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  Online Customers Wanted; No Training Required
 
Be careful about what you ask for, or you just might get it. It's an age-old truism that directly hits company call centers struggling to expand their services to meet customers' growing demands.
 
There's no question that call centers have made significant gains. According to a 2002 survey by Jupiter Research1, 70% of consumers report a satisfying experience with a customer service representative on the phone. The same survey reports that high-value customers, those spending more than $500, prefer to call a service agent for help.
 
Of course, success has come at the expense of swelling call center teams - with some Fortune 1000 company call centers now boasting more than 1000 agents. It's also no stretch to imagine that some portion of the 30% of consumers who did not report a satisfying phone experience were caught in phone-hold purgatory due to high call center demand.
 
While Web self-service will never replace call centers, it has and continues to offer the promise of offloading some portion of service requests currently handled by phone, as well as the associated costs. Last month, Forrester Research2 reported that corporations it surveyed expect the Web to divert a median of 17%-24% of customer requests from reaching the phone. Spurred by this promise, half of Fortune 1000 call centers surveyed by Fortune plan to increase their e-services investments in 2002.
 
Yet the promise of Web self-service currently falls short under the shadow of call centers. The same Jupiter survey that indicated satisfaction with phone service among 70% of consumers reported that only 56% of consumers were satisfied with online self-service - even though the consumer adoption rate was the same for both: 80%. Meanwhile a Gartner Group3 survey, published in March 2002, revealed that 46% of online users resorted to a call center in order to resolve inquiries that were initiated on a Web site.
 
Despite the touted 24x7 convenience of Web self-service, the reality is that finding answers on the Web can take more effort and time than simply calling up an agent. Call centers will always be needed to address more complex questions, but today finding even simple answers can be difficult. Arcane navigation paths and narrow fields of definition effectively require customers to train themselves on how to use a company's Web site. Even if the navigation path is known, it can still take several steps.
 
Map this Web reality against the knowledge of how few people have the patience to read their entire mobile phone manuals - or properly program their VCRs and DVD players. It should come as no surprise that nearly half of all people who start using Web self-service drop off line and call their service reps.
 
For the Web to play a more prominent role in customer service, it needs a new motto: "no customer training required." Companies are taking small steps toward this goal with easy-to-find sections on their Web sites for frequently asked questions. This is a good start, but the approach still fails to address many relatively simple questions.
 
What companies need is to make it easy, fast and intuitive for customers to obtain the relevant data they need out of the wealth of information which exists on the Web. Toward that end, Forrester2 noted that more than 41% of the companies it surveyed for its May 2002 report are considering natural language search.
 
Used in combination with embedded business rules and real-time access to enterprise data, natural language search lets consumers use everyday language online to quickly pinpoint the information they need. Instead of having the Web respond with dozens of meaningless results or irrelevant Web links, consumers have the control to obtain accurate, meaningful responses. Imagine being able to type in "How do I use the fax function on my cell phone?" to immediately get the right answer.
 
Imagine then the company being able to pick-up on your interest and automatically offer an adapter to connect the phone to a fax machine. It's possible because the combination of natural language search, real-time data access and business rules does two important things. First, it allows Web-self service systems to answer free-form interactions - like your help request - to capture valuable customer information. Second, this technology can be integrated with the customer relationship management and marketing solutions that initiate and manage customer interactions, providing a seamless link between knowledge and action.
 
Bolstered by integrated business rules, real-time data access and natural language search, Web self-service can offer the same "training-free" ease of calling a service agent for a much greater percentage of customer needs. That translates into greater convenience for customers - and greater satisfaction with the companies serving them.
 
1. Jupiter Research, Giving Customer Support a Voice, 2002
2. Forrester Research, Firms Expand Online Self-Service Offerings, May 29, 2002
3. Gartner Group, The Six Steps for Web Self-Service, March 2002
 
About the Author
Dan Gregerson. President and CEO
Dan Gregerson has been actively involved in the computer industry for more than twenty-five years. He is the founder and former CEO of PeerLogic, a software company he sold in September 2000 in a transaction valued at $416 million. Prior to PeerLogic, he co-founded Intelligent Technologies, the first company to deliver an IBM SNA-compliant PC-to-mainframe communications product-PC Express. A co-founder of the International Middleware Association, he has also been an independent management consultant specializing in business systems and IT disaster avoidance. He obtained a bachelor's degree in biology from University of California, Santa Cruz, and is a frequent speaker at industry events. About Mindfabric
Mindfabric optimizes interactions between companies and their customers. Leveraging patented natural language technology, business rules and enterprise data in real-time across all customer service channels, Mindfabric enables companies to transform the customer interaction experience and radically improve the economics and quality of customer service. Mindfabric provides a new way to serve that allows companies to expand the capabilities of their existing customer service solutions to immediately reduce costs and create new revenue. Based in San Jose, California, Mindfabric is privately funded.