Seven Realities of Online Self-Service

It is very important to revitalize the self-service experience offered on customer-facing websites in in order to keep pace with evolving consumer expectations. There are seven key realities of modern online service that expose the gap between customer expectations and website self-service performance, and how you can take steps to close that gap starting now.

1. Customers have grown tired of old online help tools. Customer satisfaction with today's most common web self-service features is abysmal and getting worse.

As more companies rectify this by deploying next-generation self-service solutions and virtual agents, fewer customers will tolerate antiquated self-service help tools online.

2. Customers now expect a superior experience online, not just a good one. Exceptionally positive online experiences are now setting the bar for what customers expect when they visit virtually any web site in search of answers and information.

3. Consumers are impatient and protective of their time. Consumers cite "valuing my time" as the most important thing a company can do to deliver a good online customer experience. Yet many web sites are complex, hard to navigate and filled with content that provides multiple possible answers rather than a single, swift path to resolution.

4. Customer service has gone mobile. Mobile phones are now ubiquitous. Convenience and ease-of-use are the hallmarks of these mobile form factors, and web sites that offer experiences contrary to these attributes will only raise the ire of today's increasingly impatient and unforgiving mobile consumer.

5. Social media is increasingly embraced as a customer service tool. Delivering a consistent service experience across multiple channels is critical, as consumers are not shy about using social media sites to publicly complain and vent frustration about any interactions with companies that fail to satisfy them.

6. It's not just your younger customers who prefer to get their answers online. In fact, consumers of all ages are equally likely to prefer online channels for customer support.

7. Dissatisfaction online = hijacked revenues. One of the most appealing benefits of delivering a positive experience in the web channel is the opportunity for organizations to provide information that supports and encourages purchase decisions. Online, the segue from a customer service conversation to a purchase consideration conversation can be a very natural and systematic progression. This progression is thwarted, however, the moment a self-service experience fails to satisfy.

The impact of the self-service experience on revenues should not be underestimated. Customers are very likely to abandon their online purchase if they cannot find a quick answer to their questions.

These seven trends underline the urgent need to revitalize the online service experience offered by most companies. Online self-service is in need of resuscitation and useful web self-service and virtual agent technologies that can deliver an enhanced customer experience are currently underutilized.

Where To Go from Here?

What should your organization do as the first step toward improving the online customer experience? Begin with an honest and objective assessment of the self-service experience your website offers today. Looking at your customer-facing website, ask yourself these three questions.

1. Is there a single, highly visible starting point for self-service activity? Today's consumers are task-oriented when they go online. Your customers want their self-service journey to begin immediately and move swiftly to completion. Looking at your home page or most highly trafficked customer service page, ask yourself if the average customer would be able to identify the clear starting point for any customer service-related task in a matter of seconds. Any required navigation or clicking through to new pages is viewed as a time-waster and is out of alignment with their expectation.

2. Is issue resolution generally a multi-step, or a single-step activity? When looking for information online, customers want a single accurate answer that's accessible in one step. Any content page that offers more than one alternative answer, or path to an answer, requires your customer to take additional steps for sorting, scanning content and/or comparing answers. On your web site, when results are served, is the customer presented with a single answer, or multiple results to sift through?

3. How will you measure how your site is performing in this area? A quantitative assessment of your self-service performance is the first thing you will need to establish for any improvement to the self-service experience.

Optimizing self-service experience in organizations' web sites is extremely important and will help to increase revenues. Contact us today for a free consultation.

E-Discovery and Information Governance

More and more companies are operating throughout the world, so the impact of differing requirements for e-discovery is increasing, especially those relating to privacy. The rules tend to be much more rigorous outside the United States, particularly in the European Union.

Europe has adopted the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which was promulgated in April 2016 and has a two-year implementation timeframe. It regulates the manner in which data can be collected and moved across international borders. The regulation makes an e-discovery company or law firm responsible for any compliance failure. If there is a breach, the data handling entity can be held liable for up to 4 % of its gross revenues worldwide, whether the breach was intentional or not.

A number of other trends are occurring in international litigation that are having an effect on e-discovery. Litigation is beginning to be seen as a business strategy in Asia as evidenced by the aggressive litigation some Korean electronics companies are taking with regard to protecting their IP. Those companies are seeing the potential benefits of using litigation as a method to protect or monetize their IP, which results in greater requirements for e-discovery.

Other factors are also driving the demand for e-discovery. The United States was the first country to carry out antitrust investigations that reached beyond its borders, and there is a domino effect with other countries now doing the same thing. These government investigations are often followed by class action lawsuits, creating additional challenges for the multinational companies.

The international nature of that litigation also creates more issues with respect to moving data across borders. Therefore, it is all the more important for companies to be aware of local laws and customs regarding privacy.

One question about data resulting from the proliferation of data is whether it will become a more frequent target of e-discovery. 

Potential issues abound including whether personally identifiable information (PII) is involved. Most information is stored in structured databases and it could be used in litigation to make a claim that an individual was doing something at a certain time. The information may or may not be encrypted; it could also involve health data from wearable devices, for example, that could be considered PII. Organizations may need to take a step back and think about who the custodian is, whether the data could be part of e-discovery and whether it is being appropriately protected.

Moving to the cloud

Every organization has information stored across a multitude of systems, computers, shared drives, repositories, and now a lot of this information is moving to the cloud. This is going to require a new approach and new technologies in order to address the challenges arising from the growing volume and format of information being generated.

Managing cloud based content may be new to an organization and as a result there might be uncertainty of the risks involved and the various approaches to mitigate them.

Most of cloud repositories lack information governance. This means that an appropriate architecture and supporting processes have to be put in place to ensure hat content is properly governed and managed. By joining a could enabled information governance platform with those cloud content repositories, an organization will be able to make those cloud based repositories complaint with e-discovery requirements.

SaaS-based delivery models for e-discovery are becoming more prevalent. The move to Office 365 is another part of this equation. With more data in the cloud, it makes sense to have cloud-based e-discovery solutions. The established benefits of SaaS delivery such as scalability, faster release of new features and simpler interfaces apply to e-discovery as well.

SaaS delivery also offers simpler inclusive cost models and, in general, lower costs than on-premise and legacy hosted products. 

With more data in the cloud, it makes sense to have cloud-based e-discovery solutions.

Information governance should be deployed within a traditional IT infrastructure, a cloud-based environment, a hybrid of traditional and cloud infrastructure. Information governance is rapidly moving toward an enterprise service model enabling organizations to deploy shared services across the complex IT infrastructure, eliminates dependence on users, and enables uniform governance across all applications and systems.

In order to remain competitive and maintain costs, organizations must consider information governance as a service. Technologies with a flexible central policy engine capable of managing the challenges of complex, federated governance environments are going to be the ones that enable organizations to make the most strategic use of information. These technologies have an enforcement model not tied to a specific store or repository but leverage standards to enable automatic enforcement across all systems, repositories, applications, and platforms.