Think Customers: The 1to1 Blog

Perhaps not all consumers are as jazzed about chat as I am (I’m thinking along the lines of “almost as good as sliced bread”). In fact, with the dearth of sites that offer it, I doubt that many e-shoppers have even used chat. All I can say is, if you’re an e-tailer, please offer it!

That doesn’t mean that you have to offer it to every customer all the time. I’ve come across companies that only use it for sales, or that offer it deep in the self-service section of their site for customers who have tried and failed to get the information they needed (and are rewarded for trying self-service first by getting put at the top of the agent queue), or that use proactive chat based on triggers like hovering on a page or abandoning a shopping cart.

Chris Hall, vice president of product marketing for KANA, and I were talking about this yesterday. According to Hall, many companies are still in the test phase with chat, with more for using it for sales than for support. The companies that do use it well for sales, he said, are seeing results. Financial services firms, for example, have seen average increases of 14 percent in online selling rates and 25 percent in online applications completion rates.

One challenge that is still prevalent among enterprises interested in using chat is ensuring that their channels are well integrated on the back end. Hall told me that some companies are piloting blended agents (mostly around integrating phone and chat), but that it’s more common to have agents who each focus on a specific channel. In fact, fewer than 10 percent of companies blend phone and email queues to the same agents, he said. Part of the reason, Hall explained, is that firms are focused on optimizing phone agents’ time, so “down time” (during which they could switch to chat or email) is, as we all know, something avoided at all costs. Many service managers think that it’s better to have agents who are adept at multitasking handle multiple chat sessions. So, what’s Hall is seeing, he said, is an increase in “e-reps.”

Ultimately, the goal of all this is what’s now being called first-time fix (that would be first-call resolution in the pre- e-service days). Whether a customer uses self-service or calls or emails or chats online, the objective is to ensure that the customer’s issue (whether that’s a purchase, service issue, complaint, etc.) is resolved on their first attempt—reducing costs to the organization and boosting customer satisfaction.

But none of this is as easy as adding new “contact us” options to your website. There are back-end issues to consider. I touched on staff. Having a comprehensive, well-maintained knowledge based available to both agents and customers is another issue. Hall also noted that multichannel SLAs are important for setting goals and measuring results. Some companies now have e-SLAs. One global hotelier, for example, has a target of six hours for responding to email inquiries, and one popular airline targets 10 hours as its turnaround time.

Hall warned that jumping into e-service without considering these and related issues could actually result in increased call times and escalations.

He offered a four-step program companies can use to avoid that fate:
1. Start with internal knowledge improvements among agents.
2. Examine what best practices to push externally to customers. Do this in a focused way by piloting the external knowledge base. Initially, only take about 15 percent of internal structure external, promote it like crazy, learn from the results, and then repeat the process.
3. Implement seamless online escalation. Be sure to consider response times. Twelve to 24 hours usually results in 75 percent customer satisfaction, Hall said; customer sat jumps to 90 percent with a six hour response time.
4. Further leverage Web’s service options by using information learned in each channel to help make improvements not only to that channel but also to the other service channels offered.