Helping Your Customers Help Themselves

Accenture research illustrates that communications service providers should seriously consider implementing robust self-service options and customer service solutions for their customers today. Doing so will allow them to simultaneously improve the economics and performance of their customer-contact operations. These advances, in turn, will allow these companies to take significant steps on their journey to high performance.

Self-service has become a compelling option for customers in recent years. Before launching a large-scale rollout of self-service, however, service providers need to be aware of the organizational and technological challenges they are likely to face.

To help them understand—and ultimately overcome these obstacles—Accenture conducted an in-depth survey of 1,600 randomly selected communications customers. This research suggests several important operational and technology-related actions that will help providers deliver self-service applications that fully meet their customers' needs. By taking these actions, companies can be more confident that their self-service solutions will generate the business benefits that are critical to service provider performance-today and in the near future.

While tempting because of their ease of implementation, one-size-fits-all self-service solutions is not likely to be the best strategy for service providers to pursue. Our survey findings indicate that there are different segments of customers with vastly different preferences for when and how to use self-service.

Operationally, providers should:

• Use customer insights to determine which customers and transactions are candidates for shifting to self-service and which type of self-service channels customers prefer.
  
  
• Take a "channel" approach to ensure that customer needs, value and cost-to-serve are aligned with the appropriate self-service applications.
  
  
• Ensure a high degree of customer usability in all self-service operations. This encourages use and provides a superior customer experience.
  
  
• Devise and use appropriate metrics that can help determine the business value of self-service operations. This goes beyond simply measuring the number of customers using self-service instead of live representatives.

Perhaps most importantly, however, service providers should define a customer interaction strategy based on who their customers are and what they want. To differentiate service according to customer insights, providers will need to build integrated capabilities for analyzing customer data, modeling typical behaviors and segmenting the customer base. It will also require creating appropriate links among existing customer channels.

Several emerging technologies can also improve the effectiveness of a provider's self-service solutions.

Natural Language Processing Yields Benefits—One such technology is "natural language processing," which significantly enhances customers' ability to serve themselves via speech-recognition and online applications. Speech technology can provide numerous operational benefits, including fewer calls to agents, shorter calls, reduced hold times and fewer abandoned calls. These can translate into real bottom-line results.

By implementing its own speech recognition system, Bell Canada reduced the number of misdirected calls by 660,000, which saved 1.7 million minutes and $5 million annually. It also saw an increase of 32 percent in self-activation of services, which cut the cost of sale from $6 to $0.25.

Web Services Increase Adoption—Another emerging technology helping service providers smooth the adoption of self-service is Web Services. These solutions, which integrate the "spaghetti" of legacy call-center systems and allow companies to build new applications in a standardized way, are particularly important in delivering an integrated customer experience across multiple channels.

Verizon has experienced early success with Web Services by developing a Web portal for its enterprise customers. The portal, which is integrated with more than 30 back-end systems via web services technology, has enabled the company to enhance customer value in the form of better and quicker access to information, while decreasing its costs to serve this market segment. More than 25 percent of Verizon's enterprise customers are registered and actively using the Web portal.

Don't Forget Security—Finally, providers should implement technologies that ensure the security of self-service transactions. According to the survey respondents, nearly half of online customers who do not pay bills online avoid doing so primarily because they don't trust the safety of their information on the Web.

But security concerns are not limited to the Internet. Forty-one percent of offline customers said they would consider using automated telephone systems more often if companies guaranteed the security of such transactions. Therefore, service providers deploying self-service must ensure that security is tight. And they must continually reassure customers that their personal information is protected from hackers.

The Potential Benefits are Substantial

With the demands for higher business performance more intense than ever, service providers must take bold, aggressive steps now to improve their customer-service operations. A major component of this effort should be customer self-service.

While customer demand for self-service is strong, the telecommunications industry has barely scratched the surface of the potential benefits self-service can generate. Fortunately, processes and technologies now exist that can lure providers from the self-service sidelines. Soon, all service providers will be using self-service as a value-generating asset that can help sustain growth for years to come.

Lynn McMahon, partner, Communications & High Tech, is the managing partner of Accenture's Murray Hill Innovation Center. Stuart Taylor, associate partner, Communications & High Tech, focuses on helping communications companies improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their Customer Relationship Management capabilities.