In the ongoing quest for better profits, companies are increasingly asking customers to solve their own problems.
With a variety of self-service technologies, including automated phone lines and on-screen computer help tutorials, companies are trying to shed costs by relying less on human interaction.
The difference between a computer-guided self-service transaction and one with a human is “literally pennies versus dollars,” said Eliah Kahn, vice president of customer experience at Chicago-based online travel firm Orbitz.
“Clearly, money can be saved by pushing customers to online channels and reducing the amount of direct interaction,” said Steve Bonadio, an analyst at the Meta Group Inc., in Stamford, Conn.
Encouraged by an uptick in automated selling, such as online shopping, a growing number of companies are trying to offload sales support inquiries to databases and voice-recognition phone calls.
ABN Amro’s LaSalle Bank unit has been gradually expanding the user base for its Web-based business banking application, supported by a virtual customer support agent dubbed Rita–Real-time Internet Technical Assistant. The technology behind Rita comes from eGain Communications Corp. of Sunnyvale, Calif., which combines common customer problems with solutions from actual service representatives.
Milton Santiago, first vice president of electronic banking products at LaSalle, said Rita answers more than 3,000 queries per day, including hundreds of simple requests for new passwords that otherwise would occupy phone support agents.
According to LaSalle Bank figures, Rita improves with repeated use and is 96 percent accurate. Still, if a question is repeated three times in one session, Rita will recommend a real agent to help.
Santiago is encouraged by the growing subscriber base using the virtual agent–1,000 customers and counting. “The more channels you give a customer, the more they will choose,” he said.
Esteban Kolsky, analyst with the research firm Gartner Group, said companies are feeling the pressure to cut customer service costs. “In the last six months, now that there’s a pinch to save money, [companies] realized that they spend a lot of money servicing customers over the telephone and they look into saving money with self-service.”
Yet, even though more options are available for customers, telephone support calls do not always decline. Calls “go down maybe 5 to 10 percent, but companies don’t get the numbers they were expecting,” he said.
According to Kolsky, many self-service software vendors promise cuts of as much as 50 percent of phone support volume to persuade companies to make investments of $500,000 or more on their products.
“All customers want the best possible service; the question for the company is, what can they really deliver in a profitable way?” said Ashutosh Roy, eGain’s chief executive. “It’s important that they segment the customer base and, depending on the value of the customer, deliver the right cost basis of service to each of them.”
Travel has been one of the major success stories of a market that quickly transitioned from a high-touch, full-service business to a self-directed e-commerce undertaking. Yet Orbitz finds that more than 25 percent of its customers still request a customer service inquiry when booking travel.
Hawaiian Linda Smith, a frequent traveler who uses Orbitz’s self-service interface to book flights, is philosophical about the changing face of a typical ticket purchase.
“Travel agents will go into the computer and pull up the cheapest fare they can find and give it to you, but it may not be the cheapest,” she said. “If you’re willing to invest the time to do it yourself, you can save a couple hundred bucks. It’s a matter of where you want to spend your time.”
A fundamental problem keeping customers from embracing self-service is that people can tell when service levels are unequal.
“This is something banks suffered with ATMs–you have to make every [support] channel the same as every other channel. ATMs can’t do everything a teller can do, and that’s the problem other companies are finding,” Kolsky said. “Not all of the channels are serviced equally.”
Another problem with self-service: Automated agents can handle only a finite and narrowly defined range of problems. Asking a complex question about billing or service options to Eva, the virtual agent available to AT&T Broadband customers, quickly results in a recommendation to a live support agent.
Customers want to feel that the hard questions will ultimately be answered by someone, rather than simply landing them in a loop of inane and unrelated multiple-choice questions with a disembodied voice.
“If they can promote a feeling so you know you’re not just dealing with a search engine, but that’s there’s a voice behind it, I think they’ll be a real success,” said Smith.
