suffice to say that
prompt responses are as important in online channels are as they are in a
traditional call center. IOS/Support encourages rapid response by providing a
scalable, rules-based routing and queuing architecture and auto-acknowledge
functions. Management features monitor elapsed time, responsiveness and other
performance parameters.
In keeping with the need for prompt, relevant responses, the CSR console has
been designed to facilitate quick access to the resources and tools needed to
resolve customer contacts. The CSR has access to customer accounts, customer
profiles and organization information as well as a knowledge base that tracks
and presents solutions. This real-time connectivity to tools and resources
allows IOS/Support to either complement a traditional call center environment
or act as the primary communication channel.
One of the goals of the customer service function is to fulfill the customer's
expectations for quality. In the CSS context, the concept of quality is tied to
the accuracy of information and processing. Therefore, to be accurate is to be
error free. Customers can reasonably expect accurate processing and response to
their inquires. Theoretically, errors may occur anywhere in the CS loop, in the
input phase, the processing phase or the output phase. The root cause of an
error includes channel noise, the unintentional translation or corruption of a
message or data. The root cause may be due to missing information or incorrect
data. The error may also be caused by the misapplication of procedures or
methods.
A CSS tool like IOS/Support helps minimize errors by removing channel noise,
providing access to information, and automating complex or repetitive
processes. Minimization of intervention is a key method for reducing channel
noise and one example of this is allowing the customer to use a Web form or
email to describe their inquiry or service request. A second example is to
present knowledge or status information directly to the customer instead of
through the CSR acting as an intermediary. IOS/Support also helps minimize
errors by providing access to accurate information within the online
environment. This connectivity includes access to the customer profile, company
resource organization and CSS process status. Making this data available at key
points during the processing and response phase encourages accuracy.
The Atalvo Systems Approach
While developing and deploying a CSS solution it is most important to align the
CSS function with the overall value proposition of your organization's
e-business strategy. IOS/Support presents a pragmatic, value driven approach
that updates the traditional CS framework to include knowledge management, data
sharing and automation of workflow processes. This approach has four goals: 1)
fulfill customer expectations for information access, accuracy and promptness;
2) Provide a familiar environment for the CSR; 3) automation of business
processes to maximize accuracy and efficiency; 4) integrate with any e-commerce
operation to provide fast, accurate processing of service action requests. As a
result of this value driven approach, IOS/Support contains features derived
from customer expectations and goals.
It is recognized that a complete online business solution includes many diverse
components: the e-commerce site to display catalogs and take orders, the ERP
system to maintain account data and track inventory, and a CSS system to
provide service information and process service action requests. Since a
full-featured enterprise-level e-business solution is not for everyone,
IOS/Support provides CSS components that can be integrated with the e-commerce
platforms and ERP environments. In other words, IOS/Support focuses on the CSS
function and presents the best value while you build customer satisfaction.
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