The Message Must Go Through: The Future of Customer Care
In April 1860, the first Pony Express rider set off from St. Joseph, Missouri, and headed west across the United States with a bag of mail. The route would take him and the other riders along the trail over the 2,000 miles to San Francisco in just ten days, a huge improvement over the usual three weeks it took to deliver mail by stagecoach from Missouri to California. The system forged a new frontier in communication with the motto: "The mail must go through." By reducing time, guaranteeing delivery, and allowing people to reach out and communicate quickly (by 1860 standards), the Pony Express revolutionized mail communications. Today, we are on the brink of a similar communications and messaging revolution. This time, it's digital, wireless and Internet-enabled. Messaging technologies have the potential to completely alter the nature of message delivery and therefore customer care, just as the Pony Express revolutionized mail delivery more than 140 years ago.
Messaging Technologies - Mobile and Multiplying
Today, more than 130 million people actively use instant messaging technology to send more than 1.5 billion instant messages a day; by 2005, IDC estimates that there will be 400 million instant messenger users. AOL Instant Messenger users alone send 475 million instant messages a day. Meanwhile, mobile phone users are sending 1.4 billion short-message-service (SMS) messages a day. Add to these numbers those individuals who are using voice messaging and interactive pagers to send messages to each other, and it's clear that messaging has been established as a mainstream communications channel. The development of these technologies points to another area of phenomenal growth - mobile communications. Devices such as pagers, Personal Digital Assistants, and mobile phones with Internet access are just a few of the new tools available that enable the mobile messaging channel. If an individual possesses just one of these devices, that person can be contacted anywhere, at anytime.
This type of constant connectivity, if effectively harnessed by businesses, will revolutionize communications - to customers, to employees, and to business partners - and create new relationships between businesses and customers. Messaging technologies provide an unprecedented ability to intelligently and cost-effectively interact with customers at scale. However, in order for these changes to take place, businesses need to embrace messaging technologies and promote them as tools in improving customer care.
Building Customer Loyalty
The rapid and explosive growth in messaging technologies may become a primary driver in the changing nature of communications and customer care. In today's market, customer loyalty is the key to success, and businesses need to focus on developing it with each interaction. Messaging channels can serve as tools in building this loyalty.
Organizations need to treat their customers as individuals from both a marketing and service delivery standpoint. By collecting customer information and gleaning insight from it, businesses can anticipate customer expectations and tailor each customer's experience to match these expectations. With this insight, companies are also able to proactively reach out to customers and business partners with personalized promotions, products, pricing and message content. Businesses can optimize customer acquisition, development, and retention by using this information and new messaging tools to better meet customer expectations at every turn, thereby improving customer loyalty.
Technology Tools Promote Customer Care
Even as some companies have made great strides in their customer service, aggregate customer satisfaction continues to decline in many industries. For example, aggregate customer satisfaction in the airline industry has dropped from 72% to 63% since 1994. And since 1997 telecommunications has seen a yearly one-point decline in overall customer satisfaction from 75% to 72%.1 Enterprises can mitigate this trend first by recognizing why customers are dissatisfied, then by using new technology tools to solve problems.
Many customers note three characteristics of customer service today that businesses need to improve. First, customers believe that many companies are rigid because they provide only one or two ways for customers to interact within specified time periods. While many companies have worked hard to make call centers and websites helpful, customers want easier, more timely access to information and services. Second, customers characterize these systems as company-centric. Instead of being able to choose a communication method or call and get a quick answer, customers often find themselves on hold for many minutes, lost in a voicemail tree, unable to find the answer in a confusing sea of Web pages, or waiting for a return email. Third, companies are perceived as reactive, responding only when approached directly by the customer and asked a specific question.
What has stopped companies from being more flexible, customer-centric, and proactive until now? It was often cost-prohibitive for organizations to contact individual customers with time-critical information. In addition, the necessary technologies to automate the process simply did not exist. However, if companies are willing to take advantage of new messaging technologies, they can change their interactions with customers and alter customer perceptions. Several new technology-enablers are making this possible:
o The rapid emergence of instant messaging services and their proliferation onto wireless PDAs and handhelds promotes even more efficient messaging communication, which will save both time and money for both companies and customers.
o Natural language processing technologies can make systems more humanistic. For the first 40 years of the computer revolution, the industry focused on making humans understand computers. Now, with the emergence of natural language processing, computers are able to understand humans. For instance, a system based on natural language technologies can receive a question via an instant messaging service, understand that question, and respond to the customer in natural language without the involvement of a customer service representative.
o Advances in voice recognition and voice synthesis technologies coupled with natural language processing are making voice interfaces possible today. These technologies can also be utilized to create outbound alerts or voice messages to which customers can respond.
o E-commerce and the rapid evolution in database technologies make it possible for businesses to collect customer information including preferred contact methods and billing methods, as well as purchasing patterns. This data can then be used to tailor individual customer relationships and communications.
While these technologies are now available, most companies are not yet harnessing them at this time. However, as the business potential of the new messaging technologies comes to light, communications between companies and customers will be redefined rapidly and dramatically - and to the benefit of all participants.
Early Adopters Are Already Raising the Bar
Regardless of the industry, the multiple messaging techniques create value through timeliness, efficiency and interactivity, enabling better business decisions. Time-critical information can be exchanged, customers can make decisions, and then businesses can act accordingly, responding directly to individual customer needs.
Already the first examples of companies taking advantage of messaging technologies are emerging. Realtor.com, an online resource focused on helping individuals contact real estate agents and search for listings, provides a good example of how businesses can use messaging technologies to their customers' benefits. As we know, real estate agents are highly mobile throughout their working hours. Whether they are showing properties, driving around town, or stopping by the office, they are rarely in one place for more than a few minutes. When a potential customer is looking to relocate and wants to reach a real estate agent, it can be difficult, if not impossible, to track one down. Realtor.com provides these customers with a new resource. Customers can visit Realtor.com, get a listing of real estate agents in a particular region of the country, and then contact these agents via messaging technologies that send messages out to agents' cell phones. This resource makes conversations between realtors and customers simple and time-efficient.
In another example, FAO Schwarz, the famed toy store, has created a "buddy" on AOL Instant Messenger, a Yahoo! Messenger "friend," and an MSN Messenger "contact," "Shop FAO." This allows customers to send messages from their instant messenger of choice to customer service representatives who will answer in real-time at that customer's messenger address. While this solution does not take advantage of the most advanced technologies, it does provide yet another avenue of customer service that is personalized for individual customers.
In these two examples, businesses are working to improve their relationships with individual customers. However, these messaging technologies can also be used by businesses whose customers are other businesses. Today, freight companies like Yellow Freight and ABF Freight are using messaging technologies to respond to customer care requests from their business customers.
The Next Generation of Customer Care: Ubiquitous Messaging
While the previous examples highlight current uses of messaging technologies, there are many examples of how messaging technologies can be more fully exploited to the benefit of both businesses and customers.
For instance, airline travelers want answers to time-sensitive questions and airlines need to be able to contact their customers to deliver time-critical announcements about flight delays or changes. An airline could have an "AirlineHelper," which customers can add to their buddy list on instant messenger services. With AirlineHelper, customers will be able to get answers to many questions related to travel plans including: "What gate is my flight departing from?"; "Is my flight on time?"; and "Have I been upgraded?" AirlineHelper can respond to these inbound messages from customers by using natural language processing and identifying technologies to answer questions. But AirlineHelper can also send outbound messages, notifying customers when flights are delayed or gates are changed, before customers even ask.
The shipping industry provides a useful illustration of the opportunities an industry can leverage by using messaging technologies in business-to-customer communications. Combined, FedEx and UPS ship 20 million packages a day, and the United States Postal Service handles approximately 660 million letters a day. Shipping companies that take advantage of new messaging technologies will tackle many problems including tracking lost packages, contacting customers about undeliverable packages and saving drivers' time by ensuring that customers will be available to sign for packages. New solutions based on messaging technologies will allow these companies to contact individuals and confirm that they will be available to receive packages, reducing resources and time spent on individual deliveries, and increasing efficiencies.
Business-to-business relationships can also benefit from the use of advanced messaging technologies. As an example, with messaging technologies, chemical exchanges will be able to alert customer businesses when they have been outbid, when a chemical they are seeking goes up for auction, and when there are shipping delays or back orders. An additional example is in the high-tech industry where messaging technologies can significantly improve the time-to-respond to customer service requests performed by third parties. Many business-to-business processes - service management, order management, account management, sales force management, and communications - can be streamlined by the application of messaging technology.
Capabilities and Knowledge Capital Lead the Change in Customer Care
We're on the verge of discovering the full value of messaging technologies. As companies expand into this communications arena, Accenture believes that several key strategies will drive businesses to adopt new solutions and use messaging to their advantage and to the advantage of their customers.
Accenture's vision for the future of customer care and communication is encompassed in a cross-industry, customer-driven messaging solution that we are developing to bring to market. The solution allows customers to enter their personal profiles once, establish their preferred communications devices, and determine how they want to be contacted. Many different businesses in multiple industries including banking, travel, utilities services, and credit card companies can take advantage of this solution. This approach promotes easy communication between businesses and customers, while protecting proprietary information such as bank account numbers.
As part of the customer messaging system, we've developed four key capabilities we believe will drive the success of messaging as a business communications tool:
o Universal Profile and Permission Marketing Model: In this model, customers are in charge, defining a communications profile for a broad audience and then setting specific criteria to determine who can use what pieces of information. This approach decreases the time customers must spend telling suppliers their preferred methods of communication while increasing efficiencies for businesses that need to send alerts.
o The Hierarchical Guaranteed Delivery Alerting Architecture: This architecture allows customers to define exactly how they want to be contacted by the messaging solution. Each customer establishes a "hierarchy of alerts." The solution then uses that alerting hierarchy to attempt to send an alert to that customer, continuing down the hierarchy of alerts until the customer gets the message and responds.
o Customer Intent-Response Models: Many companies within specific industries face the same customer questions and concerns on a daily basis. Those same companies also face the challenge of offering consistent yet differentiated responses to customers. Definable customer intent-response models can be customized for many companies within a specific industry, offering these companies an efficient and consistent model for answering customer questions.
o Virtual Agent Architecture: The customer messaging system delivers virtual agents that are resident in the major messaging networks including, for example, AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, MSN Messenger, SMS, email, and interactive pager. These virtual agents use the universal profiles, natural language processing, and the intent-response models to receive, interpret, and respond to customer requests and to send proactive and interactive customer alerts.
Capabilities Take Flight
These capabilities sound appealing, but will they improve your customer care? The airline industry once again provides an illuminating example of how these capabilities can be utilized in a real-world scenario. As discussed above, travelers often seek time-sensitive information from airlines, and airlines often need to send alerts to customers quickly.
So exactly what happens when a customer has a question? A frequent business traveler is preparing for a trip later that evening but needs to check on the flight time. Rather than calling the airline and being put on hold, the traveler sends an instant message to "AirlineHelper" asking: "Is my flight on time?" The customer messaging solution receives the request and the natural language processor (NLP) interprets this as a request for flight status. Based on the travelers IM screen name, the system is able to identify the traveler's next flight. The question is then routed to the appropriate business, in this case the airline, where the request is processed by the airline's internal system and a response is returned to the messaging system where the answer is formatted into an appropriate message and sent back to the customer. Moments later, the traveler has an answer. Based on the answer, the traveler can then expedite his or her plans to get to the airport, or they can reschedule their flight.
Conversely, airlines often need to contact customers with time-sensitive alerts about particular flights. For instance, weather conditions have prevented a flight from taking off and the airline needs to contact the 130 passengers on that flight. Rather than hiring customer service representatives to call all of the passengers, the airline sends an alert to the customer messaging engine with the names of those individuals who need to be alerted. Using the hierarchical delivery architecture, the system determines each customer's preferred contact method. The alert is formatted for each messaging method and the system attempts to deliver the alert until an acknowledgement is received from the customer or until all methods of delivery have been attempted. Once contacted, a dialogue can be started that presents the traveler with several options including the opportunity to remain on the same flight, reschedule, or cancel. Thus the airline receives customer responses that provide critical data for improving customer operations.
Specifically, think about the business traveler discussed above. Suppose the traveler prefers to receive notification on a home voicemail system. However, since the traveler is not at home, he or she will not receive an alert there. The system moves to option B, the traveler's mobile phone. Again, no response. Finally, the system beeps the traveler's interactive pager and receives a response indicating that the customer has received the message. After receiving a confirmation of delivery, the system notifies the airline that the customer has received the alert. This type of comprehensive messaging system is the future of customer care and communication.
A Communications Coup for Businesses Everywhere
As companies implement these new technology solutions, they will find that messaging fundamentally changes their interactions with their customers. Companies will become more flexible and humanistic because their customers will be able to decide how and when to interact, and because their customers will be able to interact using their "natural language." Companies will also become more proactive because they will be able to anticipate customer needs and act accordingly, contacting customers with pertinent information. Finally, by doing business under each individual customer's terms, companies will become more customer-centric.
When the Pony Express first started delivering transcontinental mail, the service was a novelty. It was expensive and customers wondered how the service could really guarantee delivery, especially at such a fast pace. However, as more people took advantage of the service, they began to realize that the Pony Express could live up to its guarantee and offer the best solution available - fast, reliable delivery of important messages. Today, messaging channels are perceived as novel, but when businesses begin to harness these technological advances, customers and companies will see the results. The messaging explosion provides businesses with a great opportunity to redefine the way they interact with their customers, increase business efficiencies, and reduce costs. Ultimately, those businesses that take advantage of new messaging technologies will increase customer satisfaction and loyalty because they will be prepared to anticipate and proactively meet customer needs anytime, anywhere.
1 American Customer Satisfaction Index - by Industry Sector 1994-2000
