My Page: Customer Self Services

Trends and Challenges

These days, since businesses are expected to provide personal service and form relationships with thousands of customers, self-service tools are a blessing. No matter how great your customer care is, if you're not offering support on the Web, your customers are left wondering why. Many experts agree that having self-service is one of the cornerstones of establishing an e-business presence.

The Self-Service model is founded on the principal of enabling customers, partners and employees to obtain information or conduct transactions directly over the Internet, avoiding time-consuming and costly traditional processes involving multiple verbal or written interactions.

Self-service provides control, performance, convenience and efficiency. This is because customers can perform tasks themselves when they want to through a secure, customized self-service web site. This 24x7 coverage provides convenience to customers while reducing customer service costs to businesses.

Self-Service clearly has become the norm these days for businesses to remain competitive. Companies that don't provide consistently high quality service in all channels will find their customers returning to the faithful and expensive telephone or defecting to the competition. Interestingly, although a phone call can be as much as 22 times more expensive than a self-service transaction, an even bigger long-term issue is the lost revenue opportunity from customers that never return at all.

Lets start by clearing up two common misconceptions. First of all, Customer Self Service (CSS) is NOT just a clever search engine designed to answer common customer questions. Knowledge-based self-care is a useful part of customer self-service but is certainly not the whole story. And conversely, CSS is not just a part of CRM – CSS and CRM are complementary strategies, combined with methodologies and technologies, which seek to maximize the long-term profitability of the customer base.

CSS empowers customers to understand and control their relationship with the service provider - without having to involve any of the service provider's staff. CSS enables customers to analyze, understand and define how they interact and communicate with the service provider, which products and services they choose to use and when, how exactly they prefer to use them and how they pay for them. In short, CSS is a strategy for customers, focused on allowing and encouraging them to both understand and transact their relationship.

It is no longer enough to provide individuals with a basic selfservice model. In order for business to capture a large selfservice audience, they must provide:

An Intelligent Self-Service model where information is timely, accurate and easy-to-find
Information in the format that individuals want it
Information pulled from a variety of corporate sources
Information aggregated into personalize user-specific reports
Real-time access to data with drill-down options
Integrated workflow that enables two-way conversations between the individual and a corporation

SEEinfobiz Pvt Ltd is working to promote the role and capabilities of customers themselves within the management of the customer relationship. We look forward to the growth of CSS as customers resume their rightful position in leading the service provider's sales and service strategy.

Research commissioned by some well known researchers shows that nearly 1 in 2 customers i.e., Mobile users, Bank Customers, etc, would prefer to handle their own customer service on-line, rather than go through a call-center. The study shows that service providers could be missing out on a significant opportunity to reduce the cost of call-centers, improve customer satisfaction and increase revenues.

The cost-saving element of self-service can be illustrated by the fact that respondents said they were most likely to use self-service in the evening (80%) and weekends (55%) - times when call-centers are most expensive to run. This potential cost reduction should be considered in the context that industry experts estimate that each customer enquiry handled via self-service costs less than a tenth of one handled via a call-center. The research estimated the cost of handling a customer in a call-center to be between $4.01 and $15.00 as opposed to between $0.18 and $1.17 for a web-based self-service customer enquiry.

The service providers can save approximately £100,000 per million customers for every 1% of customer service enquiries handled via the web rather than through the call-center.

Customer satisfaction could be improved by giving consumers a self-service option. Self-service came out as the preferred means of communication with a service provider for:

Viewing Your Bill / Statements
Checking Usage
Checking/Changing a Talk plan / package
Subscribing to Services
Topping Up Pre-Pay Cards
Contract customers were particularly interested in using self-service

Self-service also provides marketing opportunities. 39% of those interested in self-service said they would visit the site at least once a week - offering operators a four-fold increase in interactions compared to a typical user who only hears from the operator when he or she receives a monthly bill / statements.

Our Solution:

MyPage - The Complete Self Service is a suite of Internet-based applications, built specifically for the needs of online service providers, enabling them to attain new heights in customer service while also increasing revenue opportunities through increased interaction and service-centric commerce.

MyPage provides a comprehensive collection of self-service functionality supporting all stages of the customer life cycle for subscribers, including:

Account management for Individual & Corporate customers
e.Shops and Order Management for the wide and complex range of products and services
Online problem resolution and trouble ticketing (Dispute Management)
Electronic bill presentment and Payment (EBPP)
Online bill / statement analysis
Online cash transfers in case of banks, etc

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The complete MyPage solution encompasses leading-edge technologies and is supported by a highly skilled and experienced professional services team, as well as a comprehensive training program, to ensure that consulting service partners and system administrators have the knowledge required to integrate and maintain the customer care program. Here are some of the key features of MyPage - The Complete Self Service Suite:

Zero Client Installation – The MyPage suite does not require any client software to be installed on the client PC.

No End User Training – MyPage allows companies to deploy services and delivery management without any end user training. It provides simple access from web browsers and has zero supplementary plug in or applet requirements. Users can intuitively navigate complex and sophisticated pieces of applications software at the time that suits them.

Dynamic HTML (DHTML) Output – the content delivered in the DHTML format to the customers in their desktop via a browser.

Statements presented in different output formats – A bill / statement / report presented through MyPage can be viewed & downloaded by the user in several different formats such as DHTML PDF, excel, etc , which offers the customer both flexibility and choice.

Multi Lingual Support – MyPage supports viewing of contents in different languages. This increases the reach and utility of application for customers who are sensitive to viewing information in specific languages.

Ad Serving – With MyPage you can provide customized advertising messages based on individual customer-specific account information. This creates additional revenue generation opportunities and improves marketing efficiency by reducing direct mail and telemarketing costs. Furthermore, since offers are so highly targeted, customers are more likely to respond to them.

Online payment and Advanced Payment Scheduling – MyPage accepts payments via Credit Cards, Debit Cards, Bank accounts etc, giving customer flexibility to choose the payment mode most convenient to him. MyPage also includes full payment facilities including recurring and automated payment functionality. The application manages all scheduling, transactions and business logic for multiple payment vehicles.

Page Level Security – MyPage provides the ability to deliver page level security to customers. Page Level Security allows you to deliver personalized views of information to thousands of customers without the database and administrative overhead of having to create and manage thousands of documents.

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For e.g. Incase of mobile phone services only customers who have paid for itemized mobile phone billing services will get access to the detailed bill section, whereas customer service executives will get viewing access to the summarized and detail section of the bill.

With MyPage this scenario represents one statement. It offers personalized, secure views of subsets of the statement controlled by the security sub-system. Without page level security, three different statements usually meet requirements from three different people or departments with a resulting impact on processing and maintenance. This might not be an issue if only three statements are required but when there are thousands of customers needing possibly hundreds of thousands of sub statements it becomes a major issue for administration.

Integration with Corporate standards for Security – Many customers have adopted a standard security product for the maintenance and update of user permissions and profiles. LDAP is a popular example here. MyPage can integrate seamlessly with the existing security standard and avoid having to duplicate what can be a timely and costly job of managing user permissions.

Page On-Demand – MyPage offers a unique facility called page on-demand. The statement, bill or report that a Customer accesses can be hundreds or even thousands of pages in size. The customers might wish to view subsets of the statement, or "step through", from page 1 to page 700. MyPage’s page on-demand throws only one page at a time to the browser, and gives the user ability to do this with instantaneous, consistent performance. The statement also being accessed through cached memory, does not impact the operational billing database.

Scalability – The fundamental design principle behind MyPage – The Complete self-service, is to contribute to a truly scalable solution that can handle hundreds of thousands of customers. MyPage’s server architecture is designed to offer near linear scalability. As the user community grows MyPage application can scale by simply adding CPU’s. MyPage is being used to deliver consistent, web-performance to hundreds of thousands of customers.

Benefits:

Increase average revenue per user:
SEEinfobiz's customer self-service solutions create an intimate, customer-driven, always-on communication channel between service provider and the subscriber, enabling communications service providers to market, sell and support new products and services online. Dealers and other retail point-of-sale locations can activate customers directly with no need to contact the call center. SEEinfobiz applications also provide an efficient and effective channel for cross selling and up selling to existing subscribers.

Improve customer service:
Self-service has become pervasive throughout all walks of life - bank ATMs, airline check-in, grocery stores, etc., because not only is it perceived as better service, but also it is always available, always responsive and always relevant. Many customers - especially business users, high value consumers, and the youth market - believe that self-service is the best service of all. In addition, by enabling enterprise managers to mine real knowledge out of their bill through analysis, service providers can improve customer service and loyalty for their valuable business customers,

Reduce costs of interaction:
As self-service diverts traffic away from the call center and business account teams, service providers can significantly improve operational efficiency. At an average saving of $5-15 per interaction, customer self-service can reduce costs by millions of dollars per month - in other industries, providers have been able to close call centers due to the success of self-service. They can also save on printing and distribution costs for physical bills through electronic bill presentment.

Proven adoption:
The benefits of customer self-service depend entirely on customers adopting self-service as their preferred sales and support channel. Adoption and frequent usage define the difference between success and failure. The proven functionality and performance of the MyPage application suite - coupled with SEEinfobiz's expertise and experience in planning and deploying customer self-service solutions - guarantee high adoption rates and continued usage. The success of SEEinfobiz customer self-service implementations is demonstrated not only by fast and efficient deployment, but consistently enthusiastic adoption- showing customers' satisfaction with self-service and quickly delivering the financial benefits of reduced costs and increased revenues.

Benefits of Self-Service to the Individual:

Confidence - because they are in control of the information for which they are searching
Access to Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Ability to submit requests and receive an immediate response from extensive business knowledge bases and, for those items that take longer or require a person to respond, the ability to review the status of the request
Ability to update contact information and profile
Ability to update preferences for receiving information
Ability to carry out task at any time without having to worry about office hours

Direct Benefits to Businesses Providing Self-Service:

Providing an effective and extensive knowledge base for customer inquiry
Ability to distribute documents and forms to customer efficiently
Ability to automatically respond to customer queries through automated response programs
Ability to provide opt-in and opt-out capability for distribution of marketing materials
Ability to provide automated 24x7 customer care
Reduce customer service costs by 47% according to some experts
Use the web to continually assess the effectiveness of self-service
Use the web to measure the interests of customers for targeted marketing campaigns
Create a knowledge base out of the tickets that are submitted and responded to by staff
Lower total cost of ownership and increased return on investment