Unified Self-Service

In a recent article from Better Bank Systems, author Karl Hakkarainen suggests that banks are now “trying too hard” – and in all the wrong ways, resulting in a decline in their ability to innovate and in the overall customer experience.

Hakkarainen argues that the banks have gone into a reactionary mode, and lost their long term focus and their overall confidence. They’ve also been putting off important upgrades and investments in new technologies:

Banks are facing a long-term shift and short-term shock. Jean Lassignardie, global head of sales and marketing at Capgemini Financial Services, told a press briefing that the institutions are experiencing “extreme, violent, brutal pressure” from macro-economic realignment, regulatory requirements, and rising customer expectation for innovative services.

Most of the executives reported that they were confident in their ability to resolve current issues. They were, however, worried about long-term trends. The executives surveyed were looking to cost-cutting and other revenue enhancements to stabilize their institutions’ finances and operations. Except as a path to streamline operations, the executives were generally not looking to upgrade their core systems or make major investments in new technology.

There is, however, bad news for the banks that aren’t making these investments – as consumer preferences are continuing to evolve. The article cites studies that makes this readily apparent – mobile banking usage has doubled since 2005, and mobile payments’ growth trajectory suggest they may overtake credit and debit within the decade. Banks with mobile customer services and mobile payment strategies will have a significant advantage in retaining and acquiring customers.

Hakkarainen’s conclusion is that to thrive in the current market, banks should make the choices that let them “wow” their customer – which may mean evolving into a more lean organization that focuses on offering a narrower selection of financial products, and differentiating their brands based on that focus plus a strong customer service orientation. Investments in technology can be part of that “wow,” if they create secure, seamless, self-service capabilities.

Similarly, the New York Times recently reported banks have been slow to embrace social media channels. NYT cites an Assetinum study that labeled most banks’ social media strategies with terms like “amateurish” and “token”, finding that only 26 of 50 actively responded to customers via Twitter, for example. It is, however, not all bad news, and there are some banks that are engaging productively with customers in this channel:

The Assetinum survey listed some positive examples of banks’ use of social media. The Facebook pages of Royal Bank of Canada and ABN Amro reacted quickly to queries and give clients opportunities to participate in surveys and events, Mr. Manz said. “Also, they are asking their users beforehand how to implement certain new services — as in the case of a new mobile app for ABN Amro, for example,” Mr. Manz said. “This makes users feel that they are taken seriously.”

For forward-looking financial institutions, we know there’s a lot more that banks can do to upgrade their customers’ experiences with self-service – from context-sensitive, dynamically updated IVR menus and the ability to personalize and customize IVR offerings based on individual customer preferences and accounts, to proactive outbound notification systems (e.g., for functions like bill payment reminders or low balance notifications) and a rich, consistent experience across voice, text, mobile web and smartphone-app interactions and much more. Want to learn more ways to upgrade the customer service experience for financial institutions? Voxeo’s free 2012 Financial Industry Trends Report looks at current trends and provides seven steps to revolutionize your bank’s customer service strategy.

Are you ready to learn more about incorporating mobile self-service channels, and ways to leverage your cross-channel analytics to learn more about customer behavior and improve your service offerings? Join us on Wednesday, May 23, 2012 from 2-3pm Eastern Time for our upcoming webinar, “Create Value Across All Service Channels.”

CRM Magazine’s Editorial Director David Myron will moderate a panel featuring Voxeo’s Sr. Product Manager Andreas Volmer and other industry experts for this interactive roundtable event that discusses subjects like:

• Digital channel fragmentation
• The importance of a “mobile first” philosophy
• Ways to leverage data across channels to create a unified customer experience
• Personalizing the customer experience
• How to derive insights on customer issues, behaviors and improvement opportunities from cross-channel analytics
• Best practices for multichannel self-service, and more

Sign up now on CRM Magazine’s website!

In a recent whitepaper entitled “Social Media Services: Trends in Customer Care Outsourcing”, International Data Corporation (IDC), a leader in market intelligence for telecom and information technology, looked at some of the key trends and differentiators in Social CRM.

A key point in the study is that Social CRM is still very new ground. Making an investment now allows organizations to “get in on the ground floor” and lay the framework to support additional channels as they evolve, and to be part of the creation of the best practices for what works in the social sphere. As the technology evolves, it’s likely that social will cease to be an “add-on” or optional support channel and much more likely that it will become standard to CRM implementations due to customer expectations. (This evolution may happen faster than you think: per a recent story on MediaBistro, 71% of 16-24 year olds indicate the first thing they do when they have a problem with a product is go online, and the shift to social channels is not exclusive to that demographic. ) The overarching goal is to create a single, unified view of the customer. This way, appropriate social media interaction with the customer can be conducted with the appropriate history and context.

Some of the key differentiators of social CRM that will require your business to put new best practices into place are:

• Channels are now customer-dictated. While voice-based call centers offer only inbound and/or outbound IVR customer service, consumers will chatter on social networks of their choice, at whatever time they see fit. Your strategy and technology for monitoring and responding via these channels will necessarily evolve. Technologically, the biggest challenge will be combining all of these communication channels to maintain a single view of the customer, so that social interactions can be tailored to the individual with the same history and context as a voice interaction where an agent has the benefit of a screenpop with all the relevant information.

• Conversations are continuously adapting, and non-scripted. When issues are escalated from automated systems, call center agents still can often work off of a script while social conversations are more likely to go into tangents and often have a different set of rules of (n)etiquette. Agents may need special training, particularly if they are not digital natives.
• New metrics are important. Because of the visibility of social channels, there is now significant transparency into the sentiment about your brand. Appropriate analytics will need to be implemented to separate the signal from the noise and evaluate not just sentiment, but also efficiency, effectiveness and return on investment for your efforts. Reporting tools and dashboards can assist subject matter experts and other stakeholders in assessing this data.
• Timeliness is critical. Much like how channels are customer-dictated, many businesses – particularly large ones – will find there is a 24/7 expectation of rapid responses via the social channel.

Once these core competencies are understood, they are used to enable the three critical activities in the social space: listening, understanding and responding. Each phase incorporates different elements of the aforementioned core competencies. Listening requires appropriate tools and analytics; understanding requires sentiment analysis and the ability to put feedback into context; responding requires accuracy and timeliness.

At Voxeo, our Prophecy and VoiceObjects platforms let you create a social CRM tailored specifically to your business, and provide unified self-service across channels so that you can reach customers in the way they want to be reached, whether it’s via SMS, social media, mobile apps or voice. To learn more about the ways in which consumer expectations are evolving in the social and mobile space and how your business should be responding, check out our whitepaper, “Unified Self-Service: Delivering On the Value Of Multi-Channel Customer Interactions.”

Want to learn about how you can prepare your contact center for working with social media? Would you like to know more about the trends happening in the industry?

In about 24 hours, on Wednesday, June 15, 2011, at 2pm US Eastern time, I will be joining with Wendell Black from Contactual to discuss these changes and solutions in a free webinar:

Preparing Your Contact Center for the Rise of Social Media

It is free to join the session.

Here is the session abstract:

Social Media’s impacts to traditional methods of providing customer service cannot be ignored. More and more individuals are turning to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and similar forums to connect with businesses and organizations and this trend shows no signs of abating. In this session you will learn how to navigate the new world of the connected and sophisticated customer.

What Attendees Will Learn:

• Important trends in multichannel and social media customer interaction methods
• How social media is impacting customer experience optimization efforts
• How organizations are leveraging multichannel interaction to better service their customers
• Benefits of an integrated approach to managing the proliferation of customer interaction touch points
• Important steps organizations can take now to prepare for these new communication mediums
• A glimpse into the future of customer contact as social media gains mainstream prominence

I’m looking forward to joining our partner Contactual in giving this session… and am looking forward to answering the questions attendees have as well.

Again, it’s free to register and there will be time for questions at the end. We’d love to have you join us!

Want to see a multi-channel application in action? As part of our announcement today about expanded capabilities of VoiceObjects On-Demand, I put together this video that shows a single application running up in Voxeo’s hosted cloud interacting with users via:

• voice, through a regular phone call
• instant messaging (IM), through Jabber
• a web browser, on my desktop… but it could have been through a mobile browser on a smartphone

Now, the phone number for the app also supports SMS, so I could have sent a SMS message to the app from my phone. I chose not to do so purely because it meant switching the video to show my phone… plus there are delays inherent in sending SMS that I didn’t want to wait for. IM is a lot faster to show.

Regardless, this video shows how easy it is to create a multichannel app like this – complete with centralized analytics that shows data across all the channels. Enjoy…

To try this out yourself, visit:

http://www.voxeo.com/vo-ondemand/

You just need VoiceObjects 10 and a free Evolution account to start building complex multi-channel apps and hosting them in the Voxeo cloud.

And if you want to learn even more about how to get the most out of VoiceObjects, check out the training classes we offer through Voxeo University. We even have some classes available for free in our Orlando, Cologne and Beijing training centers.

If you were unable to attend yesterday’s Developer Jam Session, Serving the Social Customer: Scaling Your Support For Twitter, Facebook and More, the slides are now available as either a PDF from the Jam Session page or for direct viewing on SlideShare:

Source code for the Twitter apps referenced in the presentation is also available from Github and can be used with a free Tropo account. Additionally, you can download a free copy of VoiceObjects to try out the integration with IMified to link Twitter to your VO application.

As outlined over on our Jam Session site, tomorrow at 11am US Eastern I will be speaking on the topic of “Serving the Social Customer: Scaling Your Use of Twitter, Facebook and More”

In this free webinar I will be exploring the topic of how you can scale your interaction over Twitter. If you are successful in using Twitter to communicate with your customers, how do you handle the growth in that interaction? Do you hire more people? Do you just not respond in off-hours? Or do you look at how to use appropriate levels of automation to help?

In this session, I will be showing you how to:

• Monitor a Twitter account and take action on incoming messages or mentions.
• Send urgent notifications via SMS or voice based on certain keywords that appear in tweets.
• Craft appropriate automatic responses based on what customers send via Twitter.
• Use an automated app can assist the person monitoring a Twitter account in collecting information to provide a response.
• Tie your social interaction into the same analytics and application used for other communication channels like voice, SMS, IM, and mobile web.

I will also touch on how we are extending these options to other social channels like Facebook.

It should be an enjoyable session and you still have time to register:

Date: November 30, 2010

Time: 8:00 AM US Pacific, 11:00 AM US Eastern, 5:00 PM Central European

If you are not able to attend live, an archive of the webinar will be available for later viewing from the Jam Session web page

As we talk about how you can get started with “Unified Self-Service” and creating multi-channel applications that interact with customers over voice, texting/SMS, video, mobile web, social channels like Twitter and more, it is useful to look at how some companies are already deploying unified self-service applications.

One such company is T-Mobile International. They used our VoiceObjects application lifecycle suite to build a “self-service in your pocket” portal that interacts with customers over voice, video, text and mobile web. A brief case study is available for download at the top of:

www.voxeo.com/about/case-studies.jsp

Attendees at our Customer Summit 2010 back in June got the chance to hear directly from T-Mobile representatives about their project and to ask questions. They’re definitely doing some great work getting customers the information they want in the fastest way over the communication channel of the customer’s choice.

Watch for more Unified Self-Service case studies to appear on that page as we add them – and if you are already deploying multi-channel apps on our platform and would like to be considered for a case study, please do drop us a line.

Last night I put together this quick introduction to how you can get started with VoiceObjects On-Demand. I show how you can start in VoiceObjects Desktop for Eclipse, deploy an application to Voxeo’s hosted cloud, login to Evolution to add phone numbers and configure SMS and IM, how you can modify an existing app and how you can create a new app:

Naturally you can head over to www.voxeo.com/vo-ondemand to try it out yourself!

In the days and weeks ahead, we’ll have more tutorial videos coming your way… stay tuned!

Ever since we started talking about creating “Unified Self-Service” applications, we have always talked about how our VoiceObjects product made creating such applications incredibly easy.  However, one challenge with VoiceObjects has been that you do need an on-premises server on which to deploy the VoiceObjects application.

That need for a server has been a barrier for many folks (including me, actually) looking to use VoiceObjects as a way to easily build applications.

Today we’re pleased to remove that barrier to entry with the release of VoiceObjects On-Demand, a new service from Voxeo where the VO servers actually live up in our hosted cloud infrastructure.  It’s simple to try it out… just go to:

www.voxeo.com/vo-ondemand

to learn more, download relevant white papers and get started!