An Oracle White Paper October Migrating Customers to Lower-Cost Channels

Transcription

1 An Oracle White Paper October 2011 Migrating Customers to Lower-Cost Channels

2 Executive Overview Are you pressured to lower your contact center costs? Are customers insisting that you improve service? Do you feel like these goals conflict? They do not. This paper will show you how to meet both of these goals by moving your customers to a lower-cost Web-based selfhelp channel. Introduction As customers migrate from high-cost phone support to lower-cost Web self-service, using Oracle Knowledge for Web Self Service, they learn a lot about what it takes to ensure a successful transition. This paper describes some of those lessons, drawing on one company s experience during a project that transitioned customers to Web self-service. This case study illustrates how the company deflected a significant portion of the approximately 6,000 cases per month it was handling via phone or to Web self-help. This enabled its approximately 275 electrical engineer support agents to focus exclusively on more-complex cases. The project to increase customer self-service was executed by professionals who had experience with Oracle Knowledge for Contact Center and Oracle Knowledge for Web Self Service, in conjunction with company employees. 1

3 Make the Case for Migration The first step in transitioning your customers from phone support to Web self-service is to sell the idea within your own organization. However, this is not something you can accomplish by just talking about lowering costs the only thing your employees will hear is that you re trying to eliminate their jobs. Instead, you should point out the following benefits: Faster answers to customer questions. Phone response time is generally measured in minutes or hours. Web response time, in contrast, is measured in seconds. Providing more answers on the Web means shorter customer wait times. Elimination of redundant questions. Nobody likes answering the same question 17 times. That s why it s important to build a process that captures knowledge the first time a question is posed and then shares that knowledge via the Web for the other 16 users who pose it. This way your team gets to work on new issues instead of repeating answers to issues they ve already resolved. 24/7 answer provision. Many customers work after your team goes home for the day. If you have a solid Web solution, customers will be able to access answers after hours and on weekends. Minimized knowledge drain from employee turnover. When a valued employee leaves your team, you want as much of that person s knowledge as possible to remain with the organization. A knowledge management system especially one that captures knowledge as part of the normal agent workflow helps minimize knowledge drain from employee turnover. Build a Website That Works The first step in determining whether a Website works is to try it yourself. Once it has passed your inhouse test, it s time to turn it loose on your customers. One way of determining whether their impressions match your own is to survey them. In this case study, a team of professionals experienced with Oracle Knowledge for Contact Center and Oracle Knowledge for Web Self Service and employees at a large software company surveyed each visitor who logged into the company s Website filtering the survey to ensure that no one was surveyed more than once in a 30-day period. It took less than a minute for visitors to answer the following questions: Why did you visit our Website? Did you find what you were looking for? Did you find your answer quickly? If you did not find your answer on our Website, where did you find it? After capturing a few month s worth of data, the team redesigned the Website according to its findings making a tab out of each of the five reasons customers cited most often for visiting the company s Website: 2

4 1. Find an answer to a technical question 2. Download a product update 3. Download a license 4. Find a document 5. Find a training class Once you ve collected your initial data, you should continue surveying customers after each design tweak to ensure that progress is being made. In this example, the team focused its follow-up surveys on the 45 percent of users who said they had not been able to answer their questions via Web self-service. When many of them reported that they had instead found answers in the product documentation which was not available for Web search the team corrected the problem. In some cases, that meant improving the search ontology so that the knowledge indexed was as originally anticipated. After addressing these problems, the team improved the Web search success rate to 75 percent in just a few months. You can do the same by employing continuous testing and surveys. Advertise Web Self-Service One way of getting customers to turn to Web self-service is to advertise to the installed base the high success rate customers are enjoying on the Web. In the case of this company, the team made the survey results available to Web customers so that they could see the high success rates for themselves. Information such as the number of visitors to the Web and the number of searches being done was shared, and these numbers helped validate the success rate. Make Web Service the Easier Alternative The surest way to get customers to turn to the lowest-cost channel is to make that channel the best one the fastest, easiest, and most direct route to answers. To encourage the company s customers to transition from phone to Web support, the team changed the way the phone was used. Previously customers were connected directly to engineers who would help solve their problems. Today, calls are diverted to call coordinators who help callers search the Website for their issues and then open cases if they don t find answers. Over time, this has reduced call volume significantly while increasing the number of Website visitors. If customers are finding their answers via the Web, it also means they re finding them faster. In the case of this company, the project team soon discovered that its Website was receiving 10 times as many questions as the number of cases opened. Thus, at a user group meeting, the team asked users why they made so many more inquiries over the Web than over the phone. Their answers were as follows: It s easier to get answers on the Web. They simply used Web search to find what they needed, instead of manually searching through the user documentation. The Web was fast and accurate. 3

5 They don t end up wasting live agents time. Whereas users were reluctant to contact agents about anything other than critical issues, they felt they could access the Web about anything no matter how big or small. The Web page doesn t judge them. Addressing their questions through Web self-service meant that users didn t need to worry about being perceived as untrained or problem customers asking overly basic questions. Use Metrics Wisely Measure everything, and then share with the team those metrics that will drive the behavior you re looking for understanding that by placing a value on a measurement, you will inspire the team to improve that measurement. For example, in the company profiled in this paper, the project team modified agents behavior so that Web queries were always resolved more quickly than phone queries thus ensuring a better, faster experience on the Web even if a case was opened over the phone. Agents handling non-web-entered cases were to instruct customers how to use the Web for issue resolution. After initiating this agent behavior, the team measured the average response and resolution times for customers who did not search the Web first and then measured it again for those who did. Not surprisingly, the difference was significant. The team then published this difference on the site so that customers would know that if they had a question or a problem, the Website offered a 75 to 80 percent resolution rate and significantly faster issue resolution than if they had called in their problem. The team also made sure that customers Web-logged issues would receive an initial response within 10 minutes regardless of priority or location in the world. Why? The preferred customer channel must also be the better channel. If not and customers get worse support via the cheaper channel your preferred channel will not be their preferred channel. Drive Web Self-Help Success Your customers aren t going to suddenly grasp the benefits of Web self-help and switch from phone support on their own. You need to drive this behavior. The team did this by promoting the company s Web self-help site at all user conferences and on all customer visits as well as in training classes and documentation ing automatically generated logins and passwords for the self-service site to participants and customers. In training, instructors often referred students to the self-service site for getting answers to their questions showing them how easy it was to get swift issue resolution this way. To help direct users to the self-service site, the team removed the contact phone number from documentation (forcing users to follow a Contact Us link on the Website to find it) and added the Website address to all correspondence. The team also ed a weekly newsletter to every customer. Highlighting new product releases, bug fixes, and workarounds as well as product-specific articles added to the knowledgebase recently, the newsletter (with its more than 70,000 subscribers) linked directly to the Web self-help site driving significant traffic there each week. 4

6 Here are some other steps the team took to make Web self-service more attractive to customers: Replaced the typical Search box with a larger Enter your question here box. Oracle Knowledge for Web Self Service uses a natural language process search engine that understands the intent of questions and provides answers in the context of that intent. Entering a full question brings about far better results than entering a couple of keywords. Limited results to the top three answers. Through analysis of Web metrics, the team quickly found that no one was looking beyond the first three search results and realized that showing more was a waste of real estate. The team saved real estate by limiting the list to the top three and placed an Escalate to Support Center button immediately after those results. When users clicked this button, they were presented with a form prepopulated with their questions and contact information. Although users could add more details if they wanted to, one mouse click sent the form on to support center agents. Although this system generated an auto response with the case number, the team did not consider this to be the initial contact. Instead, it considered the initial contact to have taken place when an agent ed or called the customer. In general, worked best, because there was no problem with understanding foreign accents and there was a documented data trail for creating a knowledge article. Tracked first-call resolution. The team considered a case closed in one call to be equivalent to Website failure. Why? If agents were able to close a case on the initial call, a knowledgebase article answering that question should have existed. If such an article existed but could not be located via Search, the team had a person investigate the reason. If no such article existed, an agent created and published one that could be referenced the next time the question was asked. Rely on Team Incentives, Not Individual Recognition It takes everyone working together to drive customers away from phone support and toward Web selfservice. That s why it makes sense to offer team incentives to agents to make this happen. The company cited in this paper defined the desired customer path as follows: Go to the Web Ask a question View an article Go away or open a case By measuring the improvements along every point on the path and then offering bonuses to the team of technical support agents that achieved the highest quarter-over-quarter improvements, the project team achieved the desired results even faster than anticipated. For the company, this meant Decreasing the overall number of cases opened Increasing the percentage of Web-initiated cases opened (thus lowering the percentage of phoneinitiated cases) 5

7 Increasing the number of users who follow the above-described path to issue resolution Each member of the winning agent team received a US$500 bonus. The winning agents were also required to create a Cisco WebEx presentation describing how their team had achieved the quarterover-quarter improvements. Within approximately two years, all the groups had improved enough to make the incentive program irrelevant. It is important to understand that individual measurements would not have achieved this result, because they tend to discourage team behavior. One example is response time. Assume that your team s goal is an average response time of 10 minutes or less. If you measure and report individual response time, no single agents will want to pick up a call that will take over 10 minutes, because it will drive down their individual average. However, by measuring response time at the team level, the sooner any team member picks up any call, even if it takes over 10 minutes, the better the team average will be. This also applies to the number of cases handled, the number of knowledgebase articles created, and several other metrics. Some team members will be great at handling customers whereas others excel at creating knowledge. Measuring them individually will stop them from naturally migrating to what they do best. Measuring agents as a team enables the team to divide work based on skills, not metrics. Commit the Right Resources Every migration process is different and thus requires varying personnel. For the project described in this paper, the team took advantage of the following resources: One full-time person to drive the knowledge management process One full-time person to tune the search engine Senior agents to serve as contributing editors (investigating and filling holes in the knowledgebase) Full-time resources to help define process and drive Service Capabilities & Performance (SCP) certification Full-time product marketing manager to drive Web content, enhancements, and promotions Conclusion Migrating from high-cost phone and support to lower-cost Web self-service is a process, not an event one you need to plan carefully for and then sell assiduously, first to your employees and then to your customers. By drawing on the experiences and advice outlined here, you can begin planning your own successful transition. 6

8 October 2011 Oracle Corporation World Headquarters 500 Oracle Parkway Redwood Shores, CA U.S.A. Worldwide Inquiries: Phone: Fax: oracle.com Copyright 2011, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is provided for information purposes only and the contents hereof are subject to change without notice. This document is not warranted to be error-free, nor subject to any other warranties or conditions, whether expressed orally or implied in law, including implied warranties and conditions of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. We specifically disclaim any liability with respect to this document and no contractual obligations are formed either directly or indirectly by this document. This document may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, for any purpose, without our prior written permission. Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. Intel and Intel Xeon are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation. All SPARC trademarks are used under license and are trademarks or registered trademarks of SPARC International, Inc. AMD, Opteron, the AMD logo, and the AMD Opteron logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices. UNIX is a registered trademark licensed through X/Open Company, Ltd. 1011