Catalogue E-business Magazine: Helping Customers Help Themselves

By Davin Yap, CEO, Transversal. Published in Catalogue e-business.

Offering Web self-service benefits shoppers and, by extension, your business.

As you no doubt know, eCommerce presents merchants with a great opportunity to win and retain customers and sales. But it also presents a great challenge: How do you create a face for your brand and loyalty among customers when the competition is just a click away?

Web self-service — providing immediate, accurate answers to customer queries online — can help. It enables you to deliver a high level of customer service, accelerating sales as well as providing unique insight into customer needs.

Helping shoppers

The Web, bricks-and-mortar stores, and the contact centre are dependent on each other to maintain successful engagement with customers. An unfulfilled customer expectation at any of these places will damage a company's brand and potentially its sales.

The quality of information provided by Web sites and sales staff can heavily influence a consumer's purchase, which is one reason Web self-service is becoming increasingly important. This entails moving beyond static FAQ pages to a dynamic, self-organizing database of questions and answers that automatically prioritizes entries according to how frequently they are viewed.

A typical self-service program works like this: A customer clicks on a box labelled "ask a question", "need help?" or the like, then types in a question in everyday language. The application replies with a simple response and/or links to similar questions and their answers. A context-sensitive application can even present a customer with the most popular questions and answers based on where they are on the site before they begin typing in their query.

A database is only as good as its content, so it's important to update it as customers ask new questions. An effective back-end interface of a Web self-service application allows even staff who lack programming skills to add new content and announcements. A multi-language solution should ensure that new content added in one language is automatically alerted for update across all language modules.

You can deploy your centralized knowledgebase of customer service and product information not only on your Web site but also across your contact centre for improved customer service and efficiency. Integrating it with other customer service technologies such as chat, email and voicemail can save valuable time and free up contact centre staff to focus on the more complicated queries as well as to upsell to inbound callers.

Helping yourself

The questions that consumers ask when researching products or actively shopping are incredibly valuable. Web self-service provides the ability to log, analyze, and take action on customer feedback.

Every question asked through a Web self-service solution can provide information about customer requirements in the process of making a buying decision. For instance, if you get a number of queries along the lines of, "Can I collect my order in store?", it may be time to seriously consider offering such a service.

Even greater returns come from using this feedback at the instant that questions are asked. What better way to sell online than by using customer service interactions as a mechanism for promoting products and services based on what the customers are asking about? By asking you questions, shoppers are giving you permission to provide them with information; what you need to do is follow through in a way that satisfies their requirements and increases the chance of their making a purchase. The strategy of using Web self-service as a platform for selling products, alongside providing service, can dramatically increase online sales.

Using Web self-service to provide the right information in response to customer queries along with automated, tailored product advertising can produce exceptionally high levels of engagement and conversion. While response rates for online advertising are typically less than 1 percent, live deployments of Web self-service programs that link customers with optimal offers have achieved average clickthrough rates of 12-24 percent.

Deployed effectively, Web self-service will save you money, as the number of run-of-the-mill calls to the contact centre will decline. In addition, it can help you increase revenue, as it allows you to promote products based on what the customers actually ask. With Web self-service acting as a customer-insight engine, invaluable information can be fed back into the business and be used to enhance the overall business offering.