Rare is the company that doesn’t claim to place a premium on their service and support delivery, and while it behooves most organizations to do just that, there are companies operating in certain vertical sectors, geographical regions, and products and services for whom it’s more a mandate than a convenient philosophy. Financial services, high-tech and communications providers are among those who strive to differentiate themselves from competitors by the ways they serve their accounts. Case in point: According to a recent survey conducted by Forrester Research, 33 percent of financial services firms said they have an executive — besides the CEO — in charge of their company’s entire customer experience, while a significantly lower percentage of firms overall (24 percent) have someone dedicated to overseeing this function. For more and more companies, service and support have bottom-line influence.

Recognizing the need to optimize service, however, doesn’t mean there’s a formulaic approach to delivering it in a high-quality, cost-effective manner. Designing an effective service model — and the subsequent selection of technologies, process engineering and workforce hiring — depends on a range of factors, including the business value the service/support organization provides; the products and services it supports, the vertical sector in which it operates, the value of individual customers, and numerous others. While there’s a wealth of rich, increasingly comprehensive technologies available enabling businesses to drive toward true service and support optimization — remote diagnostics and support, self-healing, intelligent search and navigation, service resolution, personalization, multichannel integration platforms, collaboration, predictive analytics — the decision to deploy and across what channels should depend on a strategy based on clearly defined goals.

High on many executives’ list of service goals, of course, is multichannel support to drive call deflection, in which customers and employees are inspired to seek help from less-costly channels — self-service rather than phone, a Web site rather than a storefront. Given that, integrated service channels and processes that map elegant and effective escalation are also high on service executives’ wish lists.

“Companies are really concerned about delivering high-quality customer self-service in a multichannel environment,” says Susan Aldrich, a senior vice president with the Boston-based Patricia Seybold Group. “It’s extremely important in today’s commercial environment that customers be able to get the answers to questions by themselves because in many cases, by the time they’ve picked up the phone, the relationship [with the business] is already ruined.”

For companies who have multiple tiers of distribution, as many do, there’s the added challenge of trying to extend a quality experience to customers seeking service and support through partners, whether they be distributors, system integrators, VARs, OEMs or others. “Most companies know they’re not doing a good job of getting the right information into partners’ hands, and it’s giving them fits,” says Aldrich. “They’re having enough trouble with their own sites — if they can’t make it work there, how can they do it on a partner’s site? It’s going to be a high-priority problem for businesses to solve.”

Aldrich believes that once companies get their own self-service strategies, processes and technologies in place, they’ll work with partners to establish service networks so that anyone seeking help — from an employee in the partner’s store to a call center agent to the customer — can access the content they need consistently across channels.

These complexities are some of the reasons that the design and deployment of effective self-service programs — incorporating clean, targeted, up-to-date content, guided navigation and search, adaptive learning, seamless escalation capabilities and predictive analytics — can cost millions of dollars, with a great deal of the total cost of ownership consumed by maintenance activities.

“Not enough companies understand that [deploying self-service] is not a project — it’s a program. A self-service effort is ongoing and changing; every day someone should evaluate what people aren’t finding through search and navigation, for example, and determine what steps need to be taken to fix the problem. In e-commerce and in customer support, those unanswered questions can be really important tips about what needs to be changed,” says Aldrich.

Further, according to Tom Sweeny, a principal with Boston-based consultancy and research firm ServiceXRG, Web-based self-services extend beyond creating, staging and managing content to numerous transactional activities that can be automated online — registering products, opening support cases, changing profiles, opting-in to newsletters or distribution lists, requesting merchandise returns and updating service agreements, to name a few. However, he says, many organizations forget these opportunities.

“There are numerous business transactions that can be automated through a Web self-service strategy that are often overlooked, but they’re a critical part of self-service,” Sweeny says.

Mind the Gap

Providers of knowledge management and other service- and support-related technologies continue to see growth, increased sophistication in their product feature sets, and the merger and acquisition activity that characterizes maturing markets. Meanwhile, as business begin to realize ROI from their self-service deployments, they continue to invest in search and taxonomy improvements and content engineering, as well as providing access to structured and unstructured data both in targeted knowledgebases and across other back-end data sources. In many cases, the range of self-service options businesses are offering is vast, says Sweeny, which highlights their commitment to both call deflection and service improvements. However, he points to an interesting gap between what businesses offer in the area of Web self-services for technical support vs. what customers say they want.

“We made an interesting discovery when we studied users’ perceptions of support and those of the businesses that deliver the support,” says Sweeny, pointing to findings from research conducted by XRG. Responding to a recent survey, businesses cite a long list of online services they’re offering as part of their self-service strategies — online documentation, searchable knowledgebases, incident submission, personalization and many more. While such efforts are laudable, says Sweeney, XRG research shows that users are primarily interested in a much smaller set of Web-based self-services: 56.8 percent found online software updates most effective, while 47.2 percent cited searchable knowledgebases. Diagnostic tools followed at 34.1 percent and remote monitoring and support tools were next, cited by 27.8 of respondents.

Remote support, in fact, is an area that could see explosive growth over the next few years, according to Sweeny. Though he says the volume of transactions handled via remote support/diagnostics/realtime chat channels is still small, at around 5% of total transactions, the issues that have hindered adoption of such tools have been largely addressed.

Bandwidth problems, network security concerns and privacy constraints — caused not only by individuals’ worries over identity theft and other breaches but also by regulatory compliance such as that enforced by HIPAA — haven’t gone away entirely, but they don’t present the hurdles they once did. Meanwhile, the opportunity that remote solutions give both enterprise help desks and external service and support organizations to significantly reduce costs and improve time to productivity has begun to outweigh lingering concerns.

“For those technical support organizations that have an intimate relationship with customers and the problem complexity is high, remote support tools fit right in, particularly in industries that aren’t heavily regulated [on the privacy front],” says Sweeny. The area where remote support is currently seeing the greatest traction and growth, according to XRG, is in the B2C technical support segment — due, in large part, to the fact that remote control clients are now being shipped on many desktop models.

Along with other advancements in e-service and e-support come improved integration and interoperability, both in individual vendors’ product suites and across multi-vendor product lines. More and more service organizations are adopting customer interaction platforms in an effort to bring together multichannel contact capabilities, targeted knowledgebases and links to other content, analytical engines, and other service technologies, and then integrating best-of-breed solutions where necessary.

Integration is improving and — with multichannel platforms offered by CRM suite providers, traditional ACD providers, and peripheral e-service vendors — isn’t so much a technology problem at this point as it is a people and process issue, according to Sweeny. The integration burden is starting to shift to the enterprise itself, as executives realize that the departments handling key CRM functions often aren’t sharing their data in any meaningful way.

“Many companies have fundamental issues that have nothing to do with multichannel integration; there’s still a lack of integration among departments performing customer-facing functions,” says Sweeny. “In many respects, the support organization is actually ahead of the technology curve, but there are lots of other points of customer interaction within an enterprise.”

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