In The News

Service Saves Face
Best Practices

By Gabe Armstrong

A complex IVR was anything but fun and games for customers of Activision. The entertainment software maker faced a 50 percent abandonment rate on calls to its contact center. "Half of our phone calls just went away," says Jim Summers, vice president, quality assurance and customer support. "The old system was limited to nine digits and people's brains are limited to four digits," he says.

After analyzing its support operation, Summers discovered that more than 60 percent of Activision's callers are what he refers to as insight contacts: customers whose issues are basic enough to be entirely solved with an automated self-service agent. "I could not envision supporting a 24-hour call-center operation, [so] I made a strategic decision that the future of our tech support was to go to self-help," he says.

To make the plan a reality, Activision implemented a TuVox voice self-service system that provides answers to callers' problems with a conversational interface. Using a natural language speech application, the system walks callers through a "diagnostic tree" built on keywords, Summers says. Whereas a typical IVR is linear, progressing from one numerical menu to the next, the self-help tool jumps customers from one response to another without any sequential constraints. The system also "learns" customer behavior by recording query patterns based on customers' interaction with the system.

"I want the customer to feel like they are on their way in two or three mouse clicks," Summers says, likening the contact center experience to the RightNow-powered online customer support system Activision uses.

Summers' strategy has staved the disappearance of customers who try to contact Activision for support issues. The company has cut its abandonment rate to less than 10 percent, and only 38 percent of all calls escalate to a live agent. In those cases, the agent's screen is prepopulated with any relevant information, shortening call handle time. Activision provides the 24/7 support that was previously out of reachand by doing so is able to resolve 92 percent of customer issues using email and self-service both online and in the contact center. Best of all, Activision found that 85 percent of customers polled were satisfied with their self-service experience.

Summers says automated self-help is where companies should all be heading these days. "Those who resist self-help will be left behind," he says. "It's the way to go."

Panasonic Customers Demand Answers

Electronics giant Panasonic spent two years conducting thousands of one-on-one interviews with customers to uncover their expectations. "We conducted real interviews with real customers in real product situations to determine the best way to improve the experience with the brand and delight the customer," says Bob Greenburg, vice president of Panasonic's North America Brand Marketing Group. One outcome was the realization that the company needed to provide immediate responses to customer inquiries.

Meeting that need came in the form of an interactive, Web-based technology: Conversagent's Automated Service Agent (ASA), a chat bot that uses artificial intelligence to address very specific questions Panasonic's customers might have. Customers have their questions answered in an instant messagingtype text chat interface, called AskPanasonic. Instead of an agent on the other end, questions are answered by the chat bot. Customers type questions and the bot recognizes keywords in the queries and matches them with programmed responses.

"We put the priority on eliminating waiting and giving an instant response," Greenburg says. The bot replies with a single answer, not a list of possible responses, making it far easier for customers to simply ask questions and get straightforward responses. Panasonic did not have data regarding call deflections and cost savings, but a spokesperson says the primary purpose of improving its service response was to build its brand preference among customers and boost its revenue in a rapidly growing category.

The chat bots work hand-in-hand with Panasonic's 200-agent call center, according to Greenburg. The ASA can escalate automated chat sessions into contact centers, giving the live customer support reps the full transcript (with the query that triggered the escalation highlighted) of the session. Customers using this feature have experienced a significant (25 to 40 percent) reduction in call time.

The system provides extreme flexibility in customizing the responses bots deliver. For example, internal testing of the ASA among Panasonic's employees across a number of areas (e.g., engineering, marketing, sales) was conducted for about three weeks before AskPanasonic launched on its consumer Web site. Content additions as a result of session activity generated during this trial period represented about a 15 percent increase versus the initial content loaded into the ASA. In some cases natural language recognition was tweaked to accommodate some unanticipated lines of questioning regarding technical features.

Greenburg stresses the importance of companies moving to automated self-service to succeed in meeting customers' ever-increasing expectations. "Companies that will survive into the 21st century are only those that can provide an experience to the customer with sufficient service and support to drive a new level of customer delight," he says. "This has always been the goal of Panasonic, and adding the ASA functionality is another step toward reaching that goal."

AAA Helps Customers Hit the Road

It's a common scenario: A contact center is so overwhelmed with calls on easy-to-resolve issues that the more important calls wind up taking a back seat. AAA of Minnesota and Iowa sought to avoid this dilemma. "We are in an environment where we put a lot of stress on our call center," says Joe Alessi, vice president of marketing and information technology. "We needed to find a way to mitigate the customers' usage of the contact center."

Many of the calls flooding AAA of Minnesota/Iowa's contact center were simple issues like balance requests, changes of address, and renewal-related billing questionsmost of which could be handled via self-service, according to Alessi. However, AAA of Minnesota/Iowa's IVR system was being used to resolve only 1 percent of those calls. This was taking time away from agents' most important calls: roadside assistance and travel planning services.

The solution was to implement an Avaya-powered, natural language speech self-service system that could handle basic issues, giving agents more time to concentrate on complex ones. Customers who call in can use the systems to check their account balances, renew or even upgrade memberships, and request travel materials, as well as update their status regarding roadside assistance requests, including canceling a request or requesting the estimated time for help to arrive. "It's bulletproof," Alessi says of the system, referring to its high ROI.

Alessi's goal was to increase the number of customer calls completed via self-service from 1 percent to 15 percent using the Avaya system. But the system is so successful it now captures 36 percent of all service calls. As a result, the organization was able to consolidate six call centers into three, employing about 800 agents altogether. Additionally, AAA of Minnesota/Iowa is saving approximately $2 per call, compared to calls handled by a live agent. "Part of the ROI calculation was to save and redirect human resources," Alessi says. One aspect of the self-service system that helped smooth adoption is its natural language capabilities. The company predicted that many older customers would not take well to automated speech. But surveying customers has proven this theory wrong. According to Avaya's research, the majority of customers polled are happy with the new system. "Many of [our older customers] go through the system not even realizing they are speaking to an automated agent," Alessi says.

AAA of Minnesota/Iowa has benefited by using the system to counter agent turnover, while improving both employee and customer satisfaction. Tenured, highly skilled agents can focus on the priority issues, like roadside assistance. The automated agent helps fill in the gaps. "An automated agent comes to work every day, has a positive attitude every day, and can be trained with the flick of a switch," Alessi says.

Change Comes to Change Management

What was once a topic for academic discussion is now becoming a business imperative. Today, change management is often expected to accompany new business strategies.

Change management is defined as a driver used to manage the people, process, or system factors of change to achieve intended business outcomes, according to the 2005 Conference Board report, "The Changing Face of Change Management." Put simply, it's making sure that ideas get executed.

According to the Conference Board study, 540 CEOs worldwide say that speed, flexibility, and adaptability to change is one of their greatest business challenges, second only to top-line growth. "What's going on is that more businesses realize that change is a constant, and they need organizational capabilities to deal with it," says Lynne Morton, principal at change management consultancy Performance Improvement Solutions and author of the Conference Board report. "The desire is not to do change as a one-off process, but make it a capability. We used to think there was one event that caused change, but that's not true."

Morton spots three other emerging ideas in the change management arena:

• Including boards of directors in change initiatives, particularly around leadership. For what seems like the first time, there is accountability for change relative to leadership and talent up the organization, she says.
• Continuing senior leader involvement in change. Morton cites Mattel and Johnson & Johnson as good examples of companies doing change from the top. Mattel CEO Robert Eckert turned around a "tanking" company by aggressively promoting new initiatives in a nonconfrontational way, Morton says. "There were opportunities for everyone in the organization to get involved," she says.
• Integrating change management with talent management.
  Talent management is the idea of having the right person doing the right work at the right time. It's a hot topic in the business world, and it has an important connection to change management, Morton says. "Talent management is usually initiated to drive change or make it take hold," she says.

Yet one continuing obstacle to effective change is the traditional block from middle management. In many cases managers have seen countless projects come and go and are wary of the next CEO jumping headlong into yet another great new initiative. "Companies pay less attention to middle management than they ought to," Morton says. She suggests that middle management can help support change within an organization if they are involved in helping shape the change. "It will stick that way," which is the goal of any change management program.