WebRTC and Webification Driving Feedback in the Contact Center

I have written a bit about how WebRTC enables a new paradigm in customer interaction, Interaction Experience 2.0. One major point of this discussion is that more than 70% of calls into a contact center are proceeded by a web site visit and, increasingly, customers are looking to resolve these issues on the web site as Self Service Customers. In Interactive Experience 2.0, the concept of using the web site contextual information to first get the right agent and then to optimize the resolution of the issue were primary factors of the value of web/contact center integration. As WebRTC enables this process to be intimately integrated to the web site, the context is easier to carry over from the web site to the Contact Center.

However, today I would like to talk about what may be the biggest value of integrating the real-time human interaction tightly to the web site, the use of feedback from the contact center to optimize the web site experience. To understand how this changes customer service, we must look at the types of customers arriving to the typical contact center. There are three types of customers as shown in the figure: Concierge Class, Web Class, and Loss Class.

Concierge customers are those that would prefer to talk directly to an agent and have the economic business value to enable that. Self-service or Web Class customers would either prefer to use the web site or are willing to, if pushed by an economic incentive.

Finally, Loss Class customers are those who do not have sufficient business value to enable to go directly to an agent, but do not want to use the web site. Loss Class customers have low value so the use of agent time essentially eliminates any chance at profitable business transactions. The distribution of these customers will vary, but the numbers shown are representative.

For many companies, the service goals are different for the three classes. For the Concierge Class, always having direct customer access to an agent is critical, while the Loss or Low Value Class needs to be pushed to IVR to enable business transaction at lowest cost. Finally, the key group is the larger Web Class self-service group. As both the business goal for this group is to complete the transaction on the web site and most of the users would prefer that as well, any transaction that results in the customer leaving the web site to talk to an agent is a major issue. In fact, in Six Sigma terms, a self-service web customer opting to talk to an agent is a "defect" in the web site as the goal is to have 100% of the transaction managed on the web site.

The key then is to use the contextual information that is gathered on the web site and continued in the contact center to identify and categorize the "defects." A good example of this occurred to me when I was pricing Canada long distance. I had been using a block of Skype minutes, but they were running out. Before buying, I decided to check what the Comcast price was. While I readily found that I had a "nationwide unlimited" plan, there was no information there or on the international dialing pages about Canada. While I assumed that meant that Canada was included, I was wary of running up huge bills, so I called an agent. After explaining my question, he took about 10 minutes to come back with the answer that, yes, Canada was included in my dialing plan. Unfortunately, that defect information was never conveyed back as the web site is unchanged. If the web site and the contact center were linked, this defect information could be analyzed and the web site improved. The chart shows how, over a two- to six-year period, the inclusion of WebRTC and feedback can be used for the Web Class customers.

The impact of these changes is multi-fold. All the data would suggest that the Web Class is increasing as both the Concierge Class and Loss Class are shrinking. The Concierge Class is shrinking due to the education and web awareness growth in the members as well as older members aging out of the system. The Loss Class is shrinking as more members get access to the technology through new devices like smartphones as well as leaving for easier places to do business in. The result is that over the two to six years, the Web Class will probably grow to over 90% of the customers.

The combination of these factors can have a major impact on the number of calls that come to the contact center as well as the time required to resolve them. If we assume that the contextual information from the web site for the 70-90% of customers that come from there to the contact center can generate a 15% reduction in average time to resolution, and we assume that we can eliminate 25% of the defects from going to the contact center by optimizing the web site to resolve those issues, the impact on the call volume in the contact center will be dramatic. The combination of all of these factors could be a 40% reduction in agent time in a typical web integrated call center over the next six years. While this journey will not be easy, the combination of WebRTC, the web contextual information, and Six Sigma analysis and feedback techniques can generate huge cost reductions, while dramatically increasing customer satisfaction through rapid problem resolution in the preferred modality of the web site. The impact of Interaction Experience 2.0 is something that must be considered when evaluating your contact center investments going forward.