Automating Customer Issue Resolutions
Very often, we call up a service help desk with service issues or other related problems and complaints. Each call to the service help desk incurs some cost to the company, in terms of network, bandwidth, time, availability or infrastructure.
The prime reasons for a customer contacting a support help desk are:
1. To resolve issue/problems faced by the customer
2. To get additional information.
Nowadays, companies are trying to reduce their costs associated with the customer help desk. Companies want to save every possible minute in a call center and reduce the number of incoming calls to reduce their operating costs, while not compromising on customer satisfaction.
When a customer calls the help desk for an issue, the interaction proceeds through the following stages:
1. Customer provides personal details such as Name ID, etc.
2. Customer provides details on the issue.
3. Support person enters customer information in his system to pull out the customer's data.
4. Looking at the data, the agent updates the customer with the solution or the different possible options that are available.
5. Customer accepts and ends the call.
There are a number of self help support solutions provided by companies through eCRM for customers to avoid calls to the call centers and find quicker solutions on their own, but the number of calls to company call centers is increasing. Now how can these calls be avoided if there are alternatives for self help provided on company portals? An analysis of such calls should be made to find ways of providing assistance such that human interaction is entirely avoided and the relevant information is presented to the user.
For example, a customer's issue with the credit card billing would be related to a particular transaction, date or amount. If a customer calls an agent, the agent would look into databases, past history, analyze the past and current data and pass the information on to the customer with the conclusion; which is important.
The same flexibility should be provided by the portal - the customer should get the information with the complete details, analysis and a conclusion for his queries from the portal in the same way an agent would have helped, if not better. The data can be represented on the UI in such a way that customer himself can understand the data (with some help options on the website as appropriate).
This way, an entire call with the customer help desk can be avoided while providing customer service through an entirely customer driven system. Thus, the entire support function can be automated for different services and categories to the possible extent. Customers can manage their queries themselves using this system, minimizing the number of calls to the call center and reducing the company's operating cost to a great extent.
