Companies Find Answers With Self-service Systems
Sydney Morning Herald
Tuesday May 22, 2001
Less human interference in online queries means cost savings and better use of time, writes David Braue.
Walk into any retail store and, with a bit of searching, you're likely to find a salesperson who can answer any questions you have. Visit that store's Web site and your chance of getting a similar level of service is much lower; email a question to the company, and it will probably be so long before you get a reply that you will have gone elsewhere.
But that is rapidly changing, as service-minded online companies begin using new self-service technologies to give their customers and employees access to virtual ``assistants" which offer intelligent answers to questions and process a range of transactions without human intervention.
The applications for self-service technology are as varied as the companies that use it.
Many large companies, for example, have provided secure Web-based access to their enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, which manage huge amounts of information including employee profiles and benefit details.
Want to know how much holiday time you're due? Just pop into the employee portal and look it up. Changed bank accounts? Hop online and type in the new number to ensure the change is made immediately.
Self-service portals give users ``guides where you can take something that's typically a multi-step process that used to need coaching and training, and basically have wizards that do it on the Web", said Mr Robert Geib, director of business development and marketing with ERP vendor PeopleSoft, which has joined its competitors and added a self-service portal interface.
``It can take something that was 10, 20 or 25 stages long, make it graphically compelling and easy to understand, and offer customers guided facilities through them," said Mr Geib.
``They're seeing more return on investment from self-service, and so they're trying to get self-service in front of everyone with almost no training."
Efforts to reduce customers' reliance on costly and time-consuming human intervention have driven many companies to adopt a new take on knowledge management technology, which helps collate company data, procedures, documents, and policies into a single manageable system.
One vendor finding the market ripe for the picking is RightNow, which opened an Australian office earlier this month.
The company's RightNow Web system continually builds up a knowledge base, incorporating company documents and questions asked by users, cross-referencing them to determine the relationship between particular questions.
This allows it to infer meaning from even simple customer queries, presenting a list of contextually relevant answers and adjusting the output it provides based on user feedback about the usefulness of each answer.
Over time, the quality of answers increases as the system becomes better at offering answers to related questions that have been asked by previous visitors.
Mr Alan Rassaby, RightNow's vice-president of legal and risk management, said: ``In the past, companies were providing static databases of questions and answers that were manually constructed by experts.
``But as the databases were getting fuller and fuller, information was getting less and less relevant because there was no automated means of updating the process.
``Visitors to Web sites are very fickle and if they can't find their answer quickly, they move on. We've been able to see numerous instances in which we've been able to drive down the proportion of emails that come in because people are actually getting what they want."
RightNow Web has already replaced the venerable ``frequently asked questions" list at more than 1,100 Web sites and corporations, allowing customers to get the answer they need without emailing the company.
The volume of phone calls to Sanyo Electronics' call centre fell by 27 per cent shortly after implementing the system. Game-maker Electronic Arts cut the average response time for personalised email answers from 5.5 hours to 30 minutes, because the system reduced the volume of support emails. Air Canada cut the number of customer email queries by 60 per cent within a month.
Australian users include OzEmail, the Australian Graduate School of Management and the University of Southern Queensland.
But do not expect dramatic benefits to come overnight. Self-service systems still need to be tied in with customer and employee-related policies, and procedures, said Ms Brooke Galloway, Internet and e-commerce senior analyst at IDC Australia.
``If you can allow a customer to service themselves you can reduce your operating costs quite significantly, then refocus those staff and resources you have to deal with customers in more value-added services," she said.
``Many companies are aware the opportunity is there, but I think the majority would be struggling to get it in. But this isn't out of the box, shrink-wrapped stuff; it still needs to be customised, and it's an issue of getting the technology to support your business."
But as potential benefits become widely recognised, self-service technology is quickly earning its keep as a way of driving change and efficiency through organisations that can use it effectively.
© 2001 Sydney Morning Herald