This article examines the virtual Customer Service Representative (vCSR), a new kind of customer-centric software platform that automates a selected set of customer service and sales functions for both the customer and the customer service representative. The vCSR platform integrates technologies such as: speech recognition; natural language understanding; business rules engines; and abilities to link multiple channels together - ie, wireless gateway that can be linked to electronic mail as well as to a web or voice server or Interactive Voice Response (IVR) technology.
The vCSR imperative
The ever-evolving internet is relentlessly driving explosive growth in ecommerce, customer service and other real-time, interactive, transaction-based, business activities. When implemented correctly, the internet technology infrastructure unifies communications and distributes applications enterprise-wide, thereby increasing productivity, cutting costs and improving customer relations - while creating new profit centres along the way. Indeed, virtually all consumer markets are shifting their focus toward a web-enabled, multi-channel CRM enterprise platform that is dedicated to immediately satisfying the needs of their customers on an around-the-clock basis.
The emerging internet paradigm continually challenges a business' ability to differentiate itself from the competition. In the high speed, computer-driven business world, customers prefer to deal with those companies that are the most consistently accessible. In the consumer-driven environment, the rule is, if it takes a customer more than five seconds to reach you, you have lost the customer. If you don't deliver consistent, reliable accessibility to service, someone else will.
It is important to note that while the vCSR platform is internet-enabled, it is certainly more than just another 'web solution'. It is, rather, an enterprise-wide application framework that provides customer interaction solutions of virtually any type. The business imperative is that a modern company must combine human interactions with intelligent, automated technology that lets the company and its customers manage the whole relationship in an effective way.
As the vCSR platform integrates technologies such as speech recognition, natural language understanding, business rules engines and abilities to link multiple channels together, it can fulfil a variety of differently targeted purposes by automating many of the interactions that currently are being handled by live agents.
While a vCSR may not automate 100% of a company's interactions at first, it could start out at, say, 50% and incrementally increase the percentage as the technology continues to evolve. Typically, 30 to 60% of incoming phone calls can be handled automatically. If the caller can't get the answer wanted out of the IVR program, the system tags the call and sends it to a CSR. The CSR gets a content-rich 'screen pop' about the customer, a term that describes data collected by the contact centre about the current and previous caller interactions, which are spontaneously displayed on the CSR's screen in a pop-up window.
The point is to avoid making the customer ask the questions that they have already had answered. The overall goal is to automate as many human functions as possible at each step along the vCSR migration path.
The current solution to handling the explosion in customer requests is to throw more live bodies at the call centres to respond to the torrent of interactions. Technology is providing better and better tools to customer service representatives to help them be more productive, but even though that strategy helps, it is incomplete at best.
In the face of continued growth of customer service calls, there is no way that the current model is sustainable economically, either from a transaction volume standpoint or a customer satisfaction perspective.
vCSR system architecture and functionality
Successful implementation of a vCSR system is possible only through solutions that utilise a fully integrated, modular, scalable, end-to-end system architecture. Such a solution must seamlessly combine and deploy distributed applications unobtrusively on a common, multi-channel business process platform, then manage them as services to both internal and external customers in a scalable, run-time, 'zero-latency' technology environment. To meet these demands, vCSR software should incorporate the following functions and features:
1. An open specification, component-based, multi-channel architecture that allows quick development and deployment of advanced CSR applications across multiple channels, from web to wireless and is made up of the following parts:
- Prefab vCSR software objects with reusable code as they are arranged in a development space. Software objects are used to build automation in information retrieve/submittal communications through multi channel mediums and data processing.
- A visual object assembly environment offering drag-and-drop speed and simplicity, allowing for rapid refinement to adapt to changing customer needs, with a visual runtime debugger for streamlined testing and debugging.
- An application runtime environment for application management and deployment with superb scalability, full integration with leading firewall solutions to ensure end-to-end security, robust system management and an open API to protect your investment by easily permitting future integration of custom or third-party objects.
2. Intelligent application features include solutions for formulating, targeting and delivering one-to-one marketing initiatives, at any point of contact - in real-time and include the following:
- Intelligent targeting draws on back-office knowledge and resources for prospecting customers and initiating cross-selling opportunities.
- Seamless transaction histories capture the content of every telephone call, web page, completed form and email associated with a given customer transaction. Capturing all of the content of a customer transaction and making sure that it is included in their digital file folder, can be crucial to providing state-of-the-art, customer self-service.
- Sophisticated profiling, prediction and decision management engines help to plan marketing campaigns and act on immediate opportunities according to company business rules and strategic objectives.
- Real-time execution responds to the customer at the point of contact, provides feedback for immediate evaluation and permits the CSR (as well as the vCSR) to instantaneously adapt offers to new customer information. Some systems even learn in real-time, altering their predictive models in response to the latest customer input.
3. Multiple channel coverage should be fully functional across the entire customer service operation, no matter how the customer reaches the company or has been marketed to.
4. Seamless integration provides comprehensive integration with all legacy, custom and third party back-office systems, as well as CRM, ERP and ecommerce applications.
5. An information-processing engine links all back-office databases and legacy systems to front-line applications via third-party client software.
Instantaneous access to each customer's transaction history and personal information is provided via a user-friendly GUI as soon as he or she is identified by the system. Advanced verification technology, such as phone voiceprints, enables call centre agents to immediately begin a fully informed interaction.
By integrating all back-office systems on a single platform, each and any of them can be upgraded more easily and inexpensively.
The optimal solution redefines the customer experience. It eliminates phone conversations with customers, including ecustomers, as well as the bricks-and-mortar variety. Accordingly, a multi-channel solution is essential in order to accommodate today's evolving customer needs. Using multiple communication channels simultaneously accommodates an increasing consumer propensity to act on both impulse and opportunity.
Moreover, a vCSR solution must be able to save information in all steps of any business transaction and make that data available to the human CSR or customer on demand.
vCSR software and enabling technologies
In pre-internet days, customer service used to be segmented across a multiplicity of departments: one department handled customer credit, another resolved billing disputes, while another department was responsible for shipping the order. The salesman often ended up being the primary point of customer contact - especially when things went wrong and an ombudsman at the company was needed to straighten things out. The internet-enabled, customer-focused, vCSR software plays the role of service representative, ombudsman and salesman - all in one.
vCSR software can replicate the various levels of human interaction quality that are required for wall-to-wall customer relationship management, starting from the agent in the contact centre right up to the knowledge worker, as a corporation rolls out its vCSR system across the entire enterprise. This requires high-function, pre-built software objects that can be combined to create feature-rich applications. These applications fulfil the role of live CSRs by dynamically handling and responding to customer enquiries.
vCSR software objects have both depth and breadth: each has high-level functionality and each can be smoothly integrated with other objects to build across-the-board ecommerce solutions. vCSR architecture is also designed for support of software objects built by using industry-standard object models such as Microsoft COM.
vCSR architecture segments the functionality necessary to integrate the different media and systems in an ecommerce application. It replicates the multiple layers of skill sets and subsets based on specialised vertical knowledge that agents need to have.
Knowledge management software applications are built in. This means that the vCSR deals with relatively complicated questions by automating the knowledge base in the system through applying business rules and workflow processes. For example, customer context information is stored in a folder that contains data about the customer contact history.
When a telephone call or email request comes in, customer information can be extracted from back-office data sources and associated, through business rules-based, workflow software, with the customer allowing his/her request to be automatically fulfilled. The customer folder can be made instantly available by the virtual CSR to many different applications using a standard API.
High-tech innovations proliferate as web technology evolves. New formats and protocols, such as XML and WAP, and controls such as Java, COM and Active-X, open up new possibilities for customer contact and service and for better control over customer operations.
Value-added, enabling technologies that differentiate top-shelf vCSR development solutions from the norm include:
- Intelligent telephone demons that use advanced speech recognition, with large custom vocabularies and natural language support, to automate customer phone interactions. Channel integration with intelligent speech recognition streamlines consumer information delivery and makes outbound telemarketing more cost-effective.
- Intelligent speaker verification uses stored voiceprints to efficiently and unobtrusively identify repeat customers, which enables on-the-spot delivery of customer profiles to CSRs, which opens up opportunities for additional sales and cross-selling possibilities.
- Advanced CTI effectively manages the transfer of customer interactions from software to live CSRs and ensures against making customers repeat themselves to those human agents.
- Advanced web technology uses 'push' technology to periodically inform and update customers, update customer profiles and invoice clients via electronic bill presentment.
- Fax-on-demand interactively delivers paper-based and imaged documents to customers through phone menu or web browser activation.
- Email automation intelligently manages one-to-one email communications with personalised messages, which automatically evoke the most effective response and completely fulfil a customer's request for information.
- Wireless interface communicates with mobile customers using the WAP or SMS protocols, which ensures that mobile phone and pager applications are fully integrated with all other channels.
By combining CSR software objects that use these technologies, developers can create integrated, customer-focused, proactive, feature-rich applications that span various media and systems across the enterprise. vCSR applications can manipulate, transform and personalise information in real-time or based on a user-defined time or event. This enables developers to create sophisticated self-service applications that can meet the most complex user needs. Each department, branch office and employee can leverage these applications to make the organisation customer-centric, so that the same level of information regarding the customer is available to, and used by, everybody in the company.
Major vCSR applications
There are many innovative ways of taking advantage of vCSR software applications. Not only can the solutions help companies tap into the power of customer service interactions in novel and exciting ways, but they can also centralise and incorporate a company's existing algorithms and business rules, and apply them to vCSR applications through multiple technology channels.
vCSR intelligent software systems combine computer interaction with natural language understanding to bring a lifelike presence to the interface between a company and its customers, partners, suppliers and employees. vCSR applications can yield a unique competitive advantage in two important ways. First, a networked economy permits a business to offer customers a personalised experience that is utterly different from the traditional shopping experience. Rather than trying to mould online sales, marketing and support to match standard offline models, vCSR solutions allow users to target online markets more specifically, through intelligent customer profiling.
Second, they address all aspects of networked connections to customers, from marketing to sales and support.
New vCSR uses are discovered every day. A sample of horizontal applications is listed below:
- Customer self-service - vCSR software is capable of handling multi-channel customer enquiries across all industries.
- Automated email response - Content analysis software can determine the subject matter of email and then automatically respond appropriately by fulfilling requests, change of addresses, routing the email to the appropriate department, etc.
- Personalisation assistant - vCSR software can function as a multi-channel personal servant, screening out unwanted emails, phone calls and faxes, answering routine enquiries and alerting its owner to urgent messages.
- Voice self-service - Voice authentication technology can provide security that internet passwords cannot. By analysing the voiceprint of a caller, potential fraud can be detected and prevented early if a customer fails verification procedures. Advanced speech recognition capabilities allow customers to serve themselves and transact business using conversational language.
- Routing manager - the software has built-in workflow and business process-based rules that, in conjunction with content analysis, enable it to examine correspondence faxes, emails and other business documents and then to direct them to their proper destination.
- Web navigation - Customers can contact companies by email, through the web, or even by telephone, without having to learn how to navigate the web site, or know which department to send mail to, or memorise the list of keywords that work best with the site's search engine. Now the use of natural language processing means that all a customer has to do is to ask for what he or she wants, in plain language.
- Chat monitor and respondent - Content analysis software can introduce newcomers to chat rooms and anonymously monitor chat in internet chat rooms for inappropriate or illegal discussions. It also can be programmed to automatically answer the enquiries and questions of people in chat rooms that are looking for specific help.
- Customer survey agent - vCSR software can voice or email or fax query targeted customers, then monitor and record their responses, doing logic checks in the process to ensure that the surveys are answered properly.
Internet customer service, email routing, web-chat, web-collaboration, speech-enabled applications and CTI are some of the common elements of vCSR architecture. A well-developed vCSR application strategy should effectively integrate all elements into a consistent, pre-integrated architecture to understand customer behaviour across all contact channels, using the customer as the starting point. Industry-specific, vertical applications include:
- Banking,
- Insurance,
- Financial services,
- Retail,
- Delivery services,
- Academia,
- Human resources,
- Healthcare,
- Home services.
vCSR deployment across the enterprise
vCSR architecture is designed around open standards-based computing and provides the scalability, manageability, security and reliability necessary for large-scale deployment. A major advantage of vCSR architecture is that it integrates with existing technologies and infrastructures.
An object-oriented approach and development-friendly GUI enables programmers, developers and integrators to build feature-rich applications that can provide broad data access, communication media support and that also can create application logic for value-added, self-service solutions. Additionally, they enable the rapid development of application prototypes in response to shifting business strategies.
Cross-channel integration covers the full range of customer communication devices: phone, web, email, fax, pager and WAP devices. Powerful application features include personalised, proactive messaging; multi-channel servers that integrate with voiceprint speaker verification; real-time, sales message customisation, advanced process automation and more. Cross-platform integration capabilities can link together and co-ordinate back-office systems, communications media and workflow automation processes so that they all work together and are automatically self-updating.
To simplify the management and deployment of vCSR applications, high-end vendors provide a comprehensive and reliable runtime environment.
Typically, an application server is the control centre for managing the delivery of all applications to support large solutions across the enterprise. The runtime environment schedules resources and activities, manages resource usage, tracks application status, handles resource contention and responds to changing conditions. Characteristically, the application server integrates with firewall solutions to ensure that deployed applications are secure, end-to-end.
The most successful vCSR applications meet customers on their own ground in the manner in which they desire to be met. Contemporary customers are essentially selfish: online looking for even more individual attention, even more responsiveness and much more customisation. They don't want to hear 'I'll have to get back to you on that' and are willing to build long-term relationships based on trust and mutual respect with firms that reciprocate accordingly. Along these lines, it is a good idea to control target marketing, cross-selling and up-selling campaign frequency. Customers don't want every interaction with a company to lead to a sales presentation; they just want to get the information they need or get their problem solved in a timely fashion when they really need to.
vCSR applications are high-powered tools for creating the new era of customer relationships. They will certainly go a long way towards redefining the nature of customer relationships in the first decade of the 21st century. However, it is useful to keep in mind that, in the end, they will not determine the ultimate nature of the customer business relationship: the customer will inevitably do that.
