April 15 2007

Proactive chat reduces costs and increases sales

US contact centre solutions company Kana has launched a proactive online chat solution, following beta testing by a couple of US companies, including Dell. I spoke to Michael Fields, Chairman and CEO of Kana, about how web and contact centre solutions can increase customer service and reduce costs.

Kana was set up in 1996 to offer customer service solutions for eservice, assisted service and customer self-service. Its systems are highly scalable solutions for enterprise-level customers. To ensure that they work seamlessly with web and contact centre management systems, the company works closely with IBM, Sable and Siebel to ensure compatibility.

The company reported record growth last year and now has 600 customers across the financial services, telecommunications and retail industries. Its main focus has been on the telecommunications and financial services industries who were early adopters of customer contract technologies.

With 80 customers worldwide, retail makes up the smallest of Kana's three vertical markets - customers include Sears, Walmart.com, eBay, priceline.com and Tiffany.

Email response Ebay, for example, uses the company's 'Response' system to keep up with its flood of email enquiries. 90% of the 125,000 - 150,000 emails it receives each week are responded to within twelve hours.

Yahoo uses similar technology to automatically reply to customers who have forgotten their password. Obviously, trying to handle these large levels of emails by hand would be prohibitive to any business and since many are based around the same issue - forgotten password or order status - business rules can be set and responses automated. An agent can then view and authorise outbound emails which have been produced automatically. One contact centre agent, for example, can send out 500 emails a day.

Kana has three solutions for the customer support arena and is constantly working on solutions to handle the evolution of customer support and how customers wish to interact with companies.

Multi-channel knowledge database At the core of its solutions is the knowledge base, which can be used across all of the channels a company operates in - web, contact centre, shop. By having the same information available to all employees, a retailer can ensure that a customer is always given the same information and receives the same, correct response to an enquiry.

Within the contact centre itself, the knowledge base can be used to bring up information to answer a customer's query as the agent is typing in the question and talking to the customer over the telephone or via chat. This could also be linked into a view of the customer's online journey so that the agent can see which pages the customer has already viewed so that they do not just tell the customer to look at the FAQs they have already viewed without finding the answer to their query. It can also be linked in to customer history.

Live chat According to Mike Fields, retailers have to ask themselves "Do you have the knowledge?" and if the answer is yes, "Do you have a way of disseminating that information? And the right software to accommodate it?

"Chat is a way of delivering knowledge," said Fields With the right kind of knowledge base ie. an email response or chat could be generated by software but as far as the customer is concerned they are communicating with a person. This is all the future, of course, but the chat could be switched over to a 'live agent' if the system realised it was necessary.

During its trials of the chat software, Dell had hoped that each contact centre agent would be to handle 15 live chats simultaneously, but it found that this was an unreasonable amount for one person to handle. It has since reduced its expectations to around the 1:4 ratio which is accepted as best practice. More automation though could change the interaction ratio in the future from 1:4 to 1:40.

Reduce costs Rather than reducing the number of seats required in a contact centre, the companies which are using the Kana systems have found that they have had to slow down recruitment as they have grown. O2 changed 30 to 40 processes to web self-service upon implementation. "It makes agents more productive and raises capacity," says Kana of its solutions. "It's a work strategy rather than a staff cost".

As well as the work efficiencies, the systems also reduce training times with agents able to go live in half the time it previously took to train them. US telco Sprint (which has 27,000 contact centre agents), has reduced training time from 3 months to 6 weeks.

Another of Kana's US customers, Wacovia Bank, achieved a 39% reduction in its abandonment rate when it introduced co-browse and 'click to chat' capabilities. The customer initiated chat has been available for a number of years but Kana has only now introduced proactive chat to its bundle of services.

As with reactive chat, the proactive chat can be run to set business rules so that it is only offered to certain customers in set situations, ie someone spending a long time looking through terms and conditions of a mortgage, or a high spending, key account customer visiting the site.

But what about the future of chat? Is it the new paradigm for the teenagers and children used to having multiple chats online? Fields seems to think so and draws comparisons with teenagers asking product questions on forums and chatting on social networking sites. "Social networking affects how customers get information on products and services," he said.

"Misinformation in a social network can have an impact on the perception of your product," he said. It just takes one person to give out the wrong response to a query.

Rather than reading product manuals or the technical information on the retailer's or brand's sites, customers are turning to each other, social networks and forums for answers to product-related queries. "How do we harness this knowledge base?" asks Fields. Retailers must monitor forums and social networking sites is his response. "Bad information has eight times the impact of good information," he commented, and information spreads faster on the internet.

Kana continues to investigate how customer service is changing and how people are interacting on the internet. It is working with IBM and investigating text-to-voice interaction by linking interactive voice response (IVR) to its knowledge-base solution. The company is also working on a system to provide simultaneous translation.

Emma Herrod