NEW YORK-Those who think Internet-based services provision will reduce overhead should remember the conventional wisdom once was that computers were heralds of a paperless society.
Nevertheless, Web-based customer care promises its own rewards over the longer term for companies that meet its unique challenges, said Larry McKinney, senior director of Precision Response Corp., Miami.
PRC offers outsourced services to companies that include American Express, AT&T Corp., Cox Communications Inc., Sprint Corp. and DirectTV, to help them accomplish three primary goals: improve top-line revenues, manage customer relationships, and identify appropriate prospects, products and partners.
Earlier this year, the company introduced its prcnetcare.com service, which it developed with Lucent Technologies Inc. to help companies provide online services, McKinney said at DCI’s recent “Customer Relationship Management Conference and Exposition.”
“Companies thought the more they go online, the less customer care and paper and computers, but in fact, there is more,” he said.
Furthermore, while online systems offer earlier revenue recognition and sales forecasting than their more cumbersome paper counterparts, they also are more prone to errors. Consequently, it becomes critical to quickly audit exceptions, like incorrect credit-card numbers or people who used their nicknames instead of their given names.
However, one local phone company he did not identify got back its $500,000 initial investment in prcnetcare.com within 10 months, as opposed to its original projection of 18 months, McKinney said. While this type of new service can reduce overhead, its most important potential is to improve customer-relationship management, he added.
“Technology is the easiest part. The hardest-the biggest challenge as you move into online services-is managing interactions among different departments and developing new skill sets.”
For instance, people who have a problem with their telephone connections while calling a conventional customer-care hotline typically will contact the phone company to resolve the problem. By contrast, people experiencing error messages on their computer screens while connected to an online service center are most likely to call that company’s customer-care center and ask its personnel to resolve the glitch.
Consumers generally loathe using the assistance prompts on the computer screen to resolve technical problems because one of their main desires in an online transaction experience is convenience. If they must take the time to rely on help from on-screen instructions, they resent having the technical burden shifted onto them.
“Most people in call centers are hired for phone skills, which aren’t the same as e-mail skills or computer problem-solving skills,” McKinney said.
Web-based customer care also generates a large volume of information requests via e-mail that should be answered promptly.
“There are (software) packages to answer e-mails, but the accuracy of their responses is about 60 (percent) to 80 percent,” McKinney said.
“What is the impact on the rest, who get answers with no relation to their questions?”
Cross-training customer assistance representatives for both phone and e-mail responses doesn’t work because of the large volumes of queries from each medium, McKinney said. A better approach is to have agents that are trained for one or the other.
However, customer-service agents taking phone requests also must be able to use the Internet since companies are moving toward Web-based logging in of orders and complaints.
“How do you reach the market where customers are not on the Internet? Our agents look at the Web form our clients developed, answer calls from customers and fill out the forms on the Web,” McKinney said.
At the other end of the consumer spectrum, there are the technically savvy customers with wireless phones and handheld computers.
“How do you do a chat room on a Palm Pilot? Web collaboration and pushing pages is hard to do on portable devices,” McKinney said.
Besides managing customer relations and service provisioning via the Internet, companies also need to improve electronic communications among departments so the valuable data warehoused in these interactions with customers can be mined for improving the bottom line.
“Most companies are not using e-mail this way, to my knowledge,” he said. Similarly, the entire area of order fulfillment in an electronic commerce environment poses new challenges in integrating the back and front offices.
“You must change your call center into a services model that is a portal to the other functions of your company,” McKinney said.
