Thought of the Day - The Significance of Self-Service

A paradigm shift is emerging in customer service defined by new generations of customers, social networking technologies, and historic economic challenges. Businesses continue to face mounting pressure to do more with less, whilst meeting these rising customer expectations. In these times organisations need to deliver exceptional service to customers where ever they appear. Every call, video, and message must be handled appropriately across the enterprise with tracking and reporting to guide business decisions.

Voice Portal technology is the answer to reducing costs by automating inbound and outbound voice and video customer care whilst ensuring customer service levels remain high. The most important benefit of voice portal technology in the new world of SIP is it’s touted to front end all contact centre systems, from any vendor, effectively running as “the brain” of the system removing all the requirements of complex routing and CTI solutions.

In terms of ROI, a self service transaction can provide as much customer satisfaction as a voice call but be 10 times cheaper than agent interaction. Add to this the fact that self service reduces costs by around $5 per transaction; it’s a pretty compelling option. Consider these figures - for a typical heavy call volume, the costs stack up as follows:

Web based self service costs per transaction = 25 cents
Voice based self service per transaction = 45 cents
Live Phone Interaction per transaction = $5.5

Other key advantages include:

Ease of use
Voice portals extend e-commerce capabilities to fixed telephones thereby increasing use for customers without the use of expensive phones or PDAs. Information is just one telephone call away.

Improve efficiency
Customers have immediate access to information across multichannels - web or phone.

High satisfaction
Provides customers the opportunity to access information immediately, wherever they are, giving a higher quality of service.

Lower total cost of ownership
The voice portal automates customer interactions that are traditionally handled by a call centre agents, this eliminates waiting times for customers and lowers operating costs for call centre companies.

Open standards
Voice portal uses open standards like VXML, CCXML, MRCP etc. This allows customers to pick and choose their application development partner rather than depend on a vendor with proprietary platforms.

Talk to a GlobalConnect consultant today about the power of self-service – 1300 678 910.

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