Impersonal Touch Has Its Merits

Randy Hardin is an e-business's dream customer. To solve problems, the IT support and operations manager for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has taken advantage of Dell Computer's online support capabilities so extensively that he and his employees have managed to become certified as Dell technicians.

They now rarely reach out to the vendor for product support. "We call them only as an absolute last resort," Hardin says.

It may sound implausible, but that's precisely what many e-businesses, and even some of their customers, want: minimal interaction except for the most complex, critical problems. Anything below this threshold can be managed online, proponents of Web-based customer service maintain.

Benefits to customers include reduced service costs, better knowledge of products they purchase and, in the Journal-Constitution's case, the opportunity to redeploy workers from easily automated tasks, such as system monitoring, to support internal users.

While the newspaper hasn't yet tallied its savings from online support, Hardin thinks the numbers will be impressive. "As our systems get off warranty, we'll have plenty of experience to fix them and save money" by avoiding support calls, he says.

Benefits to the e-business are similar: reduced reliance on pricey support reps to field customer inquiries, the ability to redeploy those reps to more strategic product areas and even the opportunity to use automated tools to reach new customer segments.

Such benefits are borne out by InternetWeek's 1999 Transformation of the Enterprise survey, in which half of 1,000 corporate and IT managers say the Internet has altered their delivery of customer service.

Among the same base of managers, 65 percent say Internet technologies (which include automated customer service) let them retrain/redeploy staff, while 59 percent say the Internet enables them to be more productive without hiring as many people as originally planned.

The benefits of online customer service are by no means confined to IT vendors such as Dell. Premier service organizations such as United Parcel Service and TD Bank Financial Group are leveraging the Web to automate service functions.

UPS, for example, automates the handling of the 1.2 million package tracking requests it receives per day. Some 40 percent of those requests don't come from UPS's own home page but from the home pages of customers that have implemented UPS package tracking tools to build links to the package delivery vendor, says Dale Hayes, vice president of electronic commerce and technology marketing.

This service model illustrates one of the recurring maxims of online customer service: Bring the necessary service tools to customers so they can easily fulfill their requirements where they're most comfortable doing so.

"Why should customers have to leave a place of business and come to us to track a package?" Hayes says.

The potential cost savings in automating such tasks are staggering. An average order status phone call costs $2.50 vs. less than 10 cents when the status check is automated, UPS estimates.

Bank On It
Other companies are attaining similarly impressive results.

TD Bank Financial has automated the handling of routine tasks such as e-mail customer inquiries and mortgage renewals (a process unique to the Canadian banking market, whereby a person must renew a mortgage after five years or so).

Renewing mortgages online through the bank's internally developed application costs cents as opposed to hundreds of dollars for an in-person interaction in a bank branch, says Steve Gesner, vice president of interactive services at TD Bank, which now sells to consumers mostly on its Web site. "There is both incremental sales and huge cost efficiencies," he says.

Customers who use these applications are "self-selecting," Gesner says. Even among those consumers the bank prefers to serve in person because of their financial resources, many choose to handle routine tasks such as mortgage renewals online.

TD Bank's experience validates another finding from InternetWeek's Transformation of the Enterprise survey: Companies think the vast majority of their customers react favorably to Internet capabilities. Eighty-one percent of 700 non-IT managers surveyed say their customers have reacted positively.

The bank also uses an automated e-mail response application from Brightware that lets it manage a massive increase in volume without adding employees. The bank now handles more than 12,000 e-mail inquiries a month vs. 2,000 in 1997. The bank still employs just five people to respond to e-mails that require human intervention, Gesner says; 40 percent are being handled without intervention.

Despite such successes, some major companies still aren't convinced that automated e-mail response systems are dependable enough.

UPS and Southwest Airlines, for example, staunchly maintain that automated software programs can't ensure the quality or accuracy necessary to maintain their customer service standards. Southwest, in fact, doesn't even accept customer e-mails at its Web site.

"We want to give our customers specific answers to their questions instead of form letters," says Jim Ruppel, director of customer relations at Southwest Airlines.

While the airline may be skeptical of automated e-mail, it's embracing the Web for other customer service functions. It recently gave customers online access to frequent-flyer account information, for instance, and it has offered online ticketing since early 1996.

Among those companies that use automated e-mail handling, Dell says its system--it won't identify the developer--delivers 86 percent response accuracy. While that percentage may seem adequate, some disagree.

"What if I'm one of the 14 percent who got the wrong answer?" asks Steve Robins, Internet computing strategies analyst at the Yankee Group, which recently completed a cross-industry study ranking the quality of automated e-mail responses.

Some of the fastest, most accurate responses the Yankee Group received were from retailers L.L. Bean and Lands' End. But the quality of their online service reflects those companies' service orientation more than their Web expertise, Robins says. He recommends a hybrid approach of automated and human responses to e-mails, with an underlying business process that mimics humans serving customers.

The downside to heavy reliance on automated e-mail response systems, Robins says, is that it may turn customers off and prompt them to look elsewhere. Because the offending company may never hear from that customer again, it may not be aware of its inadequate service, he says.

The goal, Robins says, should be to replicate online the processes that are otherwise managed by people.

"Call centers that take in phone calls have elaborate processes to handle calls," he says. "Everything there needs to happen on the Web as well." These include call queuing, call routing and workflow.

Online customer service will be most successful when e-businesses follow the adage of placing their customer first.

Pete Solvik, CIO of Cisco Systems, perhaps the world's largest e-business, recounted personal online service frustrations to illustrate the importance of a customer orientation.

Solvik checked his account at an online financial brokerage on a recent Sunday night only to learn after calling that the downtime he experienced was due to scheduled maintenance. It was an explanation that should have been proactively delivered to all site visitors to avert frustration, he says.

"The last thing a customer should have to do when being on the Web is call a company on the phone," Solvik says. "That's a failure of the Web experience."

He adds: "Availability's got to be defined in the customer's terms, not in the company's terms."

Companies can wield the power of the Internet not only to improve the customer's experience, but also to create new business opportunities.

Consolidated Freightways Corp., for example, is using a Web sales automation application from New Channel Inc. to serve smaller customers than it could target with its high-overhead direct sales force. The application monitors Web visitors' activity to determine the appropriate time for a Consolidated employee to open up an online discussion with a prospective customer. While the application has yet to deliver significant top-line benefits, it has advanced the company's strategy to serve a new class of customers, Consolidated says.

"It allows us to establish and create qualified sales leads, which in our business is expensive to do," says Marty Larson, director of e-commerce and marketing technology at Consolidated. "We can then shoot leads out to our field sales force for that face-to-face call."

Whichever customer service application a company may try to automate, viewing customer service as a business process that must be actively managed is one of the primary building blocks in a successful e-business.

"The most important component of an e-commerce site is customer service," says David Wetherell, chairman of Internet incubator CMGI Inc. "Too often, it's an afterthought."