www.egain.com eService Winning in the Global Marketplace www.egain.comeGain Communicat ions Propr ietary Information eService: Winning in the Globa l Marketplace 2 Executive Summary The Internet, years after its emergence, continues to be a challenge for most organizations. It cannot be ignored; it has indelibly altered the customer communication landscape by adding dimensions such as Web self-service, email communication, and live Web collaboration. And, organizations are still looking for the perfect way to harness its power. What they need is a strategy to fuse the Internet with all existing marketing, sales, and customer service channels—seamlessly and cost-effectively. eService is one such strategy, and it can transform any business. This paper examines the notion of eService and the need for it in large, global organizations in particular. It also provides guidelines for developing an effective eService plan, and concludes with a discussion of the most significant benefits of implementing such a plan. What is eService? So, what is eService? It is a revolution in customer care and competitive advantage. It maximizes both opportunities to retain customers and to improve return on investment. Implemented well, it can result in dramatic improvements in service experience and equally dramatic reductions in cost. And, despite the radical benefits it brings, it does not involve any radical restructuring of your organization. Quite the contrary, it preserves and enhances the value of previous investments by building on the success of existing call centers, sales teams, and bricks-and-mortar outlets—which makes it especially suitable for large organizations. Put simply, eService is a blueprint for evolving your call center into a multimedia contact center. It is a plan for extending your existing interaction channels to include innovative Web-enabled ones in all phases of the customer life cycle—from marketing and sales to support. A modular approach, it builds on current infrastructure and grows at a pace that is right for your organization. The goal is to help you provide not just more contact points, but service that is consistently satisfactory for your customers as well as cost-effective for the enterprise. The Need for eService In these difficult times of poor sales and constrained budgets, do organizations really need eService? We believe that they do, particularly now. Let us take a quick look at some of the reasons here. Communication Explosion By one estimate, a quarter of business interactions will be over the Internet by the end of 2001, growing to over 60% by 2005. In spite of which, the demand for phone-based interactions continues to rise steeply. There is also a marked increase in customer expectations. No matter how they get in touch with an organization, customers expect rapid, high-quality, personalized service at all times. Handling both Internet and phone channels well demands an effective integration between them. It demands an eService strategy to create an interaction system designed for the Internet. eGain Communicat ions Propr ietary Information eService: Winning in the Globa l Marketplace 3 Call Center Limitations Large organizations all over the world are trying to supplement their call centers with other customer interaction channels. What are the factors driving this effort? C H A N G I N G C U S T O M E R E X P E C T A T I O N S The traditional call center can be a very frustrating experience for customers with its long wait times, impersonal service, and limited exchange of information. Many customers are comfortable using the Internet now and expect to be able to use it to interact with organizations as well. They want Webenaable contact points that give them greater control over when and how they get in touch with you. P O O R R E T U R N O N I N V E S T M E N T Call centers are expensive to set up and operate. High operating costs often mean limited service hours and fewer agents. Web-based communication costs much less, but organizations are loath to abandon their substantial call-center investments. What they need is a way to make their call centers more profitable, a way to extend current infrastructure to include new service options. I M P E R S O N A L S E R V I C E Agents often lack access to details of the customer’s past interactions with the organization as this information is locked away in various systems used by finance, sales, marketing, and eCommerce. L I M I T E D C O M M U N I C A T I O N The “voice-only” aspect of call centers can limit communication—you can’t show a picture of a product over the phone! The Power of the Internet Organizations today use the Internet in a variety of ways. Some simply deliver basic information to customers, while others are creating new and exciting ways to interact with customers, ways that can greatly enhance customer relationships. And some have created entirely new business models, such as banks that exist only in cyberspace and have no public offices. Or online music stores that offer both a huge selection of stock—more than any physical store—combined with rapid, personalized service. The Internet holds immense possibilities. An effective eService solution enables you to realize the promise of the Internet. eService, with its integration of Internet and call center technology, can maximize the efficiency of your staff and enable you to extend service round the clock. The rewards of implementing an Internet-enabled system for interacting with customers and linking it with call centers and with other systems (billing systems, for instance) are huge. An integrated system gives you an opportunity to provide customers with an outstanding and positive experience—whether they contact you by phone, email, live Web chat, voice over IP, or directly via the Web site (self-service). And it means you can collect, organize, publish, and share knowledge across all customer contact points. It also helps you enhance the value of your existing investments in eCommerce, analytics, contact center, and customer relationship management (CRM) systems, as well as use the Internet to link partners and suppliers into a service chain to help serve customers. Above all, an eService solution gives you a system that is eGain Communicat ions Propr ietary Information eService: Winning in the Globa l Marketplace 4 flexible enough both to scale as your business grows and to be customized for local markets across the world. Developing an eService Plan The success of your eService effort depends wholly on how well you know your customer. Start with investigating and understanding the ways in which your customers actually interact with you today—across the entire marketing, sales, and service cycle. Gather data such as when and why do customers get in touch with you, what are they trying to find out. Where does that information come from in your current setup? Is the information accurate and complete? Once you have an idea of how, when, and why customers communicate with you, and how well you are responding today, you can start to explore new ways to make these interactions more effective. Offer Web-Enabled Contact Points S E L F -S E R V I C E All Web sites start as self-service sites—places where Internet-savvy customers can collect information, compare products, and choose solutions. Most customers like this freedom to interact with a company as and when they feel like it. It saves them time and money. And that’s fantastic news for companies. Unfortunately, Web implementations all too often leave customers struggling to complete their tasks. It is widely recognized, for instance, that more than two-thirds of online shoppers abandon eCommerce sites mid-purchase simply because they cannot get some answers. Self-service options must be well-designed to be truly useful. The past few years have seen a boom in the area of Web self-service solutions. New technologies have evolved to provide expert, automated assistance for the most difficult sales, marketing, and support issues. Organizations can now choose from a range that includes simple FAQs, sophisticated support systems, and even animated virtual agents. But self-service cannot answer every question and sometimes, despite your best efforts, customers are unable to find the answers they need. What then? At that point it is helpful to direct customers to the different types of interaction opportunities you offer. Your business situation dictates which channels you support—but today there many new options, and all have their place. E M A I L Email is by far the largest single Internet activity. Used daily by millions, it’s the prime method of communication for some of the most active consumers in today’s economy. But do you even know how your organization handles and responds to customer emails? Do you know whose job that is, or what resources they have at their disposal? Are they working with the same account details and product information as your call center agents? eGain Communicat ions Propr ietary Information eService: Winning in the Globa l Marketplace 5 You should hope so. Handling email is one of the most critical jobs in an Internet-enabled economy. Get that job wrong and the consequences are severe—as many as 64% of retail customers say they are likely to break off their relationships with an organization if they don’t receive a response within their targeted timeframe. Yet an incredible two out of five emails go unanswered. That means lost customers, lost revenue, bloating support costs as frustrated customers pick up the phone to berate call center agents, and a negative impression of your company’s brand. L I V E W E B C O L L A B O R A T I O N While email is useful, there are times when only live communication will solve an issue. The telephone does not quite answer this need though—expecting your customer to note down the number of your call center, go offline, place the call, and start the inquiry all over again with an agent is to risk losing that customer’s business altogether. Instead of forcing customers to break off and use the phone, eService adds an extra interactive channel. Live Web collaboration provides the opportunity to combine two-way communication over the Internet with instant dialogue with a person, either through text chat or Voice over IP. Customers can be directed to information, given help filling in forms, or guided around the Web site. Web collaboration is one of the most exciting possibilities of multi-channel eService. In fact, real-time Web collaboration can even be combined with the telephone, either by offering your customers an immediate “call back” option, or just by guiding the telephone customer to a live collaboration contact point on your Web site. Bring Your Organization Together Offering customers different ways to reach you is not enough. You also need a strategy for tying all these methods of interaction together to ensure that customers not only communicate with your company, but actually accomplish their tasks. C H A N N E L E S C A L A T I O N The concept of “channel escalation”—from self-service to Web collaboration to phone—is one of the most powerful advantages of eService. It ensures continuity of customer interactions while using only the appropriate level of resources required for customers to complete their tasks. To provide outstanding eService you’ll need to give careful thought to both your customers and your internal resources. Scarce service resources should be allocated in the most efficient possible way, considering both the needs of each customer and the value she or he brings. A senior director of your largest customer, who tries to reach your Web site, should get the highest possible level of service, accessing all parts of your system without delay. A new customer, on the other hand, could be served with fewer resources. A V A I L A B I L I T Y O F I N F O R M A T I O N All service is based on knowledge and knowing how to match the company’s answer with the customer’s question. But answers to customer questions are scattered about the company in multiple systems and in the heads of various experts. And high turnover in customer service means new eGain Communicat ions Propr ietary Information eService: Winning in the Globa l Marketplace 6 employees who could give customers inaccurate or incomplete answers. The Internet makes the problem more acute—there are many more people dealing with customers, and many more places where information must be delivered, including directly to customers over the Internet. Fortunately, new systems have emerged that help manage knowledge across different interaction channels. Often these are based on knowledge management solutions proven in call centers but now extended to the Internet. New Internet-based integration technologies that make it easy to bring together data located in many places are also available. B E S T U S E O F E M P L O Y E E S Finally, you need to consider your employees. They are the most critical link in the chain for dealing with customers. Proper use of eService technologies ensures that questions go to the person best suited to handling them, with appropriate load balancing across channels. And you’ll find that eService represents a great opportunity for employees. They have a chance to learn new skills and interact with customers in new ways in an environment designed to make it easy for them to give customers great service. Also, through self-service, some of the most basic questions can be handled by the customers themselves so your employees can “stretch out” and focus on more challenging issues. Benefits of eService Cost Reduction Advanced eService solutions often sound far too sophisticated to be affordable. But that’s not the case. According to the research organization Giga, the operational costs of Internet-based service are far lower than that of traditional phone-based support. The most personal customer interaction—a collaborative Web session—costs half of a phone call. Responding to an email typically costs 30% of an average phone interaction, while the self-service option costs a mere tenth. Customer Retention And cost savings are only the beginning. By providing a choice of online interactions, you maximize your chances of keeping your customers’ attention at a time when your competitor is only a couple of clicks away. If your customers go there and find better experiences, chances are they’ll stay there— and maybe for good, as the cost of switching providers is in decline, be it for bank accounts, home insurance, utilities, or pension. And, as all business managers know, the cost of acquiring a new customer far outweighs the cost of keeping an existing one, perhaps by ten times. One study suggests that 5% better customer retention can improve organizational productivity by 20%. For businesses operating on small margins, this could mean double the profit.eGain Communicat ions Propr ietary Information eService: Winning in the Globa l Marketplace 7 Intelligent Service There is another sparkling benefit of effective eService quite apart from cost reduction and customer retention. And that benefit is intelligent service. By integrating everything you know about a customer, each eService-enabled transaction can draw on the goldmine of information you have already gathered about that customer. And the more closely you can personalize the interaction to the customer’s needs, the greater your opportunity for cross-selling and upselling. Going further, you can build on the customer information to create a personalized customer service portal. You can start to anticipate how specific customers want to communicate with you. For example, do they prefer email when they are travelling and live Web collaboration when they are at home? Competitive Edge The eService model is particularly powerful where competition is at its most fierce. And nowhere is this better demonstrated than in the rapid escalation of spending on eService strategy by major players in the financial services sector. The good news is that technological development means you don’t need to have the same wallet size as an investment bank to implement an effective eService strategy. eService is now achievable by using an Enterprise Interaction Management (EIM) system. An EIM system is a fully integrated system that can plug Web self-service, email management channels, and live Web collaboration into a knowledge management system so that all interactions with a customer are consistent and based on exactly the same information. The EIM system provides the necessary “hooks” to communicate with your call center and with any other enterprise systems which may be in place. These might include content management systems for publishing product catalogs, back-office administration databases from the likes of SAP and Oracle, front-office sales management systems, and data-mining and analytics systems. Success Follows eService The irony for today’s business seeking a route to success is that it may well mean looking back to the truth of an age-old adage: Success follows service. Only now, if you really want to fulfill and exceed your customers’ demands, and if you really want to stand out in the marketplace, boost sales, customer loyalty and, yes, reduce the unit cost per sale, then you’d better make that eService—and do it before your competition does. eGain Communicat ions Propr ietary Information eService: Winning in the Globa l Marketplace 8 About eGain Communications eGain (OTC: EGAN.OB) is a leading provider of Enterprise Interaction Management (EIM) software for the Internet. Selected by 24 of the 50 largest global companies to transform their traditional call centers into multi-channel eService networks, eGain solutions measurably improve operational efficiency and customer retention—thus delivering a significant return on investment. eGain’s best-in-class application suite includes email management, Web collaboration and self-service, and a scalable enterprise-wide knowledge management solution. Headquartered in Mountain View, CA, eGain has an operating presence in 18 countries and serves over 800 enterprise customers—including AOL, Charles Schwab and Verizon—around the world. To find out how eGain can help you gain customers and sustain relationships, please visit www.egain.com. C O N T A C T I N F O R M A T I O N eGain Communications Corporation 345 East Middlefield Road Mountain View, CA 94043 Telephone: (650) 230-7500 or (888) 603-4246 (Toll free) Fax: (650) 230-7600 Email: sales@egain.com © 2001 eGain Communications Corporation. All rights reserved.