How to Increase the Responsiveness, Efficiency and Consistency of E-Service
August 2007
http://www.insidecrm.com/whitepaper/pdf/E-Service%20Financial%20Svc.pdf
Table of Contents
· Executive Summary
· Introduction
· A survey of e-service effectiveness in the FSI marketplace
· Five Tips for Successful E-Service
· Tip #1 – Model the issue resolution techniques of your best agents
· Tip #2 –Deliver a seamless escalation experience across all channels
· Tip #3 –“Right channel” your customers
· Tip #4 –Treat e-mail as the mainstream channel it has become and meet customer expectations with fast response
· Tip #5 –Make it easy to keep e-mail interactions private
· Practical Applications and Results
· TD Waterhouse – Intelligence increases agent productivity and customer satisfaction
· Bank Leumi – Unified knowledgebase for agents and customers delivers a higher standard of service at lower cost 8
· Conclusion
Executive Summary
In the financial services industry, e-service is not working when:
95% of company websites cannot answer a simple question.
67% cannot provide satisfactory answers via e-mail.
Only 6% of websites let self-service customers escalate inquiries to e-mail or telephone channels.
17% fail to respond to an e-mail inquiry at all.
These were the unfortunate results from a “mystery shopper” survey conducted by KANA and IBM to assess the effectiveness of e-service in more than 70 financial service institutions.
In this paper, we will look at how banks, insurance companies and investment firms can reverse this trend and implement e-service that delivers the level of timely, responsive and consistent service customers demand. Here, you will find five tips that will help your organization rethink its e-service strategy to offer customer-focused, yet highly efficient service that promotes greater customer satisfaction and operational productivity.
Introduction
Financial services institutions (FSIs) have been quick off the mark when it comes to leveraging e-service channels. From ATMs to online banking, FSIs have been ahead of the curve in deploying electronic channels to improve the customer experience. But, like companies in all industries, the quality and efficiency of e-service provided by FSIs have not always lived up to expectations. As the 2007 Global Contact Centre Benchmarking scorecard reports, customer satisfaction has dropped 15% since 2005.1
Jupiter Research believes e-service investments are even driving more costly phone contacts as customers pick up the phone after a bad e-service experience. Jupiter predicts that incremental off-line contacts due to failures in online service will grow annually by 18% through 2010. In 2006, failed e-mail inquiries were predicted to drive 71% of these incremental contacts, while failed self-service inquiries would drive 27%.
A survey of e-service effectiveness in the FSI marketplace
This year, KANA and IBM evaluated the effectiveness of e-service provided by more than 70 major FSIs in a variety of sectors including retail banking, insurance and investment. This “mystery shopper” survey asked a series of questions to measure the usability and response quality of each company’s Web self-service and escalation via
multiple channels.3 Questions were simple and relevant to the type of industry. For example, banks were asked about cancelled check charges and interest rates on checking accounts. Insurers were asked if claims could be made online. Investments firms were asked if they could trade on a foreign stock exchange.
The results indicate FSIs have significant room for improvement when it comes to eservice:
- 95% of websites surveyed could not answer a simple question.
- 67% did not provide satisfactory answers via e-mail.
- Only 6% offered the ability to escalate self-service inquiries to e-mail or telephone channels.
- 17% failed entirely to respond to an e-mail inquiry.
The KANA-IBM study ranked the overall quality of online service offered by each FSI according to
their proficiency scores for a number of contact channels and effectiveness of each channel. Only
4% scored in the top “Multi-channel Leaders” quadrant for having multiple and highly effective
channels available to their customers. 25% landed in the “Best Practice” quadrant for having only a
few channels but using those channels effectively. 15% fell into the “Lip Service” quadrant with
multiple, but ineffective channels. The majority of companies – 58% – fell into the lowest quadrant
for lack of both the necessary online access channels or for having a channel that was ineffective.
Five Tips for Successful E-Service
Obviously, implementing electronic channels is not enough to guarantee great customer service. So how can e-service work better for FSIs and their customers? Based on KANA’s experience with leading financial firms around the world, the following five tips will help you start delivering the level of service convenience and quality your customers and your company demand.
Tip #1 – Model the issue resolution techniques of your best agents
Driving intelligence into the process of answering questions is a key enabler of customer satisfaction and agent efficiency. Start by going beyond standard search techniques to offer guidance that helps agents and self-service customers through the process of finding an appropriate resolution. Provide multiple ways to look for answers
so that users can choose a method that matches their level of skill and mimics a oneon-one interaction with a highly knowledgeable agent. For example, in addition to standard and advanced search capabilities, offer step-by-step scripts and dynamically generated FAQs that help users efficiently express the intent of their questions and pinpoint the most relevant answers.
Don’t stop with the just answer. Increase the value of your service and reap higher retention and life-time value by offering advice along with the solution. When a credit card customer inquires about a car loan, guide the process of finding the most appropriate information about a loan. Then, use knowledge of the customer and products owned to suggest an equity line of credit that provides debt consolidation, a lower rate and tax deductions. This advice-driven response delivers the dual benefit of a better deal for the customer and an effective up-sell for the company. Finally, increase the consistency of answers with a unified solutions knowledgebase that can be shared by agents and customers alike across all channels, including selfservice, e-mail, live chat and phone. Online customers learn to trust the self-service experience when they can be certain that the answer will be the same on your website, from an agent on the phone or a teller at the branch.
Tip #2 –Deliver a seamless escalation experience across all channels
In the eyes of customers, self-service convenience is never a substitute for live interactions. It turns out that “I can talk to a person when I want to” is still the number one factor in creating a positive experience with self-service according to recent research by HarrisInteractive. Customers must always be able to reach you with simple paths to live communication built into your self-service strategy. Provide quick, easy ways for customers to escalate from a self-service session with one-click links to assisted service channels, such as e-mail and live chat. Ensure that no matter which channel the customer chooses for escalation, the experience is smooth and seamless. The key to delivering a seamless experience is to preserve the context of the customer’s self-service inquiry when transferring to an escalation channel. With the self-service session history maintained, agents know what solutions have been tried and rejected so that they do not ask the customer to repeat solutions that have already failed. The session history can be also be used to analyze the context of the incoming escalation to appropriately route the inquiry and automatically supply the agent with recommended solutions.
Tip #3 –“Right channel” your customers
Selectively match channels and service levels to customer profitability. For example, you may want to offer e-mail as the primary escalation channel for lower-value customers and reserve more costly interaction channels, such as live chat, for your long-term or high-value customers.
Take advantage of solutions that let you proactively engage with self-service customers to drive sales and forestall online abandonment. You can use business rules to automate the process of proactively extending chat invitations at particularly opportune moments, such as when a customer browses a high-value page or has spent an unusual amount of time completing an online account application, suggesting help may be needed. Let customers tell you how and when they want to hear from you. Offer them the opportunity to subscribe to proactive notifications about topics of specific interest, such as automatic e-mails or SMS alerts about unusual account activity or completed trades.
These outbound communications convey your company’s understanding and awareness of the customer’s needs, while at the same time presenting a valuable opportunity to deliver relevant cross-sell and up-sell offers within the context of asked for operational messages.
Tip #4 –Treat e-mail as the mainstream channel it has become and meet customer expectations with fast response
As the SSPA points out, in the 1990s, surveys showed customers expected an e-mail response within 24-48 hours. Now, surveys indicate a two-hour response window is best, with younger users growing impatient after the one-hour mark.4 Give your e-mail service as much attention as you do your phone service to ensure fast answers. Use automation to set expectations for response and shorten reply time such as:
· Auto-acknowledgements for immediate feedback that establishes the time frame for response.
· Intelligent queuing, business rules and language detection to route an inquiry to the most qualified agent.
· Message analysis and categorization to analyze the inquiry before it reaches the agent’s desktop and recommend the most appropriate answer.
· Back-end system integration to automatically fetch and insert relevant data, such as account information, into replies.
Tip #5 –Make it easy to keep e-mail interactions private
Satisfy governmental regulations and corporate requirements for protecting the privacy of electronic communications in a way that makes it simple and easy for customers to do business with you. Rather than imposing
Cumbersome encryption/decryption schemes on your customers and agents, ensure privacy through secure, personal Web portals. With this type of implementation, sensitive information is never included in an e-mail. Instead,
customers receive an e-mail reply that contains a link to the appropriate portal site.
Once customers log on, they can read the response securely and reply back as necessary through the portal.
Customers can also initiate secure exchanges through their private portals.
What to Look for in Secure E-mail Solutions
Look for solutions that:
· Do not require customers to install additional software or hardware.
· Automatically enforce corporate communication security policies and maintain corporate security standards.
· Automate the process of determining which e-mails should be treated confidentially using rules to scan incoming messages for sensitive content, such as the alphanumeric pattern of an account number.
· Prohibit e-mail messages from containing sensitive information so that you can continue current best practices for e-mail management, including analyzing content, applying routing rules and sending autoacknowledgments or replies.
· Are fully integrated into the agent desktop so that confidential messages can be created with just one click.
Practical Applications and Results
KANA customers have been applying these tips to their e-service operations for many years. The results speak for themselves: higher customer satisfaction, greater operational efficiency, widespread self-service adoption and increased up-sell/cross-sell rates. Let’s look at how these tips have benefited two FSIs and their customers.
TD Waterhouse – Intelligence increases agent productivity and customer satisfaction
Great Britain’s second largest discount broker, TD Waterhouse UK, regards customer service as the “make or break” factor in customer relations. To improve its service, the company identified the need to develop multi-skilled customer service teams that would effectively support any customer question about its large and growing product portfolio. TD Waterhouse built an intelligent environment for its service staff using KANA’s knowledge management solution, KANA Agent IQ. Agents have access to a variety of information retrieval methodologies and a single, unified solutions knowledgebase containing thousands of solutions. The ability to guide agents through the resolution process has meant that even the most inexperienced staff members can now help customers with complex trading, support and other inquiries.
As a result, TD Waterhouse UK has reduced hold times by more than 23% and escalations to the back office by 16%. The effects of these improvements are reflected in the company’s customer satisfaction rating as well, which has risen 12%. In addition, the company can now rapidly retrain representatives to provide support across multiple
lines of business, resulting in higher productivity, greater levels of cooperation between departments and a more attractive working environment for its customer service teams.
Bank Leumi – Unified knowledgebase for agents and customers delivers a higher standard of service at lower cost
Through its online banking, online trading and direct banking help desks, Israel’s Bank Leumi enjoys a reputation for quality service with service level agreements approaching 100% at its online banking support center. To better manage its growing portfolio of complex products and services and reduce the time needed to train agents, the bank implemented KANA Agent IQ in its call center. With the knowledgebase providing one-stop access to solutions and intelligent guidance to help agents resolve inquiries, Bank Leumi has been able to reduce training costs by 66%.
Bank Leumi has also implemented KANA Customer IQ for customer self-service. The bank regards the ability of the unified knowledgebase to ensure consistent answers across channels as crucial to the success of its banking strategy. The self-service implementation ensures 24x7 service, solving the problem of not being available to
assist customers due to the practice of not working on parts of Fridays and Saturdays.
The self-service implementation has produced real benefits as call deflections have been measured at 17%, and the bank has increased its customer base 15% to 20% without adding agents.
“The system enables us to deliver outstanding service to our Internet-based customers and to set a new standard in customer service via Internet channels.”
Itzhak Malach
Senior VP, Head of Operations
Bank Leumi.
Conclusion
The KANA-IBM mystery shopper survey shows that much work remains to be done
when it comes to delivering e-service successfully. Using the tips we have outlined
here, FSIs can deliver an e-service experience that is always timely, consistent and
customer-focused. As the TD Waterhouse UK and Bank Leumi experiences illustrate,
thoughtfully implemented e-service can lead to significant improvements in customer
satisfaction, while reducing pressure on other service resources to deliver the level of
service customers want.
For More Information
To learn more about how the KANA suite of intelligent multi-channel solutions can help
you create customers for life, call 1-800-737-8738.
About KANA
KANA is a world leader in multi-channel customer service. KANA's integrated solutions allow companies to deliver consistent, managed service across all channels, including email, chat, call centers and Web self-service, so customers have the freedom to choose the service they want, how and when they want it. KANA's clients report doubledigit increases in customer satisfaction, while reducing call volumes by an average of 20%. KANA's award-winning solutions are proven in more than 600 companies worldwide, including approximately half of the world's largest 100 companies. For more information visit www.kana.com.
Copyright 2007 KANA Software, Inc. KANA and the KANA logo are registered trademarks of
KANA. Other company, product and service names may be service marks of their respective
owners. All Rights Reserved.
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1 2007 Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report for 400 contact centers in 43 countries.
2 “The State of Customer Service 2006: Trends in Consumers’ Attitudes and Behavior” Jupiter Research
3 KANA-IBM Online Customer Service Study: US Financial Service Sector, 2007
4 “10 Best Practices to Increase ERMS Success” John Ragsdale, SSPA, July, 2007.
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