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| Technology: Got Information? |
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| Written by Jill Rose |
| Sunday, 01 November 2009 00:00 |
 Fifteen years ago, 90% of customers were served on the phone at eSignal, a Hayward, Calif.-based provider of financial information to individual traders and institutions. Today, phone calls represent 40% of the business; the rest is conducted via live chat and e-mail. The company started with chat 11 years ago when it first put all of its products online, according to Scott Johnson, vice president of client services. “We wanted customers to be able to stay in the platform and click a button to start chatting with us. We also wanted to do co-browsing,” said Johnson, who has been with eSignal for 21 years. That original chat product, NetAgent, is now part of a suite of online customer experience tools from Bellevue, Wash.-based nGenera CIM. The company’s client list includes Saks Fifth Avenue, Fidelity, and Microsoft. Other vendors in this space include Omniture, Coremetrics, and Kana Software. Wade Phieffer, general manager of nGenera CIM, says companies find chat and co-browsing one of the strongest retention tools. “If customers are having trouble on your site, they can click on the chat-with-us button. Or you can set it up so someone in customer service is be notified that a potential customer has been on a page for a certain amount of time. They initiate a chat, asking ‘Can I help you?’” said Phieffer. “This greatly reduces page and shopping cart abandonment.” Phieffer says one of his clients, Nationwide, did just that. “Nationwide does a lot of advertising and gets a lot of prospects to its site to price out insurance,” he said. “But it had a huge abandonment rate because it needed people to fill out their personal information.” Using nGen Chat, whenever a visitor is on the form for 30 seconds and hasn’t filled anything out, customer service is notified to initiate a chat offering to help. Phieffer noted that, increasingly, people prefer interacting with companies this way. “I do my banking online, and at 10:00 at night, I don’t feel like talking to an operator on the phone. I’m already on my computer, and it’s simple to initiate a chat. If I’m third in line for service, I can do other things while I’m waiting, and the window pops up when they’re ready.” A data repository Six years ago, eSignal added to its arsenal of customer experience tools by buying nGen Knowledgebase. When someone asks a question in an e-mail using the Web site form, the question is first filtered through the database. The sender receives an auto-reply listing articles that might contain an answer. “If the customer doesn’t think the articles will help, he or she just hits ‘continue,’ and we get the e-mail,” said Johnson, noting that although the system is a way to deflect queries, the company has never had a complaint about it. Today, the knowledge base has grown beyond a tool for customer queries to become a repository, Johnson said. “It’s where we put all the information from our technical documents because it’s searchable. We can link to any article and e-mail it to a customer. We push links through the chat tools all the time.” The information in the knowledge base has to be maintained, of course, but his team can search by the date something was last edited. “I can ask to see every article that hasn’t been touched in six months; that helps my review process. We do that every nine months or so: go through and make sure the articles look right,” he said, adding that the product allows for multiple editors and has good workflow controls. The knowledge base and chat tools are implemented throughout eSignal, which has offices in California, Chicago, New York, London, and Australia. The coordinated system and global geography mean customers requesting help through the Web site (chat or e-mail) can receive an answer 24 hours a day. “There’s a single queue for salespeople in all offices to pull chats from,” explained Johnson. “It’s an incredible work tool.” Johnson cautions that companies looking to set up a multi-office system like his must be aware of the pricing model for the software they purchase. He noted that nGen offers concurrent licenses, so pricing is for the number of users on the system at the same time. For example, if he has 10 Australian users, 10 in London, and 10 in Hayward, but only 12 will be on at any one time, he pays for 12 licenses rather than 30. Johnson has been pleased with his ROI on all of the nGenera CIM tools. “We saw benefit from the day we bought the knowledge base. It paid for itself in a month,” he said. “It’s a game changer in terms of the time savings, the ability to eliminate redundancies and headcount, because you can use people from other offices to cover rather than hiring more people at headquarters.” Phieffer said this is a common theme with customers. “They want to provide the same or better service for less cost. By bringing in a tool like the knowledge base, you can overwhelmingly change the effectiveness of how you interact with customers and prospects while reducing your costs.” He noted that the next wave of tools to help companies is in the form of communities that allow customers to actively engage with each other and the company. He said the company will be rolling out nGen Community in December. “It’s a forum where you as a prospect can ask a question, and a fellow customer or the company can respond. Or you can search to see of your question has already been asked. “This is definitely the way the industry is going,” he continued. “Say I have a certain computer model that is acting up. I ask the community if anyone else has experienced the problem, and someone responds. I look at their reputation, see that they have a great reputation, so I try their solution. If it works, I give it a thumbs up, and someone else may give it a thumbs up, and that response starts becoming the general wisdom of the community. It gets baked in.” |