Pipeline Publishing, Volume 4, Issue 2

	This Month's Issue:
	Keeping Customers

Taking Self-Service Seriously

By Greg Billings and Stephen Krajewski

As the online channel grows in primacy, second rate self-service will no longer cut it

Web self-service has been an idea that management loves in theory but stumbles over in practice.

What’s not to love? Customers come to your website and not only buy goods and services, but update their account information, check out their bills, participate in self-help forums, and arrange to receive email alerts when new products are announced: all without your having to take the time away from your customer representatives.

But as it has turned out, the devil is in the execution. Customers may visit once, but when it comes down to making themselves at home, too many are still reverting to old habits and reaching out to the contact center. What’s going on is partly a matter of customer sophistication, or a lack thereof, but more crucially, a demonstration of just how much planning, insight, and stellar execution is needed to create a self-service web portal—one that not only looks pretty, but closes the deal.

If this performance gap is perceived as a slightly embarrassing problem today, it will be a major competitive headache tomorrow. That’s because service providers must build to meet the demands of a new generation of consumers, who surfed the Internet around the same time they learned how to read. Consider that a child born the same year as eBay and Amazon went online is now almost a teenager. For him or her, “e-commerce” is better known as “shopping.” And what businesses now call “self-service” will simply be an ordinary Web transaction, paired with the control and convenience that people already expect from their TIVO and iPod.

Business adoption

It may at first seem ironic, but self-service has actually seen higher rates of adoption in business-to-business transactions. The reason has less to do with great design of corporate portals than with the fact that corporate portal end users need the portal to do their jobs. A corporate purchaser of communication services, for example, is a member of a captive audience, and may have no choice but to master a supplier’s website, however opaque, because doing so is now part of the job description. But pressure for self-service also flows the other way.

Network administrators, for example, increasingly want not just raw bandwidth for their service provider, but a view of their slice of that bandwidth, along with the online tools to actually manage it. The pain involved in exposing what have always been internal processes to customer scrutiny is that,

If this performance gap is perceived as a slightly embarrassing problem today, it will be a major competitive headache tomorrow.

presumably, the customer will call in less and therefore cost you less to support.

Also changing the picture is the number of ways - or channels- self-service will be delivered. Mobile devices, of course, are slowly becoming Web-savvy. The major distinguishing feature of the iPhone, for example, is not that it already resides in Steve Jobs’ pocket, but that it has traded a keyboard for a comparatively large (3.5 inch) touch screen—large and clear enough to make mobile Web browsing and transactions more likely to occur. Less visible on the radar, but of even more potential impact is the melding of television and the Internet. IPTV--a service that is still in the early stage of acceptance-offers a new channel of self-service that will go beyond the electronic programming guides that we know from our cable and satellite TV providers. If service providers can unify the underlying self-service capability to support this new service, IPTV will put self-service within range of the television remote, providing the same self-service across the three screens of mobile device, home computer and television.

Yet for all this future promise, the adoption rate on self-service sites is strikingly low. In the communications services sector, most service providers would jump at the chance for even 15 percent consistent adoption among their residential customer base. And while the technology is moving forward, there is much room for improvement. Consider, for example, the consumer-oriented telecommunications websites, which have a wide range of self-service offerings. In theory, customers logging in can do everything from purchase downloadable ring tones to review their billing records. They can check out new phones, investigate different calling plans, and read through an extensive knowledge basis to untangle problems—all before having to call customer service.

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