Event

The force that is self-service

Discussing self-service, an emerging trend in the contact centre industry, was high on the G-Force 06 agenda. Faiz Askari reports from Melbourne

Stakeholders to the worldwide contact centre community recently gathered to discuss some core issues affecting the industry. The event was Genesys Labs’ G-Force 06 at Melbourne. Experts talked about the emerging trend of self-service solutions in the contact centre industry. They highlighted issues surrounding the industry and the way in which contact centres were headed.

Speech self-service is one area that the pundits unanimously believe will have a promising future. That said, precautions have to be taken while exploring business growth through self-service.

In laying out its vision for speech self-service over the next few years, Genesys plans to drive this technology beyond contact centres and into broader customer service settings to provide a consistent customer experience at every touch-point.

“Self-service is an emerging trend in the contact centre market. It’s become an unstoppable force permeating the entire business landscape. This is because of the fact that many organisations benefit from huge cost-savings by adopting self-service making the investment worthwhile,” says James Brooks, Senior Vice-president, Genesys Telecommunications Labs.

In a recent study done by Genesys on Contact Centre Realities: Optimising the Agent Performance, it was clearly indicated that contact centres that use self-service features report that giving agents greater control over their working lives encourages them to be more responsible and accountable for their actions. This is reflected in better results.

The right degree of self-service can enhance a business, at the same time too much of self-service can bring about some bad results. 87 percent of consumers feel that more companies are pushing self-service on to them. As a result of this, 56 percent of consumers become less loyal, 28 percent start complaining or discussing this with their family and friends while 16 percent stop doing business with such companies.

Every self-service interaction either creates or destroys customer equity. Customers create value in two ways in the context of self-service: they consume support services today, which can change the likelihood of their making future purchases.

According to Gartner, by 2010 self-service will account for 58 percent of customer-business interactions. At many organisations, the cost-savings in self-service alone have made the investment worthwhile. However, focussing on cost-savings alone represents only half of the RoI equation.

Brian Galvin, Vice-president, Product Management, Genesys says, “Speech self-service will be the new front door to the enterprise, creating a common voice brand and streamlining access to people and functions. Speech platforms will listen to the voice of the customer in surveys that ensure follow-up and satisfaction. As far as key self-service capabilities are concerned, the technology has the capacity to speech-enable Web interactions and it seamlessly supports escalation to human assistance or to experts through multimedia collaboration. These factors help agents.”

Next-generation speech services are part of a larger trend toward dynamic customer interaction blending self-service and assisted-service across multiple touch-points including the Web and multimedia devices. Under business rules control, callers can be proactively moved from self- to assisted-service to take advantage of opportunities or expertise. As customer expectations and needs grow, enterprises are moving to create dynamic contact centres to offer a superior customer experience.

Peter M Williams, Technology Strategist, Yahoo explains, “It is very critical to keep the customer satisfied. Self-service is a handy tool that can achieve customer satisfaction in a good way. I think a lot of credit can be given to customers themselves as they are showing good interest. Going by the latest market dynamics it clearly indicates that this technology has a dynamic future in the contact centre world.”

Michael Kim, Manager, Customer Service Centre, Samsung Fire & Marine Insurance elaborates, “It is very clear that the industry is moving toward such solutions. Consumers are showing interest in self-service and IVR-based solutions. The Web is also a major driver of this concept. Web sites are offering interactive applications including voice-based ones.”

Luca Bellati, Chief of Services and Business Solutions, CartaSi says, “It has been clearly indicated in the survey that managers of contact centres prefer to adopt self-service solutions. The key to maximising agent productivity lies in managing the balance between service levels and costs, and many contact centre managers are achieving this by engaging agents to make outbound calls when inbound call volumes are low. Companies that have had the best success with this are the 27 percent working with dynamically integrated inbound and outbound systems.”

Describing the Indian connection with self-service, Sunny Rao, Country Manager, India, Genesys says, “Basic self-service is prevalent among domestic enterprises but largely performs rudimentary functions such as office hours, branch office locations, and bill status. A few full-fledged applications are running in areas such as phone-banking, ticket-booking and ordering. The use of speech self-service has been more prevalent in the areas of mobile value-added services and internally facing applications such as password resets and help desks. General rollout of speech applications has been limited by the lack of commercially viable language models for languages outside of Indian English and Hindi. In addition, the diversity of the consumer base results in a higher cost of deployment of full-fledged speech applications. Innovative commercial models such as revenue-sharing and sharing of costs saved by higher automation levels will jump-start adoption of speech self-service in India.

James Brooks, Senior Vice-president, Genesys Telecommunications Labs, addressing the keynote session at G-Force 06

Rao adds, “Self-service has significant potential for both inbound self-service and outbound applications. With the huge growth in the telecom sector, the use of self-service is the only viable manner in which the cost of service can be managed. However, there is a dire need to ensure that the right segmentation rules are adopted to make the self-service experience meaningful else it leads to greater customer frustration.”

Rao feels, “Many sectors in India are opening up especially in the financial services, insurance and travel & tourism sectors. These sectors can benefit from inbound self-service applications and proactive notification applications. Our research has shown that in the Indian context, companies can significantly manage their costs and achieve higher closure rates when they adopt outbound applications that provide a preamble message to the customer regarding the intent of the call through an elegantly designed voice interface.”

He says further, “The customer has an option upfront to agree to hear more about the service or product being offered or ask to be put on to a do-not-call list. Data collected from pilot rollouts has shown a greater propensity of customers agreeing to listen to the marketing pitch compared to when they get a call from a human agent with less than adequate communication skills.”

He adds, “Genesys is working on a number of speech-enabled projects in the country. One area that we are very excited about is the results we are seeing from our proactive notification applications which provide reminder and payment options on outbound calls (especially in areas of insurance policy renewals) and outbound tele-sales. The RoIs and data security provided from these have far exceeded in customer expectations.”

Rao explained that the company has invested in a core group called Genesys Advanced Research that is part of its business consulting practice and this team’s sole focus is on enhancing operational efficiencies of organisations based on market research. The core team is a mix of seasoned business professionals and holders of doctorates in analytics bringing to customers clear tangible results.

G-Force 06 showcased the fact that open standards and flexible deployment enabled managed service providers and IT departments to leverage common assets and applications that can be deployed for many departments or multiple enterprises. To support this growing range of new applications and demanding environments, Genesys has aligned its GVP and VoiceGenie self-service platforms into a single platform tuned for three unique sets of needs:

• Genesys self-service for contact centres serves traditional call centre and voice self-service needs, including next-generation call centre applications such as voice-based customer recognition and voice-video self-service over 3G phones.
• Genesys enterprise speech portals support emerging applications such as speech-enabled automated receptionists, voice-enabled Web sites, automated voice payments and voice branding.
• Genesys enhanced network services enables service providers, such as carriers and wireless providers, to create value-added services including speech-enabled voice mail, enhanced directory assistance and video portals.

In the future, factors such as cost of service will be a critical component as enterprises reach out to larger segments of the population. Initially self-service is likely to be more popular in those strata of the consumer base that value their time and prefer self-help rather than no-help when contacting enterprises at odd hours. Greater benefits will accrue when appropriately designed self-service user interfaces along with customer education make it usable by the population at large. Real estate, skilled personnel and infrastructure dependencies will and are becoming factors which will enhance creative uses of self-service applications.