Challenges Aplenty

Spruicking self-service ROI is all well and good but challenges nonetheless abound, not least that servicing today's customer is very information intensive, and delivering relevant content remains tough, requiring a blend of both static information and transactional content. And as Aberdeen notes, to understand the empowered customer you need systems that continuously monitor how different customers use Web sites, and also let marketers execute, rather than simply monitor, aggregate and analyze. "To address these challenges, smart sellers are building online 'answer repositories' that not only expose corporate knowledge to the customer but also better manage back-and-forth collaboration between subject matter experts and interested customers," Aberdeen says.

So while many organizations are already gathering data and putting it into a customer relationship management system, the tricky bit is gathering and consolidating all the information about a customer's activities - not just what he or she clicked on or responded to, but how much time elapsed between the first question and the second question, and whether they read the pop-up ad that appeared between questions.

"Can you or can you not gather the data that [customers] are basically providing you by going through those clicks? In other words, one set of information that you gather from the customer is what he has ultimately done. [That is, he] . . . went into the Charles Schwab account, went into the Merrill Lynch account, got this, got that, the following things occurred. But you also want to know where the customer stayed, how long he stayed, what decisions he made, if he went back and forth. All of that kind of stuff is available to you on the Web, but it is very difficult to gather, so that is also a challenge," Ghadar says.

Although eBay and other organizations are already doing such analysis, Ghadar says it will take 18 months for such business intelligence and reporting capabilities to really take off. Implementation is currently a big issue, he says.

So is integration, according to advertising and search company Sensis CIO Dr Len Carver. Sensis - which Carver says is probably one of the largest face-to-face sales forces in Australia - looks after some 42,000 advertisers, all of whom are reflected in its Siebel databases. There is a range of self-service offerings that Sensis is investing in its self-service model, including the ability to change White Pages records online and to view ad proofs and bills.

"I think self-service is the direction that the industry is moving, particularly as the industry becomes more e-oriented," Carver says. "I think the challenges are in the integration to your back-end systems, and I think it's fair to say we have our challenges in much the same way that any of them do. If I look at my time in the banking industry, integrating your CRM solution into the back-end account management system is just as challenging as it is for us to integrate it into our back-end content management system where we manage the content of customers."

Sensis has had Siebel implemented for almost four years, and Carver says it now has a basic self-service environment, which it is growing. There are currently perhaps 9 percent of customers doing self-service, and the intention is to move most customers onto self-service over time. But Carver warns against the dangers of focusing too much on self-service delivery. "You still want to manage your more profitable relationships face-to-face," he says. "Not only does the customer expect it, you want to be able to do that."

You also have to give consumers choice, Carver says. Sensis believes the power is vested with the consumer, and although the company might have a view of where it would like to take the market, ultimately it recognizes it is there to serve the customer, not the other way around.

And those customers have very particular notions of how they want to interact with companies. Recent research studies have revealed that consumers have very low levels of satisfaction with online FAQs and automated interactive voice response systems (IVRs). But US-based online self-service technology firm Conversagent CEO Stephen Klein says the research indicates that consumers do give high marks to online chat with live support, and recent customer deployments and analysis of the performance of their product Automated Service Agent (ASA v3.0) indicates a very high level of satisfaction and repeat usage.