In the realm of service and support, the Web has made its mark.

It’s changed the way customers interact with each other, as they use forums and blogs to cheer or deride companies and even aid in product development with their feedback. It’s made available invaluable content and dedicated knowledgebases that have transformed the mix of channels customers use to get service. It’s enabled service desk technicians to perform break/fix and complex operations on desktops and servers across the hallway or across the world. It’s deconstructed software delivery and molded a new model that gives companies of any size the chance to leverage service and support technologies for competitive differentiation. Its reach and accessibility have forced companies to put their best faces forward and seek to ensure every site visit binds them closer to their constituents.

As a channel and platform for service delivery and related technologies, the Web has gone from being bleeding-edge to stronghold. No longer is Web-based support — with its characteristic 24x7 access, ubiquity, self-services, and collaboration capability — a competitive differentiator simply by virtue of its existence; it now differentiates companies by virtue of its quality. Today, Web-based service is often on the front lines, and for some companies, it’s the only line of defense.

Since a business’s Web site is the first place many customers go today when they’re in need of service, it’s imperative that what they find there — the search tools, the breadth and depth of content, easy escalation paths, the tools that aid in speedy resolution — meets their needs. Each visit presents the business with the opportunity to impress and influence existing and potential customers.

SaaS Power

Increasingly, the tools that deliver prompt resolution and other service-related benefits are built on Web platforms, as more and more companies see and seize the application-delivery benefits of software-as-a service (SaaS). SaaS-based service and support systems have found solid traction in contact centers and IT service desks with customer-facing responsibilities, and are making enterprise in-roads in such areas as self-service knowledge management, remote connectivity, and other areas.

Indeed, the service and support arena has been a target-rich environment for SaaS applications. Gartner predicted SaaS-based software would account for $1 billion — or 14% — of CRM’s total revenues in 2007, stating that the compound annual growth rate of on-demand CRM software is more than double that of the overall market. And, according to the 2008 Service and Support Metrics survey conducted by SupportIndustry.com, 40% of responding organizations have chosen a SaaS model for at least some of their service-related technology initiatives, and 20% more said they would deploy hosted software for a service/support function within the year.

Further, in a recent study conducted by McKinsey & Co. and Sand Hill Group, IT and business executives named SaaS, along with Web services, as the most important trends in the software industry, for the third consecutive year. It’s particularly important for smaller businesses: Businesses with between 100 and 1,000 employees put 17% of their software budgets toward SaaS purchases in 2007, while those with 100 employees or fewer allocated 25%, according to the survey. And even more revealing: 36% of SMBs have multiple SaaS deployments.

Experts say it’s not surprising that SaaS has made such strides in the service and support realm. Beyond SaaS’s obvious and oft-cited benefits, on-demand vendors have addressed worrisome technical issues with the model.

“[Hosted] software is able to scale much better than it could previously. If there was ever a gap between premised-based and hosted offerings from a fundamental feature and functionality standpoint, it’s narrowing, if not already closed,” says Keith Dawson, a senior research analyst with Frost & Sullivan who covers contact center and IT service desk markets.

Dawson believes that a SaaS-based model for service and support may actually begin to alleviate some of what he calls “the intractable problems” inherent in contact centers. One is the high rate of agent turnover: On-demand models might just remove some of the structural issues that ultimately result in so many agents leaving their jobs.

“The idea that you can source an agent anywhere — not just at home, but among outsourcers and other locales — and let them connect via on-demand systems to do their work has taken off more than people expected. These days, even if a company isn’t using on-demand software itself, there’s a good chance its outsourcers are, and it creates a lot more flexibility,” Dawson says.

“If you remove the structural issues, you may very well remove the [turnover] problem,” Dawson continues. “We could eventually have agents all working at home, signing on to connect seamlessly through an on-demand platform, as long as workforce management doesn’t suffer. One of the reasons agents leave their jobs is that they feel their supervisors are always looking over their shoulders.”

Other service-related problems — perhaps not intractable but certainly lingering — are seeing improvement at the structural level, but as is often the case, progress is slowed by people, entrenched processes and legacy technologies. Incomplete integration across service channels and disjointed customer data views are two areas where technology is becoming much less of an impediment, but where people are not.

Seamless Experience Possible?

Technologically, multichannel integration, though an expensive and time-consuming process, is a reachable goal given the right environment, say experts. But that blissful environment is elusive: Vendors offer platforms that provide seamless integration among some channels, but large companies are usually saddled with legacy systems housing decades worth of data and can’t rip everything out and start from scratch. Perhaps the best candidate for this kind of integrated platform is a startup with a greenfield view that, given the resources, can begin life with integrated systems that provide the seamless interaction department managers seek.

Channel integration is on the rise, according to the 2008 SupportIndustry.com survey. About 57% of respondents say they’ve integrated at least some of their channels through such initiatives as common knowledgebases, integrated contact management platforms or a unified view into customer interaction data. This represents improvements over previous years: 40% of respondents said they’d achieved some channel integration in 2006, while 30% had done so in 2004, and 27% in 2003.

source: SupportIndustry.com 2008 Metrics Survey

Some experts feel the biggest impediment to the kind of integration that would benefit all corporate stakeholders are the stakeholders themselves. Customer-related data, each belonging to different constituencies, are housed in ACD switch, CRM, business intelligence and quality monitoring systems, and even in back-office systems. It’s extremely difficult to put that into one coordinating picture. The constituencies that touch the customer experience — managers of IT, marketing, inbound and outbound contact centers, product development, service — are often unwilling to sign-off on technology and integration budgeting if they feel they’re bearing the brunt of the expenditure.

But, incrementally, says Dawson, the effects of Voice XML and Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) on these stumbling blocks will be transformative. “They’re dramatically different than the kinds of integration technologies available 10 years ago,” he says. “Because they’re open and lots of applications write to them, they provide a framework that will, over time, produce some of this integration. Five years from now, it will be much easier to deploy integrated systems where interaction will flow more seamlessly.”

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