Lessons in Self-Service Leadership

By now, most companies have come to realize that effective self-service is an essential component of any CRM strategy.

From the customer's point of view, self-service is important because it allows them to get immediate answers to their questions 24 hours a day, seven days a week-regardless of what hours the company's contact center is actually open. From the CFO's point of view, self-service is important because it allows questions to be answered at near-zero cost-allowing companies to grow revenue without increasing their contact center overhead.

Many customer service managers, however, are still looking for ways to fully optimize the effectiveness of their self-service performance. Often, these managers have invested significant resources into the creation of self-service content and systems without achieving hoped-for results. Sometimes it's because the content doesn't seem to adequately align with customers' needs. Other times, it's because customers don't seem to be able to find the content they need-even though it is, in fact, available.

Other companies, in marked contrast, have achieved stunning results with self-service-answering 95% or more of their customers' questions without human intervention. Some of these companies have literally saved millions of dollars and gained ten-fold returns or more on their self-service investments.

These self-service leaders, it turns out, achieve these results by applying several straightforward-but extremely powerful-best practices to their self-service implementations. Their examples offer valuable lessons to any customer service organizations seeking to achieve worldclass self-service performance.

KODAK: INTEGRATING VOICE AND WEB SELF-SERVICE

Kodak is one of the world's great brands, with an unmatched reputation for reliability and customer satisfaction. Kodak is also committed to leadership in the digital photography market. That's why it's very important for the company to optimize the customer's quality-of-experience with Kodak EasyShare Gallery, an online service for managing, protecting, and sharing digital pictures-as well as ordering prints and specialty photo products.

Unfortunately, that's easier said than done. As digital cameras became increasingly popular and more customers visited the site, Kodak became less able to respond to customer calls with its customary speed and accuracy. The problem became especially pronounced during spikes in call volume, especially those that occurred during the holiday season. And those spikes were driving up costs. So Kodak had to take steps to improve the scalability and efficiency of its contact center.

Those steps included implementing web and voice self-service, which enabled Kodak to automatically answer a wide range of customer questions by phone and via the web 24 hours a day, seven days a week. This automation quickly reduced contact center workloads, saving the company money and ensuring its ability to deliver a superior customer experience any time of the day or night. As a result, Kodak can continue profitably growing its online business while protecting its worldwide brand.

The voice-enabled self-service knowledge base lets customers find answers to their most common questions by speaking their answers to a series of automated questions and/or using their phone's touch-tone keypad. This allows Kodak to provide prompt service any time of the day or night with no labor cost.

Because the same knowledge base is used to provide self-service over the web, Kodak can maintain consistency of information across all channels and manage all of its knowledge in just one place.

Kodak also provides its customers with self-service access to a Sybase database that allows them to get answers about their own individual accounts. Because roughly 35% of the company's overall call volume comes from customers checking on the status of an order, this resource has had a significant impact on both the quality of the Kodak customer experience and on its contact center costs. Customers simply speak or punch in appropriate numbers or answers as prompted, and are able to determine their order status, again avoiding more costly support channels.

At the same time, Kodak is taking advantage of its self-service system to better understand the needs and behaviors of its customers. For example, if the system indicates that customers are asking repetitive questions about ordering products online, Kodak's website design staff can re-evaluate the corresponding web pages and make any necessary changes.

Within a few months of deployment, Kodak's voice self-service system was handling 21,000 calls per month-significantly reducing its call center workload. Just as important, Kodak was able to acquire the technology it required to implement this self-service system under a "software as a service" (SaaS) delivery model-which meant that it did not have to allocate capital or staff resources to ownership of the software and associated IT infrastructure.

In addition to meeting its immediate needs, the SaaS-based self-service system has positioned Kodak EasyShare Gallery well for continued profitable growth. The company will be able to handle more customers without increased spending on call center staff-and will be able to scale its call capacity without having to worry about server hardware and network bandwidth.

BEN & JERRY'S: FINE-TUNING CONTENT AND SEARCH

Ben & Jerry's built its ice cream empire on an irresistible product and a unique, consumer-friendly brand. But as use of the internet grew, it faced a customer service crisis. Customers were flocking to the company website and flooding the Consumer Affairs department with emails. At one point, the company had a backlog of 6,000 emails-which could take as long as four months to reply to.

Fortunately, because so many customer questions pertained to common issues, online self-service was a perfect fit for Ben & Jerry's needs. The company came up with a knowledge base containing about 200 answers that customers could search on its website by using keywords or browsing through various categories.

However, they didn't stop there. The company continued to refine its online knowledge base-adding content based on the questions its customers asked over time and modifying the wording of existing content based on customer feedback.

Ben & Jerry's also found that it could improve its self-service success rate by fine-tuning its search rules. At one point, for example, the company realized that it would help to remove the phrase "ice cream" from customers' keyword searches-since it was contained in so many searches and so many online answers.

This continuous fine-tuning of content and search rules has resulted in a self-service system that enables more than 99.7 percent of people who visit the site to find their answers without having to ask for personal assistance. As a result, email backlog is a thing of the past, and the company can provide "high-touch" service with a staff of just four people.

CENTERS FOR MEDICARE AND MEDICAID SERVICES (CMS): THE 80/20 RULE

Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) faces a massive information delivery challenge on a daily basis. The agency has to provide fast answers to more than 80 million program beneficiaries, healthcare service providers, and CMS staff. It has to keep that information accurate and up-to-date, despite the scale and complexity of government healthcare programs. And it has to quickly respond to change whenever it occurs-from cataclysmic events like Hurricane Katrina to the smallest modification in an agency policy.

Highly effective self-service has enabled CMS to succeed on all counts. The agency has done an extraordinary job of leveraging the web as an information delivery channel, answering more than 99% of www.Medicare.gov visitors' questions automatically-even with traffic in excess of 1.75 million page views per week.

CMS makes it easy for site visitors to quickly pinpoint the specific information they need. A "Questions" link in the site's main navigation bar takes visitors to a page that enables them to search the agency's knowledge base with phrases and keywords. That content is rigorously maintained using internal workfiow tools. As soon as someone in the agency recognizes that a new standardized "answer" needs to be created-or that an existing one needs to be updated-he or she can initiate the process. The answer is then appropriately reviewed and approved by authorized content managers. The system tracks the process and provides complete version control capabilities. Answers can also be flagged for reevaluation at a pre-set time in the future to ensure they don't become "stale" as a result of neglect.

One particularly powerful feature of CMS's self-service system is its "Top 20" topic list. This is a list of the 20 topics that are currently most popular with site visitors. It is automatically and continuously updated based on the changing behavior of site visitors. So if a change in a prescription assistance policy causes visitors to suddenly start searching for that particular piece of information in larger numbers, that information will quickly "bubble up" to the top of the list.

This feature is important because a large percentage of visitors to almost any web site are typically looking for answers to a relatively limited number of questions. Those questions may change over time-but, in general, the "80/20" rule remains in effect: 80 percent of visitors are interested in about 20 percent of knowledge base content. It's also the case that self-service is most effective when visitors can find what they're looking for with the lowest number of mouse clicks.

Therefore, by presenting the most popular knowledge items to site visitors right away, CMS is able to maximize the number of visitors who find what they're looking for without even having to enter search terms or browse their way through a hierarchical search.

Site visitors to Medicare.gov take advantage of these resources on average more than 670,000 times every month. Only about 4,000 of these sessions result in an issue being escalated to the CMS contact center-an impressive self-service rate of 99.4 percent.

This high self-service rate benefits both the agency and the constituencies it serves. For citizens and providers, this online success means that they can find immediate answers to their most pressing questions 24 hours a day, seven days a week. For the agency, it means reduced phone, email, and "snail mail" workloads. The site is also useful for agency staff and other government employees who need to quickly access healthcare policy information.

Online self-service can be particularly beneficial when there is suddenly a huge demand for information relating to an event such as Hurricane Katrina or a major reform in Medicare prescription plans. Such events can potentially overwhelm CMS's contact center resources. But with an effective self-service system in place, the necessary information can be posted quickly and easily on the site where it's easy to find-and where links to other related site content can be readily provided.

For example, as a recent deadline for choosing a prescription plan approached, as many as 5,269,300 visitors accessed the Medicare.gov site every day. That volume would have overwhelmed the agency's contact center if its self-service system wasn't there to handle the workload.

Citizens and providers can also "subscribe" to specific answers, so that they're automatically notified if and when any updates are made. This ensures that relevant news is immediately "pushed" out to whoever needs it.

CMS has also leveraged several of its databases to further enhance the effectiveness of its online self-service system. Site visitors can access the databases to compare and find their way to local facilities. They can search for hospitals, doctors, and nursing homes by state, city, county, or proximity to a given zip code, as well as by specific criteria. Once they find the best facility for their individual need, the system provides them with a map and/or driving directions.

TRAVELOCITY: KNOWLEDGE AS A COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE

Many companies are discovering that the content of their self-service knowledge bases needn't be restricted to information about their own products and services. Instead, they've learned the value of expanding the scope of those knowledge bases so that they can become trusted advisers to their customers about a wider range of related topics.

Travelocity is a prime example of such a company. The online travel business is definitely a challenging one. To succeed, customers have to be able to trust Travelocity with their complex and critical travel transactions. If something goes wrong and they have a bad experience, the company can lose their business forever. Travelocity also has to run an extremely efficient operation to keep prices down-because customers can go elsewhere with just a few mouse clicks.

One way that Travelocity maintains customer loyalty is by providing a website that they can depend on for all kinds of travel-related information. This rich self-service resource keeps them coming back to Travelocity and positions the company as an authority on all aspects of the travel and hospitality industry.

Thus, when the entire travel industry was transformed on 9/11, Travelocity was able to quickly put together about 200 question/answer pairs to address its customers' top concerns. In less than two weeks, Travelocity customers were getting the answers they needed online. This eased the phone call and email workloads that threatened to overwhelm Travelocity's contact centers.

And when Hurricane Katrina struck, Travelocity proved so adept at generating relevant, up-to-the-minute content for its self-service system that the Wall Street Journal actually directed their readers to Travelocity's site as an authoritative reference. That month, there were more than 400,000 hits on the site's Katrina-related content alone.

These same capabilities enable Travelocity to quickly roll out new capabilities and capitalize on emerging business opportunities to extend its competitive differentiation-since it can quickly support new features and programs with helpful self-service content.

Travelocity also leverages its self-service knowledge base internally and with its outsourcers, so that even relatively inexperienced staff can answers customers' most common questions like an industry veteran. The use of a single knowledge base across and beyond the organization ensures that customers get the same accurate, precisely worded answers regardless of whether they're looking online, using voice self-service, talking to an outsourced call center, or inquiring about their issue via email.

These companies are just a few among many that are effectively using self-service to deliver a superior customer experience, reduce costs, and keep their finger on the pulse of the market. They've succeeded in part because they use the right technology-voice systems capable of speech recognition, knowledge bases that can track user activity and automatically maintain a "Top 20" list, workflow tools that facilitate diligent ongoing management of self-service content, etc.

But they've also succeeded because they've implemented appropriate best practices. They've tuned content and search functions in response to customer behaviors. They've integrated back-end databases with their self-service systems to provide richer content to their customers. And they've responded to the insights they've gained from customers' self-service activity to make substantive improvements to the customer experience.

These same technologies and best practices are available to everyone. So there's no reason that any business or public sector organization should continue operating without the benefits offered by effective self-service. At a time when just about every company is under pressure to do more with less, self-service is indispensable. And, as the examples above demonstrate, it can deliver tremendous ROI-if you do it right.