Automating The Telephone Support Call

Companies have invested billions in sophisticated electronic service technologies to cut the cost of customer care and improve the support experience for their customers. Although these e-service solutions have proliferated and have forever changed our expectations about customer support, over two-thirds of all support incidents are still initiated via the telephone.

E-service solutions have focused on automating and optimising the Web support channel. The traditional phone-based support channel, however, has remained largely untouched by automation beyond basic routing and queuing of calls. Until service providers can optimise the support call, they will not realise maximum savings and product margins or provide the best possible service experience for their customers.

Support Call Automation Challenges
Unfortunately, the unautomated nature of identifying and resolving problems over the phone continues to cause misdiagnosed problems, unnecessary dispatches, and lengthy support calls. As a result, telephone support continues to be a major source of cost and consternation for businesses.

Any efforts to optimise the support call through automation must address and overcome three special challenges:

• The Diagnostic/Repair Challenge: The entire diagnostic and repair process is too manual, too time-consuming, and too error-prone. It relies on users to observe and articulate the symptoms of their problems, to navigate successfully through a conversation with a Customer Service Representative (CSR) or an interactive voice response (IVR) system, and to implement supplied fixes. Technology and service providers clearly need a better way to gather diagnostic information and make the entire support call less susceptible to human error.

• The Knowledge Challenge: Because the diagnostic process is not automated, diagnostic information cannot easily be integrated with details from other systems to give the CSR a complete and up-to-date picture of the end-user environment. Fragmented knowledge, viewed through multiple applications, leaves problem resolution at the mercy of the CSR’s subjective interpretation of the data. Providers need a way to capture content from the telephone call digitally, and integrate it in real-time with other electronic information so that the CSR has immediate access to accurate information about the situation.

• The Workflow Challenge: Service providers have automated the mechanics of receiving, routing, and handling telephone service calls with technologies such as speech recognition, voice gateways, and IVRs. They now need to automate the logic of telephone calls, or their content and context. This means connecting the phone call into the various front-end and back-end systems as well as the support organisation processes.

Four Steps to Support Call Automation
But there’s good news. Service providers can look to the principles of electronic service delivery and apply those best practices to automating the phone channel.

By using existing technology platforms and processes, providers can capture and leverage the telemetry generated during a support call – just as other companies have been able to extract and use digital telemetry from PCs and other devices for e-support purposes.

An effective automated-service strategy for the telephone should include the following four steps.

1. Automate Diagnostics: The thorniest problem in automating the service call is automating the process of gathering actual diagnostic information – the dreaded Q&A – to remove all guesswork from it. New automated diagnostic capabilities can generate a simple to communicate code that encapsulates key technical data about the customer’s environment. The customer then speaks or keys this code into the telephone. Ideally, automated diagnostic technology will be able to collect and consolidate technical information about the customer environment and back-end systems into a simple code to trigger an automated diagnostic workflow or display translated diagnostic data for the appropriate CSR.

2. Deploy Guided Resolution: The fastest way to cut costs is to reduce the number of calls that require the help of a CSR. Guided resolution workflows help customers solve problems quickly and independently over the telephone by automatically using relevant device and diagnostic data. With a guided-resolution system, customers can speak or key the aforementioned code generated at the time of the problem, rather than being forced to describe complex, detailed problems. The system captures this code and blends this information with other relevant customer and operations information automatically extracted from back-end systems. The guided resolution system initiates workflows that dynamically guide the customer to the right solution without the intervention of a live CSR. In those cases where live help is needed, the system can help reduce the time and steps for the CSR by delivering a digital history of customer technical information and steps taken to date.

Once they are able to capture the logic of support calls, providers can use this information to steadily raise the level of automation. For example, they can analyse historical call information to determine the top reasons for customer calls, then create automated self-service workflows that solve the problems – all integrated with the telephone-based system.

3. Make CSRs More Productive with a Single Console: By integrating telemetry in real-time with other knowledge and tools, providers can give CSRs a more complete picture of the customer’s problem at the start of the live call. Ideally, providers should create Web-based “dashboards” for CSRs that display voice and non-voice information in an easy-to-understand format. These dashboards or consoles should be integrated with call-centre software to achieve maximum productivity.

4. Tie Everything into Your Service Infrastructure: For maximum efficiency, providers must integrate these first three capabilities with their back-end systems, including call-centre software, outage and network systems, and service infrastructure software. By being able to compare phone-collected data automatically with data from back-end systems, providers can dramatically shorten resolution times and conserve precious CSR time for exception problems.

Most importantly, by integrating the telephone support call into automated service infrastructures, providers can now have a single service delivery platform for all support channels. This unified platform provides greatly improved efficiencies by leveraging common telemetry data, support information, and automation techniques.

By extending automated service to the telephone, providers can decrease the number of calls that reach CSRs and reduce average handling times for calls that do. Only by doing so can providers make the telephone support call an integral, productive and customer-pleasing part of their e-care strategies.