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 TEST CENTER Autoresponsiveness By Mario Apicella February 15, 2002 EVERYBODY LIKES talking to a live person when calling customer service, but for companies that count daily customer interactions by the thousands, having enough employees to take care of each call can be unbearably expensive, or fall short of satisfying customers' demands. Some estimates indicate a $30 to $50 cost per telephone call, which can quickly erode fatter profit margins. By comparison, the estimated cost of an e-mail or Web-based customer interaction is only a few dollars.
We examined Web eService Center 5.0 from RightNow Technologies, an Internet-based suite that includes modules to handle customer interactions on a variety of channels. We liked eService because of its good integration capabilities, excellent set of features that facilitate hands-off responses to customer queries, and a customizable screening system that identifies service issues. Anticipating customers' wishes Customer service issues that companies face day after day are often repetitive. The percentage varies slightly for different business sectors, but Right Now estimates that an average 86 percent of customers' requests can be solved without the assistance of a customer service rep. Remaining issues do require some form of assistance: Companies that fail or are slow to provide help in those cases can disgust those customers and ultimately loose their business. Companies that embrace a customer self-service strategy must carefully balance their efforts on two fronts: creating the infrastructure that facilitates customer self-help and setting up a monitoring system to promptly identify customer demands that need more attention. RightNow's eService helps companies reach both of these objectives. RightNow's Revelation knowledge base offers a comprehensive repository of solutions to common problems that customers can access from a Web browser, and by posing questions in plain human language. (In addition to English, eService supports major European idioms and two-byte alphabets such as Japanese, which should appeal to companies with an international customer base.) Furthermore, Smart Assistant, a component of eService, automatically analyzes each question and immediately suggests a list of possible solutions from the knowledge base that the customer can rate according to their usefulness. Most service issues should end here, with a satisfied customer and minimal cost to the company. Behind the scenes, eService keeps track of the customer rating for each answer and updates the knowledge base accordingly. Future suggestions for similar questions will consider those ratings, which makes the knowledge base increasingly more effective as more customers provide feedback. But sometimes the customer will ask for further assistance, so eService will automatically assign the question to a service queue or to a specific rep according to predefined criteria. Interestingly, another component of eService, called SmartSense, tries to determine the mind-set of the customer from the words used in the message, for example, assigning higher priority to questions that appear to come from a disappointed or irate person. Companies can easily adjust SmartSense to work with different idioms or to improve its accuracy, simply by modifying a list of key words and their emotional ratings. SmartSense is probably the most exciting feature of eService because it provides an automated agent to screen and quickly escalate service issues that could spell trouble. These two technologies, SmartSense and SmartAssistant, work consistently across any service channel supported by eService, including Web interactions, e-mail messages, and interactive chats, helping to build a knowledge base and assist service reps in selecting the most urgent issues and proposing proper solutions. Web eService does not offer call-center management functionality, but service reps can manually update the Revelation database with customers' telephone calls. RightNow eService can be installed in-house or implemented as a hosted service, both options carrying the same license fee for a two-year commitment. Obviously, the hosted approach saves the cost and technical headaches of installing and managing the product on your premises. Not surprisingly, RightNow indicates that the majority of its customers prefer the hosted approach, which is a big differentiator with competing solutions such as Kana that do not offer hosted app services. If your company would rather keep its customer service apps within company premises, eService offers great flexibility in choosing an OS and database mix that best suits your technical inclination and your budget. For example, you can select an inexpensive open-source software approach, deploying eService on Linux and MySQL database, deploy on Sun Solaris with an Oracle database, or choose a Microsoft Windows NT or 2000 server and SQL Server database. Whatever your choice, RightNow offers C language-oriented and XML-based APIs to integrate eService with other applications such as SFA (sales-force automation) or call-center solutions. For our review, RightNow provided an instance of eService hosted on its hardware. We had browser access to administrative tools, tools for customer service reps, and customer-oriented features over the Internet, much like your company would have using RightNow's hosted eService. Our setup included a fictitious company with administrative, service rep, and customer accounts already defined. Administrators and service reps share a common, browser-based GUI, which has a rather Spartan look but offers numerous features to customize eService according to business requirements and service demands. A few icons on top of the screen provide access to service features, including lists of open incidents, a summary view of customers' interactions and knowledge base accesses, and configuration tools. The latter include a formidable set of tools for managing users, adding new customers and products, and defining custom rules to assign and escalate problems, as well as numerous wizards to adjust eService to work according to company standards. Logged in as a service rep, we began exploring the knowledge base, which is arguably the most important element of customer self-service. Populating the knowledge base is very easy and intuitive: select the most common questions that your customers ask, and associate each of them with a pertinent answer. For example, in the new answer screen of eService we entered a proxy question, "How do I warm up a beverage in the microwave," and filled the answer section with "For a cup or a glass, select the beverage button on the front panel" and typed in a list of keywords such as hot, cup, and beverage. Each question can be associated with specific product categories or groups of users. Time for a change of hat. Logging in as a customer, our intention was to browse the knowledge base to find a solution to our problem of warming up a cup of tea in the microwave, but surprisingly, this wasn't necessary. Based on our product preferences, eService had already inserted the new answer on our screen. This is how eService can save your company money: By building a comprehensive knowledge base of the most common support issues, it can anticipate customers' questions and answer them automatically, without costly service and support reps getting involved. To test how successfully SmartSense can detect human feelings from plain text, we entered several emotionally formulated messages. Interestingly, SmartSense was able to discern between sentences such as " I am happy that the problem is solved," which it understood as a positive customer comment, and "I am not a happy camper," which was correctly interpreted as negative. Detecting those feelings with the SmartSense agent, eService can raise a red flag and attract the attention of your service reps to handle hot issues before the customer walks away. No self-service solution can automatically solve 100 percent of your customer service and support issues, but a product such as Web eService 5.0 from RightNow Technologies provides that balance between human-driven and automated customer service that can give your company a competitive edge.
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