| Experts Corner |  With the advent of huge spam levels, plus restrictions on email marketing from the EU, what is the effectiveness of permission email to customers and to prospects?
Andy Wood, MD, GI Insight
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Treating Service as a Business
Mark Angel, Founder and Chief Technology Officer, Kanisa Inc.
 Empowering Service Resolution with Business Process Support
Why Isn’t Service Already Automated?
There are more people wearing headsets and answering customer questions than doing any other job in America. Even as technology has sharply reduced the number of people needed to farm, cut payroll checks, and produce cars, the number of customer service agents grows inexorably, seemingly immune to automation.
Why? Because customer service is a hard job. We expect service and support representatives to have diagnostic skills, zeroing in on problems from thousands of possibilities based on brief discussions. We ask them to make judgments about how and when to apply policies, and to handle each customer interaction with courtesy and efficiency.
Lots of Technology But Little Impact
Over time, customer service agents have each been surrounded thousands of dollars of technology to assist them in doing their jobs. But the core of the agent’s work–resolving issues and answering questions–remains virtually unchanged from the first days of the call center. Although huge improvements in telephony and CRM have automated contact routing and incident management, the agent still answers questions the old-fashioned way, relying on personal experience to ask the right questions and hunt for useful content.
As a result, many service and support organizations find that their operational metrics are not where they need to be. Costs are too high. Customer satisfaction isn’t high enough. And the number of customer issues handled by each agent isn’t increasing the way it ought to. Data from the Service and Support Professionals Association (SSPA) shows, in fact, that the cost of handling a single incident is now more than $55, and the average first contact resolution rate is a mere 54%, down almost 15% since 2000.
The Right Focus: Service Resolution Management
Since SSPA research also tells us that 82% or more of the cost of delivering service and support is incurred when actually resolving customer issues, service and support organizations are increasingly turning to initiatives that reduce the cost of service resolution.
Often contact center managers tell us, “Of course, our costs are chiefly in the form of agent compensation. And our agents spend all their time solving customer problems. Isn’t that obvious?” But that’s just the point. That means there is only one opportunity left for technology to impact the cost and quality of customer service: automating this set of resolution tasks. Starting in 2002, we called this new breed of technology Service Resolution Management (SRM), a term that is being increasingly adopted by the rest of the industry.
Yesterday’s Process-Free Approach to Service Resolution
Problem resolution is all about the knowledge that drives a conversation between customer and agent. During this conversation, the agent often taps into enterprise content, applications, or experts.
The traditional approach to making agents more effective is to deploy technology for natural language search or structured knowledge bases. These knowledge management tools share a common characteristic: enterprises are supposed to install them on a server, hand them to their agents, and forget about them.
Unlike effective technology deployments, they’re not tied in with the service delivery process: they’re not customized with business rules specific to the enterprise; they don’t integrate with CRM applications at a business process level; and their reporting is restricted to basic statistics. They’re generic, standalone point technologies.
In short, yesterday’s approach to service resolution relies solely on the agents themselves. Provided with generic knowledge management tools, they must define their own processes for resolving issues and coming up with answers. So it is easy to see that the conversation with the customer is essentially unmanageable–a black hole instead of a business process.
Optimizing Service Resolution with Business Process Support
In contrast with yesterday’s ad hoc approach to resolution, today’s true business applications for SRM implement a defined process for service resolution, and optimize that process for the specifics of each customer issue with easily maintained business rules.
The first requirement for supporting service resolution as a process is having comprehensive resolution functionality. In addition to search and authoring, SRM applications must provide scripting, direct answers, expert location and structured collaboration. Through integration with a CRM system, SRM must provide capabilities for customer understanding, case summarization, and customer response.
The second requirement is that service delivery managers can optimize the handling of specific incident types with business rules. If there is a specific document that answers a specific question (as is often the case if a customer is getting an error message), SRM should present it when the agent first opens the case. If there is a specific process for resolving a class of problems, SRM should play the appropriate script, leading the agent through the interaction. If the customer wants to return an item, the agent should be lead to the RMA application with all customer information pre-populated. If there are no answers, the system should recommend experts to ask.
The third requirement is that the system continuously improves, both by learning automatically and by providing business analytics on customer trends, root causes, and knowledge gaps so organizations can refine their offerings. The leading factor in customer satisfaction with service is product quality, and root cause analytics can help deliver products that avoid problems and simplify service and support.
With comprehensive functionality that optimizes itself for each service experience and continuously improves, SRM increases satisfaction and reduces cost pressures.
Extending the Process to Self-Service
Perhaps even more significantly, SRM empowered with support for the resolution process can dramatically improve the experience of end users who come to the web site for help. Instead of an empty search box followed by no results or far too many, an SRM application leads the visitor through the same sort of resolution process enjoyed by the agent. Based on the specifics of the issue and the customer, web screens will guide users to specific answers, follow-up questions, escalation options, opportunities to drill down, or just highly relevant search results. The web flow can be easily tuned to deliver more and more optimized experiences.
In addition to incident deflection, these experiences add value to the product and create loyalty, driving both the top and bottom line.
Benefits of Process-Driven SRM
Customer service is a hard job, and most of the technology applied to it has done little to make it easier. Some minimal progress has been made with generic knowledge management tools, but real benefits have been on hold, waiting for SRM to be a mature, process-oriented business application like CRM, ERP, and SCM. The process-enabled SRM revolution is just starting, and its demonstrated benefits are substantial:
• Agent efficiency. The largest component of ROI is reduced incident handling time and increased agent productivity. Our experiences show that both high-volume and high-complexity interactions can be shortened by 20% - 40% with a process-enabled SRM application.
• Product improvements. The perfect mechanism for delighting customers is shipping bug-free, perfectly intuitive products. While this nirvana may never be attained, a key benefit of process-enabled SRM is to enable a new level of visibility with analytics that identify the costs and causes of service and support including incident root causes, problematic use cases, third party compatibility issues, and emerging problems.
• Self-service. In addition to making the agent more efficient, process-enabled SRM also empowers the customer with knowledge directly on the support website. The cost of self-service is an order of magnitude lower than assisted service. Self-service is empowering, and helps customers avoid embarrassing or frustrating interactions with agents.
In short, service resolution is the high-leverage choice for improving the efficiency of a contact center, and today’s process-enabled SRM applications are the best choice for making it happen.
| Mark Angel (marka@kanisa.com) is Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Kanisa Inc., a leading provider of business applications that knowledge-empower customer service.
Kanisa Inc.
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