Firms seen as failing online customers
GEOFF LONG
Melbourne, Australia - Despite its huge cost and reach advantages, the web is still a neglected channel for many call centre and customer support operations, according to speakers at the recent G-Force Asia Pacific event held at Melbourne's Crown Casino.
The message was also backed up by a new report from Genesys, the call centre software vendor that has been running the G-Force event for the past 10 years. The report suggested that investment in web channels was happening only slowly.
Jason Sterling, Genesys Australasia VP, told the G-Force audience of almost 900 that the failure to fully embrace web channels was a massive wasted opportunity. "I believe we're neglecting online customers," he said, advising companies that many are "hamstrung" by the current 20-year-old model used for operating contact centres.
He pointed to Internet-only operations such as Flowers.com that was proactively going after customers as an indicator of what could be achieved online. For example it would send out reminders for the many customers that tend to order flowers at the same time each year.
"They are a new breed of company that only exists through the Net and the contact centre," he said, warning companies that in future customer service could be one of the few competitive differentiators available to them.
One company that has embraced the web as a support channel is PC vendor Lenovo. Hongxin Shi, the company's customer contact centre manager, told the audience that each agent could handle four to five chat sessions at a time. As a result, web service now accounts for around 10 percent of Lenovo's contact centre traffic.
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But the company is in the minority in offering a web chat channel, according to the most recent Contact Centre Realities report, the ninth to date. Genesys surveyed 230 contact centre managers from across Asia Pacific on their use of the Internet as an interactive channel. While many offer some form of email and web self-service, the report found the use of newer channels such as web chat to interact with customers was not widespread.
The adoption overall for web chat was eight percent, although in South Korea 22 percent of respondents were making use of it.
And of the companies that do not offer any form of live online help (such as web chat or click-for-call back), 70 percent have no plans to invest in it.
How long they can afford to continue to ignore new online channels is another matter, however. According to the survey, more than 60 percent of firms using web chat say it has boosted sales revenue.
Web-based service channels are also significantly less costly to support than phone service, according to most industry observers. Forrester Research, for example, has stated that the average telephone interaction costs four times more than live chat.
Another area where business are falling down, according to the report, is in the integration between web-based service and more traditional channels such as voice, both in terms of business "ownership" of the function and integration of information across channels. Only 15 percent of respondents said that internal business ownership of web-based channels was owned solely by the contact centre. More often it was shared with other departments, such as marketing, IT, sales or operations, or managed completely by a department other than the contact centre.
The study also found that organisational structure was not the only integration challenge businesses face today when bringing the web and contact centre together. Only 31 percent of respondents indicated that if a customer moves from web self-service to calling the contact centre, the receiving agent would be provided with information on the customer's self-service session.
The situation may be about to change, according to Steve Rutledge, Genesys product and solutions marketing VP. "2008 will be a major inflection point in web integration to the contact centre," he said.
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