The upward path

“WISMO” is more than just a funny acronym to women’s footwear brand Aerosoles. It’s its own cost center at Aerosoles’ call center, where “Where is my order” is the subject of about 11% of all calls. “And we handle hundreds of calls a day,” says vice president of direct marketing Robert Garris. “Thousands in peak seasons.”

Do the math, and it’s clear that even a relatively small 11% can add up to a big headache. But Garris says he expects to reduce such calls by as much as 15% with customer service technology from Escalate Inc., which automates the online order process at the multi-channel retailer’s web site. Among functions, the software allows customers who’ve placed an order online at Aerosoles.com to track its shipment progress online without human intervention.

The caution

In its desire to automate customer service online to reduce costs—while keeping customers happy—Aerosoles, a division of Aerogroup International Inc., is hardly alone. Nor is Aerosoles alone in wanting to automate even more. For instance, customers can now check the status of Internet orders online; in the future, the company hopes to extend that to catalog orders. “Our objective is make the web as self-service as possible,” Garris says.

That goal becomes even more important at call centers that are dedicated to customer service as opposed to Aerosoles’ call center which handles calls from vendors and stores as well as customers. “At those centers, 80% of the calls could be Where is my order,” says Sally Sheward, vice president of marketing at Escalate, whose clients include retailers such as Home Depot and Nieman-Marcus Direct. “If 80% of your calls are WISMO, and you can cut that by 30%, you have freed up time, which redefines your call center costs or lets you do more proactive customer service online.”

But when migrating customer service functions to automated self-service online, smart e-retailers are balancing their desire to reduce costs with the desire not to antagonize customers. “Our initiative has always been to try to reduce the typical interaction with the call center,” says Rafaelle Pisacane, vice president of Internet development at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia Inc., which is pursuing that goal using the functionality on its Art Technology Group Inc. e-commerce platform.

He estimates that online self service costs only half or less of call center service. “But if you create the expectation that the customer can be served in the online channel without calling the call center, and it doesn’t work, you could have disappointed customers whose trust is turned against using self-service,” Pisacane warns.

That marks a change in attitude about web self-service since e-commerce’s earlier days. “In the late ‘90s the idea was to push everything to the low-cost channel,” says Ken Jochims, director of marketing at CRM technology provider Kana Inc. That’s self-service, but as Jochims adds, “That worked only so far. We’ve modified that now to the idea of the right channel.”

Hitting that sweet spot of the right automated option for the right online customer service job can pay off. Aberdeen Group Inc. research director Guy Creese estimates that computer manufacturer giant Gateway Inc. cut its call center costs by perhaps $16,000 per day by improving online customers’ ability to answer their own questions while on the site with the installation of natural language search technology from provider iPhrase Technologies Inc.

While Gateway did not disclose cost savings for call center avoidance, Creese calculates that if only 1% of the site’s 80,000 daily visitors found the technical support, product data and customer service answers they wanted online—an estimate he thinks is low—the avoidance of 800 calls at a resolution cost of $20 each would save Gateway $16,000 per day—$480,000 per month.

Those numbers are compelling even to those who operate on a much smaller scale. But with no universal rules for when to push customer service online to automated solutions and when and how to escalate to human intervention in the form of chat, e-mail or phone, online retailers must find their own tipping point.

Best practices, however, are emerging from the experience of marketers who’ve taken the plunge into online self-service options. Those guidelines on what works—or doesn’t—cluster around factors such as the complexity of the customer query and the value of the customer to the site. Another factor in the mix is that web-self-service technology is more sophisticated than earlier versions, for as experts point out, even the most well-reasoned strategy on self-service is only as good as the technology that supports it.

While automating responses to WISMO queries is a no-brainer, today’s technology can do more than that. But will the push away from call center contact to more self-service online satisfy or frustrate online customers? Part of that answer depends on how closely the process for a task customers are seeking to accomplish online maps to how they would do it in the physical world, and whether they can actually accomplish it more easily online.

While so deeply integrated into the online customer experience that it’s not generally regarded as customer service but, rather, part of the core sales function, the web shopping cart is a good example of self-service that works online, Creese says. “It’s a relatively simple process that people understand has certain steps,” he says. “You want to buy something, you look at shipping, you look at taxes, you provide your credit card and that’s it. People didn’t have a big problem with doing that online because they often didn’t get a ton of value there by dealing with a human.”

Another shopping task particularly well adapted to web self-service that’s likewise ingrained in the online customer experience is product research and selection. “If I have initial questions abut hiking boots on REI, for example, FAQs or being able to tap into a more extensive product data sheet might be of interest,” says Jochims.

More complexity

While functions such as product research, order entry, order history and order status were some of the first customer service functions to be automated successfully online, now new technologies are helping to push more complex tasks into the realm of self-service. These self-service options are most often linked to a knowledge base, a behind-the-scenes repository that centralizes product and customer transaction data. The knowledge base, the backbone of the soup-to-nuts offerings of major CRM vendors, serves up responses to customer self-service queries; it’s also accessible to call center agents seeking information on customers’ behalf.

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Natural language search technology is letting both self-service customers and call center agents make better use of knowledge bases. It’s formatted to deliver answers in response to queries posed as questions rather than keywords. Among other functions, according to Creese, the software adjusts the search function to allow for typos, misspellings and variances in query language. It can pull relevant data from both documents and databases to find answers for site visitors.

While it allows for differences in how users pose questions, upping the chances they’ll find the information they’re looking for, natural language search still delivers multiple answers. When resolving a customer’s question requires one answer instead of a multiple choice, guided assistance is another approach.

At CRM technology provider eGain Communications Corp., guided assistance is part of a suite of CRM solutions. “Search gives you a lot of options to choose from as your answer. Guided help takes you through a series of questions and shows you the right answer,” says Anand Subramaniam, vice president of marketing. Online guided assistance is a Q-and-A session, in which the online help function displays a question at the user interface and then posts additional, preloaded questions triggered by how the customer responds. Each question-and-answer round draws a tighter circle around the universe of possible answers until the customer is left with a final answer or recommendation.

While automated, guided assistance can help online customers with tasks that range from picking a camera to configuring a computer, self-service has its limitations. At some points in the self-service process, customers are better served with the opportunity to escalate to live, human assistance, whether by live chat, e-mail or phone.

Dealing with limitations

One of those points is when customers are confused about the self-service process itself. The live agent’s job on escalation is to solve the customer’s problem; it’s also to try to guide them back to self service, where appropriate. Athletic shoe manufacturer Fila Holdings S.p.A, an ATG client, has been able to reduce its call center cost by almost 20% by deflecting phone orders from small retailers to online order entry at its B2B web site. Fila also requires call center agents to supply relevant URLs to customers ordering by phone to let them know where they can get the same information online.

When call center agents using Kana’s Kana IQ knowledgebase respond to customer questions by e-mail, they include links to those answers in the knowledge base. “This says to the customer that next time, they might be able to find the answer themselves. The agents don’t actually say that, but when you provide the link, customers can easily pick up on it,” says Jochims. Co-browsing, in which the agent takes control of the user’s browser to help the user navigate the site is so far little-used in e-commerce, but it can do the same thing, essentially; training customers to serve themselves.

Because customer interactions do cost more at the contact center than online, site operators are developing rationing strategies that escalate customer service from self-help to human help in the situations where it will have the greatest impact. Executives at CRM solutions provider Talisma Corp. describe three types of escalation strategies: by offering live help for visitors to certain predefined pages on the site, according to visitors’ pathway through the site, and according to the trigger of defined events.

For example, “You can offer an expensive service channel such as chat on a set of pages which are of high value, maybe a page that sells cameras or camcorders,” says product manager Amit Bansal. The second strategy is based on customer behavior. “Based on how the customer navigates the site and the URLs the customer has clicked on previously, for example, we can show a catalog page. The third way is based on events. For instance, if the customer clicks on a cart and then abandons it, it could trigger a chat session.”

Like a store shopper

Tim McMullen, Talisma’s CMO, likens the company’s multi-tiered CRM approach to the experience of a customer walking into the corner store. “When you’re at the store, they are monitoring your behavior before they walk up to you and ask if you need help,” he says. “That’s human intervention into self service in the retail experience.”

Yet another way to decide when to move customers beyond online self service is to set the parameters based on a customer’s value to the company or the value of the transaction. “If I am sitting on a shopping cart and have an immediate question I need to answer, chances are I won’t keep the shopping cart open as I go through a standard process of submitting an e-mail question or making a phone call, and I’m going to abandon my cart,” says Kana’s Jochims. To minimize such bailouts, particularly among high-value customers, he suggests, the site operator could recognize those customers on log-in to allow them instant access to an agent who will respond to questions immediately via live chat.

Quality vs. cost

While the dividing line between when to leave online customers to serve themselves and when to offer live help will differ for each online marketer, one constant principle offers some guidance. “The need for escalation is based on the limitations of your self service solution,” says Subramaniam. In eGain’s view, the success of online self-service as well as its future depends to a large extent on how it’s presented to users. Unless the service or information the customers seeks is offered in a way that’s useful, the customer is unlikely to try self service again.

Technology providers are working to increase the percentage of satisfied self-service customers that come back for more of the same. Because while reducing costs is one element driving the use of online self service, it’s not the only one or even the most powerful. “Cost is a factor but its’ not going to drive the adoption of these technologies in the future,” says Talisma’s Bansal. “It’s going to be the quality of a customer experience that is much better using the online channel than it is using the phone.”