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“Help Yourself” To Better Customer Relations: Key Success Factors in Customer Self-Service
Kevin Laracey, President and CEO, edocs Inc.
 Convenience, completeness and control are the attributes customers expect when they turn to a business for answers. Increasingly the most effective channel for meeting these expectations is online customer self-service (CSS). It delivers what customers want and businesses need — a classic win-win opportunity.
CSS gives customers direct control over the full range of account-related tasks, removing the immediate need to make a call or contact the company through other channels, which are significantly more expensive and time consuming than online self-service.
Great Service Starts with the Bill
A comprehensive self-service platform becomes the first, best stop for superior customer care when it provides the functionality to quickly and simply address customer’s most common service inquiries. Such a platform combines electronic presentment and payment (EPP) — or e-billing — with account management, order and service management, knowledge management, personalization and application integration technologies to create an integrated, natural and preferred starting point for all customer service issues.
For most industries, e-billing is the cornerstone of truly effective customer self-service, because 50-80% of all customer service transactions — such as balance inquiries, payments or account updates — are related to customer’s accounts. As such, an effective self-service application requires access to the data sources that drive EPP, including existing billing, call center, accounting, web and ERP applications.
In 2004, approximately 40 million U.S. consumers will view and pay their accounts and bills online. That number is expected to increase to over 65 million by 2007 (Source: Gartner). All indications are that consumers manage and pay their bills and accounts online because it’s easy and convenient - and they fully expect a rich and rewarding self-service experience.
For these self-servers, the monthly bill or invoice online becomes the portal to an array of do-it-yourself opportunities, from reviewing and validating charges to tracking order status, finding product and service information, evaluating alternative services and resolving disputes.
The Drivers and Benefits of Online Customer Self -Service
The factors driving businesses to deploy online self-service…
• Decreased calls to the call center
• Lowered print and mail costs
• Reduced payment collection and processing costs
• Streamlined dispute resolution
…are in line with the benefits organizations achieve once the capabilities are available:
• Reduced operational costs and increased profitability
• Reduced customer churn
• Increased customer satisfaction
This alignment yields a very clear and real ROI. Gartner puts the savings tally at just over $26 million a year for the average-size B2C company delivering e-bills and migrating customer service calls to web-based self-service. This opportunity increases tenfold or more for larger wireless telecommunications or credit card companies with tens of millions of customers.
In a B2B relationship, invoices are more complicated, values are higher and disputes occur more than three times as often as they do in a B2C transaction. With e-billing and CSS, the average $55 cost for manual resolution of an invoice dispute can be halved when the dispute is resolved online. Faster resolution to invoice disputes shortens days sales outstanding (DSO), and the faster money comes in the faster it can be invested or used to pay off debts. Gartner estimates a $7.3 million yearly savings for a B2B averaging 75,000 bills per month, 198,000 invoice-related calls a year, and a 13 percent dispute rate. Again, the larger the enterprise, the bigger the cost savings opportunity.
Beyond savings, CSS-enabled businesses can anticipate additional benefits. Customers managing their accounts online are primed for cross-sell and up-sell opportunities enabled by CSS. B2C organizations surveyed expect to generate about 7.5 percent more revenue from e-billing programs and to acquire new customers through e-billing. B2B organizations anticipate a three percent revenue increase (Source: Gartner).
The Must-Have Requirements for a Comprehensive Customer Self-Service Platform
To be a viable and preferred first stop for customer service, a CSS platform must present complete and useful information in context, enable interactive access to the breadth and depth of account details and provide easy-to-understand, customer-focused capabilities rather than merely opening internally-focused systems to customer access. The platform should also extend these same capabilities to assisted service channels like e-mail, chat and the contact center. This enables companies to serve their customers as efficiently and effectively as possible, no matter what channel they choose to use.
To get started, consider the following key factors when evaluating a CSS platform for your organization:
1. Does it integrate the core functions of account, service, information knowledge and interaction management?
2. Will customers and partners be able to access and interact with detailed account data, regardless of where it originates, i.e., from existing billing, call center, accounting, web, ERP, knowledge management and self-service applications/systems?
3. Is the available data and functionality proven to provide resolution to the top customer service interactions?
4. Are there advanced integrated capabilities such as provisioning, enrollment, auditing and reporting, workflows, e-mail notification and personalized presentation?
5. Will the solution scale to support millions of complex accounts and thousands of concurrent users without limiting the extent of data that can be accessed and reviewed?
6. Is there an efficient path for updating the solution as products, services and customers change?
7. Is there support for service consistency across channels?
Additionally, there are underlying technology considerations:
1. Does it use Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition (J2EE), and will it adapt to support specific electronic payment standards as they emerge?
2. What are the storage requirements?
3. What are the potential implications of database licensing?
4. Will performance and memory management be optimized?
5. How will data integrity be protected?
6. Are there appropriate security standards in place both for securing customer account information and protecting network resources?
7. How will authentication and enrollment be managed?
And finally, don’t forget to look at the scope of the product:
1. Will customer service representatives be able to access the same view of the account data as a customer?
2. Are both B2C and B2B e-billing models supported, so that a business can develop a CSS center of excellence for the needs of its customers, partners and suppliers?
3. Does the platform incorporate specific industry best practices?
Keeping these factors in mind will help make your company’s selection of a CSS platform the right move for your company, transforming your web site into the first stop — and preferred channel — for superior customer care.
| Kevin Laracey is President and CEO of edocs, Inc., which delivers comprehensive customer self-service and e-billing solutions to many of the world’s leading companies. Laracey oversees edocs’ strategic direction and has managed its day-to-day operations since founding the company in 1997.
edocs Inc.
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