Self-service: What are the greatest difficulties for contact centre managers?

Perhaps the greatest challenge for contact centre managers is making sure that they view self-service from a customer perspective rather than chase after internal self-service benefits such as reduced transaction costs, freeing up valuable agent time, and the potential to introduce new added value services. IVR particularly – with its ability to deliver contact sessions that cost less than a tenth of traditional telephone-based service – have gained a reputation for being inefficient, and not necessarily providing the service customers want.

As a result, many businesses and consumers alike are wary of self-service, but is this really a fair reflection? At Sabio, we’ve always felt that the problem has been more of a design issue rather than a technology one. Traditional IVR-based solutions are ideal for transactional enquiries – such as ‘What’s my current account balance?’ or ‘When does the New York flight land?’, but obviously less suited to more complex enquiries – perhaps a mortgage or a detailed insurance request.

Before designing and implementing a new IVR-based solution, we believe contact centre managers need to consider a number of key issues, including:

• What’s the targeted customer base for the application?
  
• Are there any implications for call handling techniques?
  
• Is the design of the system user-friendly – particularly making sure that customers won’t get trapped in the system with no way out!
  
• How will the service be marketed?
  
• What impact will the system have on other channels, for example email and web chat?

We still believe that the potential benefits of self-service solutions such as IVR far outweigh the pitfalls. However, with the breadth of functionality now available in terms of voice interfaces, multiple language support, natural language speech recognition, text-to-speech and CTI interfaces, there are clearly a lot of choices to be made to ensure a successful implementation.

Will self-service replace agents in the future?

The simple answer is no. Self-service will become an increasingly important part of the service delivery mix for customer contact centres, but there will always be complex transactions that only live agents can handle, and there will always be customers who only want to deal with a live agent. We believe that by focusing on the desired business objective – namely getting people to actually use a self-service system – rather than simply concentrating on the cost of the transaction, will help organisations to best determine the mix they offer between self-service and live agents.

What mistakes are made when buying self-service technology?

We’ve looked quite carefully at how self-service technology are being deployed today, and have identified five key issues that we believe organisations should focus on if they are to avoid some of the more common self-service mistakes. We believe the key issues are:

• Make sure you provide the caller with an advantage from using self-service – perhaps by speeding up a process, extending service availability or reducing the cost of a product or service
• Make sure you automate simple transactions for all customers, rather than trying to automate all transactions – organisations should focus on getting more people to use self-service for simple transactions – such as a bank balance – rather than encouraging a smaller group of clients to complete all transactions using advanced IVR, for example
• Make sure you vary the service offered to customers – many systems are set-up to always offer self-service at the start of every call – varying the service that clients receive when they call can make them more tolerant of self-service
• Make intelligent use of all call time – when all the agents in your call centre are busy, callers should be asked to identify themselves and the reason for their call while they wait. This way, agents can be ready as soon as they become available
• Make sure you adapt your self-service based on who is calling – when implemented properly, self-service should be intelligent enough to first recognise who the caller is (using CLI or by getting the caller to enter an account number) and then change the self-service options to make them relevant to that caller

We find that few organisations follow all these rules all the time – however, the more you get right, the greater the chance of a successful self-service project! What’s clear, as most operators of self
service programmes will tell you, is that getting it right isn’t easy.

How should you evaluate self-service vendors and technology?

We encourage organisations to focus very carefully on how any solution or technology they are looking at will impact their customers. We also believe that the way organisations roll out their self-service applications can have a significant impact on the success or failure of a project. We would recommend starting with a small pilot project, testing a solution, fine tuning and improving based on business feedback, testing it again and again until both you and the users are 100 per cent happy – then rolling it out on a wider basis. We believe this iterative approach is essential to avoid the potentially brand-damaging impact of inflicting a poor quality self-service solution on your customers.

What self-service technology is hot for the next five years?

As a vendor-independent contact centre specialist, we spend a lot of time looking at the different technologies that are helping drive self-service take-up. While there are a lot of different technologies out there, we try and concentrate on those that will help provide our customers with a differentiator and deliver significant bottom-line results. The technologies that we’re most excited about at the moment are Speech Recognition, the implications of VoiceXML, Voiceprint Verification and the latest Natural Language keyword and indexing developments from vendors such as Audentify.

We’re finding that speech recognition and natural language has become significantly more accurate over the last year, and organisations are starting to think of speech-based self-service solutions as a viable, real world alternative to existing DTMF and phonym-based systems. Speech recognition is also driving voice verification thanks to biometric security (the world’s third most secure solution after retina and fingerprint scanning). Voice verification will increasingly be used to accurately identify callers, and trigger immediate personalisation services rather than the caller having to navigate through IVR steps or wait for a live agent. Autonomy-style indexing will also prove an important technology as it uses speech engines to monitor calls, identify keywords, and cross-reference knowledge databases to provide agents with near-immediate access to call-specific information.

We’re also excited by the opportunities that VoiceXML presents, effectively enabling organisations to offer all the functionality already available via their web channels using a VoiceXML-driven voice portal approach. VoiceXML will play an important role in integrating self-service applications, and we expect that this will translate into a more seamless user experience for the customer.