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Serving the Self Served

by Geoff Galat, Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, Tealeaf - December 30, 2014

Serving the Self Served

Bridging the Gap between Online and Call Center Service

By Geoff Galat, Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, Tealeaf

Imagine that you’re a travel insurance provider. A would-be traveler is on your mobile website trying to purchase a policy for her upcoming vacation. She enters the site through a link from one of your airline partners and completes your online quote form. Upon evaluating her policy options, she calls your contact center with questions about the fine print. However, your contact center has no visibility into the online customer experience. Your potential customer must repeat all of the information she entered online and then gets a higher-price quote than what she had seen on your site.

Maybe your contact center agent can understand the discrepancy and act quickly to reproduce the previously quoted price. While he might save the sale, the process has wasted valuable time for the customer. Maybe the agent will have to send the traveler back to your website to complete the transaction. If her session has timed out, she may end up re-entering all of the information about her trip a third time. Or, she may just leave your site in frustration and decide that she didn’t really need trip insurance after all.

Is this really how you want to treat your customers?

The scenario above depicts a common interaction pattern today. While website and mobile channels have driven online self-service across any number of industries, a significant portion of the transactions that begin online continue to require the help of an agent. More troubling still, these customers typically encounter contact centers that appear to act like a completely different company from the websites they just visited.

Forrester’s research shows that only 49% of customers report being “satisfied” with transitions from the web to the phone.[1] This frustration is because customer service agents have no visibility into what online customers were doing before calling in—they have no knowledge as to “why” an individual needs their help, so must ask time-consuming diagnostic questions instead. This lack of visibility and context creates a multi-channel customer experience gap that results in slower problem resolution, lower first-call resolution rates, and less satisfied customers.

This multi-channel gap has a massive business impact. A Harris Interactive survey[2] shows that 45% of customers who receive bad service from a call center after having problems on the web will stop doing business with that company. Ask yourself, can you afford to potentially lose that much of your customer base?

Closing the Multi-channel Customer Experience Gap

Gartner states that “The lack of cohesive business integration across channels and consistent management of customer interactions… will be the leading factors diminishing customer satisfaction and increasing defection to competitors.”

So what are organizations to do about this issue? How do they gain visibility into the online customer experience to close this costly gap? There are a few different approaches.

Website Replica: Some organizations provide call center agents an internal version of their websites so those agents can “impersonate” their customers. However, this mandates maintaining not one but two sites—including any current pricing, product promotions, etc. And it doesn’t account for transaction history, visitor preferences and the unique and unpredictable behavior of each user.

Co-Browsing: Contact center agents may also have co-browsing tools, allowing them to follow customers through the site. However, these tools do not give agents context of what happened prior to the customer’s call. Co-browsing works only at the point when the customer reaches the call center.

Customer Experience Management: Done properly, Customer Experience Management, or CEM, provides visibility into the complete context of the online experience—not just what customers are doing right now but also a quick snapshot of what they did earlier in their visits and during previous online interactions with a business—from both mobile devices and website. This enables agents to see first-hand why things went wrong for the customer—as though they were looking over the customer’s shoulder. While on the phone with customers, they can use this information to validate what those customers experienced and help them to accomplish their goals. After the call has ended, agents can quickly escalate any website problems to the appropriate team.

Why Close the Gap?

The benefits of closing the multi-channel customer experience gap are significant. They include…

• Faster problem resolution and shorter call handle times: Rather than asking the customer, “What did you just do?” the agent can begin each interaction at a point that makes sense to the customer and provide a much higher level of service. Research shows this ability shaves an average of 30 seconds off of call handle times.

• Improved first-call resolution: Front-line agents are able to solve customer issues themselves, so there’s less often a need to escalate the issue to tier 2 support. That means greater efficiencies, lower costs, less time on hold for customers, and significantly improved customer satisfaction.

• Higher customer value: Call center agents are more likely to help the customer complete the transaction when they’re armed with online visibility. Furthermore, because they now have valuable information about their customers’ interests, they can leverage this information for targeted cross-selling and up-selling. Consider the example of a bank’s contact center. A customer may be calling because of problems with a wire transfer and may also have spent time on the site researching lines of credit. With visibility into the customer’s online behavior, the contact center agent has the perfect opportunity to present her with a compelling offer on lines of credit. Businesses that invest in CEM solutions can create these proactive opportunities and, as a result, translate online visibility into higher customer value.

Establishing a Customer Service Advantage

The rewards of online self-service can be quite high. Do it well and you’ll save money, increase customer retention and have bragging rights over the competition. Do it poorly and you’ll spend a lot of time and money trying to win customers back. However, the reality is that even with the most feature-rich website and the best website design, self-service still requires service. That’s why superior customer service requires a seamless multi-channel customer experience—where customers can cross from one channel to another without feeling like they are interacting with two different companies.

The multi-channel customer experience gap is a common problem. A recent study by e-business consulting firm Econsultancy[3] shows that only 3% of companies believe they provide an excellent cross-channel customer experience. And only 6% believe that the offline parts of their business have visibility into how customers interact with their websites. The companies that invest the time and resources to close this gap will not only achieve the business benefits described earlier, they will also distinguish themselves by their superior customer service. In this day of far-reaching social media comments, #fails and Yelp ratings, the brand impact of cross-channel customer services is greater than ever.

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Tealeaf is the industry-leading provider of Customer Experience Management solutions, with more than 450 enterprise customers worldwide. For organizations that make customer experience a top priority, Tealeaf solutions provide unprecedented enterprise-wide visibility into every visitor’s unique online interactions for ongoing analysis, website optimization and superior cross-channel customer service.



[1] “How Satisfied Are Shoppers When Moving Across Channels?” Forrester Research, Inc. January 2009

[2] “The Customer Experience Impact: North America 2010,” Harris Interactive commissioned by RightNow

[3] “Reducing Online Customer Struggle,” Econsultancy, June 2, 2011

 
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