| Experts Corner |  CRM investment is wasted if the intelligence it delivers fails to influence despatched communications. How can businesses ensure that money spent on CRM analytics actually begins to benefit the messages that are delivered to customers and prospects?
David Jefferies, Marketing Director, Pitney Bowes
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Self-Service Comes of Age - Part III
Cliff Conneighton, Senior VP, Marketing, Art Technology Group, Inc.
 Self-Service Comes of Age - Part II
Online self-service can be typically categorized as providing customers with either informational (e.g. store FAQ's, return policies) or transactional (e.g. account management, order placement) capabilities. But this is a reactive response to a customer initiated interaction. An answer lies in proactive service; providing information or services to your customers before they ask for it. Using your customer data in such a way as to be able to target them based on changing business conditions or events is at the heart of making the customer experience even more fulfilling than the experience they received through in-store and catalog sales, for example.
Proactive Service - Self-Service, but the other way round
There is little doubt that, so long as customer service quality is maintained, Web-based customer self-service is a vastly more cost effective way of managing customer interactions and inquiries than are channels that require any kind of human intervention, such as a call center. However, Web-based self-service, a call center inquiry or an inbound e-mail all share a common characteristic: the customer initiates the interaction. Proactive Service is the art of communicating, informing, alerting and interacting with a customer who will likely be affected by a change in business conditions, before the customer initiates the service interaction. The premise is that it is better to solve a customer's issue before it becomes a problem.
Self-service is 'pull.' Proactive Service is 'push.'
Across every industry there are examples of the business being aware of trigger events or changing circumstances that will affect a customer, a segment of customers, or some other arbitrary customer grouping (by age, by postal code, etc). The business knows about the potential impact on the customer before the customer does.
Proactive Service aims to get in front of customers with targeted and relevant information to remove the need for them to initiate an interaction through a high cost channel. For example:
• Subscription renewal - There are many products or services that are purchased or maintained on a renewal basis, hence the business needs to keep an ongoing relationship with the customers to retain their loyalty. As a contract, subscription, or license approaches its expiration date, a proactive service campaign may be kicked off that informs the customer of the impending contract expiration, while providing supplementary guidance on how the renewal process works and an offer to entice the renewal. In doing so, the business can increase the number of timely renewals while reducing the number of customers who fall off contract. As well as triggered by business events, proactive service may be triggered and communicated on a more planned or scheduled basis. For example:
• Scheduled service outage - A telecommunications provider is planning major maintenance work on a local cable and the work will create a service outage for four hours. The telecommunications company, through its customer records, knows which customers will be affected by the outage. Rather than risking upsetting their customers, they initiate a scheduled service campaign to the relevant customers informing them of the work ahead of time. Thus, the telecommunications company will correctly keep their customer informed, as well as reduce the number of irate customers who call the customer service center from their mobile phones. Moreover, Proactive Service can also enhance the communication to customers with useful information while they are within the scope of a business process. For example:
• Flight booking - A flight booking is not just the transactional element of booking a seat and making payment. It is, from a customer's perspective, a longer drawn-out business process that is not successfully completed until he and his luggage arrives at his required destination. Proactive Service would most certainly include the notification and confirmation of flight bookings to a customer, perhaps through their personalized portal or via e-mail, but it may further provide information to the customer while he is traveling. Proactive Service campaigns may be triggered by, and interact with, airport systems for gate allocations or flight delays, or may give airport traffic reports or security levels. In this instance, this information may be sent to a customer's mobile device so the customer is kept fully informed while traveling.
Although Proactive Service involves outbound communication or notifications of some description to a customer, and can involve a multi-step campaign of interactions to ensure the customer receives all the service he needs, proactive service is very different from marketing campaigns. Unlike marketing campaigns, Proactive Service has a genuine purpose of providing customers with information based upon a deep understanding of the customer's current context or state within a business process. Proactive Service emphasizes reducing interaction costs by keeping customers informed through cost-effective, but convenient, channels.
Marketing campaigns emphasize generating revenue by targeting products and promotions at prospects or existing customers. In some respects, for Proactive Service, the customer has given implicit permission to receive information as long as it is within the context of the business process. Once the business process is complete, that permission is mentally removed. For example, a customer may value information provided during the course of his travels, but after he has successfully arrived at his destination (with luggage); he may classify any further communication from the airline regarding his flight as annoyance or 'spam.' Such is the fine line between service and marketing.
Proactive Service is unattainable, impractical and too costly solely within a traditional, call center-based customer care environment. It requires the exploitation of modern digital communication channels such as personalized portals, e-mail and messaging to ensure that information is given to the right customer, in the right way, and at the right time. It may well, however, integrate with call-centers to influence outbound calls. The opportunities that Proactive Service offers to reduce inbound service requests is yet to be fully realized, but it is easy for almost any business to envisage how such a capability could be used with its own customers. One thing is certain: all aspects of self-service, whether informational, transactional, or proactive, require a good understanding and visibility of customer information and of their interactions with the business. To make self-service and indeed all customer interactions successful, this customer knowledge needs to be used in an operational way.
The idea of aggregating customer information together to get a '360?? customer view' is common, but it is usually within the context of an offline data warehouse where analytical 'slicing and dicing' is carried out to discover new customer segments or determine marketing strategies. Furthermore, businesses have in many cases decided that a '270?? customer view' is often good enough to get started. Using an aggregated view of the customer in real-time for customer-facing applications to use is a very different problem, and is at the sharp edge of where businesses and customers meet. By leveraging a common set of operational customer information and interaction history across all self-service channels, businesses can demonstrate their dedication to servicing their customers while providing customers with an experience that is useful, compelling and consistent.
Customer Experience Management - The imperative for successful customer self-service
Today, consumers are familiar with using self-service channels, such as the Web and ATMs, but this does not mean they would give up on using assisted-service or full-service channels completely. It is obviously important to present a consistent experience to a customer within a single self-service channel, but to really meet customer expectations, it is vital to also present the same level of consistency across a blend of customer service channels.
Customer Experience Management is the discipline of tracking customer contact across a wide spectrum of interaction channels, exploiting customer knowledge and context to maximize customer service and convenience levels, and to provide customers with a 'feel-good' experience in dealing with a business. Without recognizing customer experience management as a discipline, self-service, regardless of how well implemented, is relegated to being just another customer interaction initiative that is destined to be disjointed from everything else the business has to offer.
Bruce Temkin from Forrester Research is very careful to differentiate Customer Experience Management from its CRM 'cousin.' He describes Customer Experience Management as "… aligning executive involvement, operational process, organizational structure and technology infrastructure to stimulate, anticipate and satisfy customer needs." The premise is that a good customer experience through the entire customer life cycle does not just happen. Businesses need to put in place process, organization, and technology both to be effective and to foster a customer-centric attitude at every customer touch point.
The need for businesses to provide a consistent experience to their customers is mandatory, regardless of the channel of contact. Customer expectations are set high, and customers will use multiple channels to achieve a single objective. These types of people are often your best customers. For example, within the retail industry, it is a well known fact that the 'cross channel shoppers' who research products on the Web but purchase the products in-store are in fact the most profitable segment of customers. For customer self-service, the informational, transactional, and proactive channels should be linked together and synchronized. The role technology can play in supporting Customer Experience Management should not be underestimated.
Customer Experience Management requires a good understanding of customers and their interactions with the business. It therefore is imperative that every customer touch point should both feed and be fed by consistent customer knowledge, the objectives the business has for that customer depending on the demographic (or other) segmentation, and their recent interactions. Success requires integration.
The good news is that the emergence of Web Services as an integration method offers new opportunities for integrating electronic customer touch points with a centralized repository of customer information. Moreover, just about every electronic customer touch point is consolidating around Web architectures as their primary technology. Point of sales devices, Interactive Voice Response, ATMs, and self-service kiosks are all dropping their proprietary technology origins to instead embrace a set of technologies that opens the door for Customer Experience Management to be both achievable AND cost effective.
Summary
Self-service is a term that can mean different things to different people, depending on their perspective and the industry in which they work. This has lead to a confused market place for determining what kind of self-service solutions are most appropriate for fulfilling unique business requirements. Research has shown that customers are increasingly willing to help themselves, so long as the benefit of doing so outweighs the effort. Understanding the exact customer benefit is critical.
This paper has outlined Four Building Block of Self-Service. The Four Building Blocks are a framework for understanding the various business requirements of self-service:
• Informational Self-Service - providing information to allow customers to do research, ask questions, and resolve problems on their own terms and at their own convenience.
• Transactional Self-Service - providing tools and applications to allow customers to take actions for themselves without having to interact with an employee or representative of the business.
• Proactive Service - providing customers with timely service information that the business knows customers will need based upon their participation in a business process or changing business conditions that will have customer impact.
• Customer Experience Management - understanding customers and leveraging customer information across all customer touch points to provide a consistent customer experience to learn about cross channel customer behaviors.
Businesses should asses their own self-service requirements against this framework. The degrees of involvement for each of the building blocks will vary from industry to industry and business to business. In applying this framework, businesses can better understand the ways in which customers can directly use new and existing corporate assets, removing the need for human intervention. In doing so, the cost of managing customer interactions can be greatly reduced while simultaneously improving the customer's experience and loyalty. For the first time, self-service brings an opportunity for businesses to wholeheartedly invite their customers to… "...come help yourselves!"
| Cliff Conneighton is the senior vice president of marketing at ATG (Art Technology Group, Inc., NASDAQ: ARTG). ATG delivers innovative software to help high-end consumer-facing companies create a richer, more adaptive interactive experience for their customers and partners online and via other channels. He can be reached at cconneighton@atg.com
Art Technology Group, Inc.
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