Omnichannel Customer Support for the B2B Organization - A SupportIndustry.com White Paper - Sponsored by
Omnichannel Customer Support for the B2B Organization Executive Overview Support has fundamentally changed for the better. For business customers, it has become easier to access and connect with vendors through multiple touch points, ranging from laptops to mobile devices. And for support providers, what used to be a crazy quilt of interfaces and tools has become much more of a seamless whole. More important, it is much easier than ever to brand your support as a competitive differentiator, as the cost of entry and implementation become lower than ever. Once upon a time, the vast majority of support consisted of two humans on opposite ends of a telephone connection. Later, the idea of multi-channel support led support providers to create new touch points for their customers often with dedicated support teams for each channel, and high implementation and maintenance costs. Over time, however, channel lines are blurring for example, mobile device interfaces were a curiosity not long ago, but a way of life for many users today. Today, we have entered the era of omnichannel support, where customers can seamlessly change between support channels while the company maintains a comprehensive view of their activities. This is a world where low costs of entry and unified interfaces help you serve every customer, every time, inexpensively with the same team and the same capabilities. This white paper explores what omnichannel support is, why it is the new imperative for B-to-B support operations, and how to put it to work for you and your team. Managing tickets from a web-based or mobile interface lets you deploy agents your way. (Image courtesy TeamSupport) From Multi-Channel to Omni-Channel: A History In its earliest days, business-to-business technical and customer support was a one-to-one process. It took place almost exclusively on the phone, between two people in their respective offices. And for many years, the terms channel would have meant little more than what station the office TV was tuned to. OMNICHANNEL SUPPORT FOR THE B2B ORGANIZATION 2
Since then technology has changed just about everything about the way we work, and in turn how we seek and provide support. We still provide phone support to people in offices, but now efficient support requires multiple touch points. Your customers may be on the web, or on a mobile device. Your support agents may be serving several people at once via web chat, or processing tickets that arrived from around the world via e-mail, or even handling a frustrated customer who has taken to Twitter to voice her displeasure. You may even have a community of users providing peer support for people who post online. Support industry vendors soon jumped in to serve these multiple touch points, with a plethora of products and interfaces. Given their relative novelty a few years ago, multiple support channels were expensive and highly demand-driven for a long time. If you were an early adopter in the multichannel arena, you were probably a large organization that could devote capital, implementation resources, and dedicated staff to these new channels. Later the advent of scalable, easy-to-implement cloud software moved many support channels into the realm of smaller support operations. Suddenly, for a relatively small per-seat entry cost, anyone could add new support channels like web chat or self-service portals. This, in turn, has made multichannel support a de facto standard. Today, we are seeing the next revolution in support, from multi-channel to omnichannel: organizations and customers alike now want integrated, seamless solutions that reduce time and costs. The new competitive points of pain in this landscape are: A consistent support brand : A growing external mandate for a seamless customer interface across multiple support touch points Agility: Internal efficiency and cost factors surrounding departmental collaboration and access to common data, versus incompatible systems and data hoarding across departments such as sales, support, marketing, and product development Implementation and scalability: CRM implementation and expansion used to be an expensive process with seemingly a cast of thousands. Today, solutions must be inexpensive and scalable with minimal infrastructure Interface compatibility: Seamless integration with enterprise tools such as CRM, remote screen-sharing, and others What turns multi-channel support into omnichannel support revolves around areas such as common interfaces and shared access to customer-facing data, along with the rapid scalability and configurability that has marked the latest generation of cloud-based applications. The benefits of an omnichannel solution have become very clear in the marketplace: having one solution, one support team, and multiple channels serving each and every customer. OMNICHANNEL SUPPORT FOR THE B2B ORGANIZATION 3
Example: Omnichannel Support at Wren Solutions Wren Solutions is a leading technology supplier for the Loss Prevention field, helping leading retailers and others protect assets and reduce loss. Their Encapsulon Platform provides a comprehensive suite of physical security software solutions ranging from video surveillance hardware to retail audit software. The Jefferson City, Missouri-based company has earned a solid reputation for top-notch customer service and high quality products. One consequence of their success, however, was a support environment that required four different systems across six departments: technical and customer support, RMA returns, product staging, services and training. According to IS and Client Services Manager Sean Chambers, Support goes way beyond [simply] answering a call and fixing a software issue; cases often involve hardware return and replacement, scheduling technicians to go on-site, and creating license keys, as well as [everyday] software issues. Wren installed TeamSupport s Enterprise Edition with advanced Customer Portal, making extensive use of its Issue Tracking (tickets), Live Chat and Product capabilities. This helped them eliminate repetitive data entry and the use of several spreadsheets, reducing tasks that previously took 20-30 minutes to less than five minutes. More important, this new integrated system streamlined finding information, helped cases move more efficiently through different departments, and reduced the potential for cases to fall through the cracks. Chambers notes, We ve saved some 20% in manhours over the past six months and by reducing our [use of] the CRM enterprise software, we re saving more than 40% in monthly seat license fees. Omnichannel Support by the Numbers Responses from SupportIndustry.com s 2012 Service and Support Metrics Survey shows how ubiquitous multiple support channels have become, along with the need to integrate them. With rare exceptions, over a dozen channels are used by large numbers of support centers of all sizes, with six of them used by more than half of respondents. OMNICHANNEL SUPPORT FOR THE B2B ORGANIZATION 4
Source: SupportIndustry.com, 2012 A more telling result is the nearly one-quarter of sites that feel they have integrated their support channels, a number that continues to grow quickly. In the future, support organizations that don t integrate multiple support channels risk being dangerously out of touch with what their customers need and expect. Source: SupportIndustry.com, 2012 This leads naturally to a core question: are customers happier with multiple support channels? The CFI Group s 2013 Contact Center Satisfaction Index echoes this sentiment, with their survey showing that nearly half of respondents prefer channels other than the telephone as their first OMNICHANNEL SUPPORT FOR THE B2B ORGANIZATION 5
choice, while other studies have shown improved customer satisfaction levels with the use of newer support channels: for example, the edigital Customer Service Benchmark shows a 73% customer satisfaction with web chat versus just 44% for the telephone. The cost side of the equation is equally significant: a 2013 study sponsored by UK consulting firm ContactBabel, the Inner Circle Guide to Multichannel Customer Contact, showed that the mean costs per interaction for channels like web chat and e-mail are roughly half those of traditional phone support. On both fronts, the case for omnichannel support is becoming increasingly clear within the industry. What to Look For In an Omnichannel Solution So what do you look for in trying to find a B-to-B omnichannel support solution? How do you evaluate all the competing product claims that are out there, and choose a solution that will grow with you into the future? Here is a handy checklist of criteria that you can use to help guide your team s decision: Wide range of channels. This is, of course, the ticket-of-entry criteria for an omnichannel solution. At a minimum, your solution should be able to create and work with cases coming from phone, web, mobile and other sources. Seamless, consistent interfaces. A key difference between multi and omni channel support is integrated touch points for your customers, and interfaces for your team. Whether customers- or agents are using a laptop, tablet, or smartphone, your support portal should be consistent. All of these touch points should produce tickets and user interaction within a common support interface, as well as facilitating communication and shared data within departments of your organization. Cloud-based applications. The days of locally-installed and maintained support tools are over for many support operations. A core selling point of omnichannel support is for support of multiple channels and new channels over time to rest with the vendor, not the client. Low entry cost. This is important as a competitive factor as well as an economic factor. Scalable, low-cost cloud solutions with per-agent pricing have opened the door for operations of any size to get up and running with omnichannel solutions, with even as few as one or two people. TeamSupport, for example, has packages that start as little as $30 a month per agent. Global view of your customers. Being able to quickly view all of the support activity from a particular customer or organization, within one application, is a key advantage to an integrated support solution. How easy is it to drill down into this information and turn it into data and reports? The best solutions can quickly turn into a dashboard that strategically gives you the pulse of what is happening with specific clients. OMNICHANNEL SUPPORT FOR THE B2B ORGANIZATION 6
Graphical snapshot of ticket activity for one client site. (Image courtesy TeamSupport) Reporting. Support has quickly become a data-driven process, both for the sake of improving the costs and quality of your support operations, and as a strategic marketing tool for both clients and within your own organization. The ability to quickly mine and report this data is critical to its value for both decision support and marketing. Reports generated from ticket data. (Image courtesy TeamSupport) Ease of implementation and interfacing. Low entry barriers to implementation, particularly in terms of your investment of time and manpower, are a critical factor in choosing the right solution. Look for rapid out-of-the-box functionality, high configurability in areas such as customization tools OMNICHANNEL SUPPORT FOR THE B2B ORGANIZATION 7
and custom client-defined fields, and clear interfaces to common enterprise database and support tools. Scalability. Your success and growth should never constrain your solution capabilities, nor should it change the interaction between customers and your company. Look for solutions that can scale cost-effectively and support whatever size of customer base you need, and can be configured for multiple levels of access or user rights for people in different roles. TeamSupport: An Example of an Omnichannel Solution TeamSupport has quickly become a leading vendor in the field of omnichannel support by offering an integrated, seamless product that is easy to deploy and maintain. Some of its core capabilities include: Powerful agent tools: An easy yet powerful interface with an integrated dashboard and search capabilities Collaboration: From internal chat to Wiki, knowledge base and customer community capabilities Customer self-service: An advanced customer portal that allows clients to manage their tickets and interact with other customers Multi-channel support: Integrated e-mail support, live chat, customer and product databases, and seamless integration with popular CRM systems Understand your customers: Consolidate your customer interactions with powerful search and reporting tools Management tools: Including reporting, rights management, ticket flow automation, and interfaces to business intelligence tools Privacy and security: Secure capabilities including 128-bit encryption, redundant facilities, and user authentication Omnichannel Support: A Trend That Is Here to Stay Omnichannel support is the result of the natural progression of support tools to the current day. It is a trend that has been increasingly driven by the convergence of customer demand, cost efficiency, enabling technologies, and ease of implementation. More important, it has been become an important competitive differentiator: B-to-B customers now expect a consistent support brand, and organizations no longer have the luxury of dedicating different teams to different channels. That said, omnichannel support is about much more than multiple touch points or consistent interfaces. It is driving a fundamental culture change within support teams, making them more of an integral part of their surrounding organizations. The right solutions help organizations share common data and work together to serve customers, in ways that they never have before. Make omnichannel support part of your environment, and you will get ahead of the competitive curve while laying the right groundwork for the future of your support team. OMNICHANNEL SUPPORT FOR THE B2B ORGANIZATION 8
About SupportIndustry.com Supportindustry.com provides senior-level service and support professionals with direct access to information on customer support, including enterprise strategies, people issues, technology, trends and research. This data enables support professionals to benchmark and improve their customer support operation. Members are responsible for the customer service and support operation of their company. More information can be found at http://www.supportindustry.com. About TeamSupport TeamSupport provides powerful yet easy-to-use, Web-based enterprise software that helps businesses provide seamless, effective omnichannel customer support by enhancing collaboration and breaking down internal barriers. Using their skills as software and customer support professionals, and drawing upon industry best practices honed in numerous workplaces, TeamSupport has built a product that is widely considered one of the best in the field. For more information, visit http://www.teamsupport.com or call +1 800.596.2820. Written by Rich Gallagher, contributing editor, Supportindustry.com OMNICHANNEL SUPPORT FOR THE B2B ORGANIZATION 9