Now is the time for eCare
In an expanding economy, many companies rightfully focus on acquiring valuable new customers. However, now that the economy has seen sustained contraction, those companies are instead trying to hold onto the valuable customer base they have built up and focus on servicing them better, and cheaper.
A huge proportion of customer support is currently spent on contact centres, where a single person-to-person interaction is estimated to cost many organisations up to £25 per call. Increasingly, this ‘traditional’ approach to customer service appears to be failing our expectations.
A BBC Watchdog programme highlighted the increasing dissatisfaction that UK customers have with contact centres among big businesses; almost three quarters of people said that customer service is getting worse. Although the levels of dissatisfaction may actually be inconsistent with the real levels of service, the perception is nonetheless very real.
Why? In an age of personal control and voice driven by online experiences on social networking sites, the frustration of dealing with a contact centre agent where issues need to be explained, often repeatedly, is growing. Put simply, digital has empowered the customer.
Therefore, it’s no surprise that many large corporations are finding that well-delivered digital customer support services – eCare, mCare, kiosks (think ATMs from banks), and other selfcare channels – are able to significantly improve their levels of customer satisfaction.
The benefits of ‘going digital’ are also found to directly impact the organisation’s bottom line. When you compare the estimated cost per contact through eCare services to that of more traditional means, the digital services appear some 25 times cheaper – at less than £1 per contact. Furthermore, such digital customer support services also provide significant opportunities to cross-sell. A leading utilities company recently launched an online energy usage advice calculator and has seen cross-sell sales averaging £100 per user over the past two years.
Given these trends, the number of organisations investing in powerful online tools including troubleshooters, step-by-step demonstrators, intelligent FAQs, account management and billing is fast on the rise. However, many such organisations – most of whom are used to delivering successful eCommerce solutions – are finding the implementation of effective and complete eCare solutions significantly more complex.
Implementing eCare is complex
The challenges of implementing eCare can be divided into three key areas: user experience, system integration and cross-department stakeholder management.
The first challenge is that the online user experience needs to undergo a significant philosophical shift. Most retail and service provider websites have been built with marketing and eCommerce in mind. Pieces of eCare functionality that have been added to an eCommerce site often feel like an awkward bolt-on extra. The result is that new and existing customers alike will perceive the website solely as a place to purchase, not to get support. They subsequently only return to the site when they need to renew their contract, or unfortunately to cancel it. This creates a valley of missed opportunity. Visits to the website occur principally in the lead-up to the sale, and then fall off immediately as the new customer perceives that the website doesn’t offer anything more. This behaviour pattern is then set for the remainder of the relationship with that provider.
The second challenge is providing the right information and business logic to support customers online. Providing relevant information for a diverse range of customer needs will usually require access to information that is held in many different stores around an organisation. This requires appropriately open and flexible infrastructures to allow integration of those different information sources. When legacy systems are involved, this requires an often missing, well-executed systems architecture design.
The third challenge of organisational stakeholder management arises from the legacy of customer service. Most companies have now enabled an accountable and linked-up eCommerce organisational design. However, that has often led to the website being the property of the Marketing or Sales directorate. Customer support is often very silo-ed, with the Customer Service director not being directly accountable for online and retail customer support. This is changing, as organisations realise the power of consistent customer support across channels – but the challenge of implementing selfcare across multiple channels remains significant.
Good eCare user experience starts with ‘Learn’
From a user experience perspective, the key to successful eCare is the re-orientation of the site away from being solely focused on prospects, to being a valuable resource to existing customers.
The re-orientation needs to start at the stage of acquisition. Incorporating eCare tools into the acquisition process kickstarts a new ‘digital relationship’ with the customer. By enabling new customers to learn online, a new model of behaviour can be created (see figure 2). This will set a pattern that will see brand new customers returning to the site again and again to learn and self support.
Cross-channel selfcare
Best practice eCare ensures that customer support is consistent across channels –providing the same solutions to a wide variety of customer facing channels, and to internal channels such as the contact centres and retail environments.
The advantages are three-fold:
1. The customer receives a consistent experience of care. This means that a contact centre agent can refer to the same, assisting the customer to learn to self serve;
2. Content for the different channels can be ‘WORM’ – Written Once Read Many times. Content can be created once and used across many channels.
3. Using the same content can better enable the sharing of customer enquiries across channels. For example, customers dealing with a contact centre expect the service provider to be aware of that contact when dealing with another channel such as a retail store.
Key messages
eCare can bring significant cost savings, and is increasingly a vital component in an organisation’s capability to acquire and retain its customers. We have identified the three key factors in implementing successful eCare:
1. Adopt ‘Learn’ as a principal activity for website users throughout the lifecycle of customer engagement.
2. Apply the ‘Monitor-Anticipate-Connect-Respond’ model to identify key integration points; and
3. Ensure eCare is part of an overall cross-channel selfcare programme that ensures consistent user experience.
Author: Kevin Yuen, Head of Digital Strategy, Detica