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The New Online
Assistance GuideThis guide aims to cover:
Why self service assistance has reached all time low success rate,
The critical engagement steps for your merchant website,
Three social customer care tactics,
The best of traditional tools for online assistance,
The ideal web engagement metrics framework,
And much, much more!
This document has been developed and compiled by
Michael Durand, CEO @ Butterflive,
Guillaume Dumortier, Strategic Marketing Consultant for @ Butterflive
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Customer Relationship Management has been deeplyimpacted by the emergence of online networks andmobile applications. Online consumers are empoweredlike never before: they use search engines and blogsto find new stories, they use social networks to shareand rate their experiences and they use online sourcesand resources to influence their online purchasedecision and meet their online support demands.
Organizations have been working hard to jump on the new CRM bandwagon.
The whole purchase funnel has been impacted and is now owned by the online
customer. Organizations have been implementing and growing new interaction
channels and self-services resources for the online customer to find and use.
Thus, online assistance has become a critical topic for brands and organizations
as e-commerce represents an ever growing part in their sales revenue.
But in 2011, a new analysis draws a challenging picture of online support:
successful visits to self-service are continually trending downward,
customers have all but abandoned online knowledge bases, and employees
are growing more dissatisfied with knowledge tools in place.
The concept of customer service needs to be brought to the next level
by activating the real-time engagement mode. Fortunately, technology
is here to help leverage the already existing traditional tools.
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I- The Defeat Of Online Traditional Assistance ?
All Time Low in Online Self-Service Success
Researches have been highlighting the decline of self-service success for the past 3 years.
Defined in the TSIA support services benchmark questionnaire as the percentage of
customers that attempt self-service and successfully find the information they need, this
metric has been in free fall mode, from 48% in 2003 down to 40% in 2010. Analyzing the most
recent entries, as of January 2011, self-service success has declined to an all-time low: 39%.
Successful Visits to Self-Service
Source : TSIA Benchmark
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Self service solutions are supposed to optimize support management as well as
a standardizing the way to manage incidents and troubleshooting requests, thus
decreasing the volume of incoming requests to the customer call center.
Online assistance and self service tools are doing a poor job in toggling those incoming
requests away from the good old and lengthy phone call. Phone calls still remain the
preferred way to interact with customer service staff (47% of total interaction volume).
Mainly because of bad design and single alienating path to content tactics, online
self-service tools cannot provide a satisfactory experience: depending on the customer skill
level, education, age, and other demographics, different customers need different tools.
If 100% of customers who attempted
self-service were successful, thepercentage of issues resolved by selfservice would easily grow to nearlyone-half of all interactions.
The challenge is not to convince more
customers to try self-service; the realchallenge is to answer their questionsonce they are there, instead of sending71% of self-service customers toanother channel for support. TSIA
Knowledgebase Content Is Not Appealing Anymore
In the early days of unassisted support, Web self-service primarily consisted of a searchable
knowledgebase. Over the last decade, various other content sources have been placed
online to assist customers, with little work done to update or refresh old knowledgebase
content and tools. As a result, it is the least used self-service resource on line by customers.
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Most Used Self-Service Resources
Source: TSIA 2011 Benchmark, 5= Most Used / Most Accessed
Traditional Online Assistance Missed The Early Days Of The Social Web
Social media and online communities have emerged and organized themselves
much faster than organizations decided to put social media on their agenda.
But 9% of the interactions are currently resolved by peers, quickly catching up to
self-service volumes, which has been around in various modes since the mid-1990s.
Most support communities are not well blended into the other elements of the
support organization. Therefore they are underused and are perceived as an
alternative to self-service and online resources, not a complement. It is seenas an extra and counterproductive step in the customer experience.
Support is not social yet because:
Customers are limited in taking action
=> rating, commenting or submitting an idea?
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Customer actions cannot impact how other customers experience support, yet
=> customers can edit product documentation?
Customer actions cannot make a difference in how
other customers experience the product, yet
=> common ideation translated into an augmented product or new feature?
The Critical Moments of Engagement Are Skipped or Missed
There are four critical stages when purchasing online:
Discovery - Recommendation - Comparison - Transaction
Social media has become the main source for brand conversation and product
recommendations. 90% of online users trust peer endorsements. 14% of online users trust
advertising. Online assistances role to inform and feed online customers has been taken
over by services like Facebook or Twitter. Social network and microblog contacts have morecredibility and influence than ever. Product discovery is not happening on websites anymore.
Change in Sources that are Trusted for ProductRecommendations Among Internet Users
Wordwide, Sept 2010 (% Change vs. July 2009)
Source: Global Web Index, Annual Report 2011: Welcome to social Entertainment
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The proportion of prospects who are un-sold when they encounter the websites shopping
cart is likely 80%, while the audience segment that is truly sold is probably around 20%.
Therefore it is key to maintain maximum awareness and availability when
users are visiting the website. 73% of online users feel reassured when
they see live online assistance capabilities displayed on the website. Yet,
only one out of ten online merchants are equipped with such tools.
In addition, multi-tabbed browsing features enable online visitors with a high
chance to lose focus in the proposed engagement/sales funnel on websites. This
happens mainly when users want to compare prices, find reviews, find coupons
or ask questions about the intended purchase during their exploratory visit.
As the ultimate proof of the defeat of online assistance: 92% of e-store visitors
leave without performing a purchase. Had there been a live support help, 93%
of abandoned carts would have completed the whole transaction process.
Online merchants need to step up their online customer care game as a decisive
part in the overall satisfaction of the online purchase experience. The current trend
is to massively invest in social media and live assistance technology in order to
catch up with the real-time and humanization needs of online customers.
II - The New Online Assistance: The Best ofBoth Social and Old-school Worlds
Facebook and Twitter have made it compulsory for brands and businesses to builda strong brand presence to monitor and act on the conversations. Nowhere will the
impact of the social web be stronger, or more beneficial, than in Service and Support.
But for them, its a double-edged sword. Brands are no longer in the control of advertisers
or PR agencies, but in the words, messages, and even music videos of consumers and
it is still a challenge to define or measure a standardized ROI for social investments.
Thats why organizations also need to rely on old-school tactics and metrics to balance the
real nature of online assistance and customer care: resolving the issue, whatever the channel.
The Social Media Revolution
It is now a fact that social media has become a main focus of investment in organizations
to develop it as a customer service channel on its own. Social media has changed
customer service from being a support function to being an extension of marketing.
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In the social media ecosystem, customers want to know that companies are listening
and responding. As the organizations front line, customer service is where the company
becomes real to prospects and buyers whereby showing authenticity and care.
With social media, it is about winning prospects, customers, and fans with every interaction.
As the companys point of interaction, customer service is critical to social media marketing
efforts. Zappos is the poster child of amazing customer service across social media outlets.
Company: Where does your organization planto invest to improve customer service?
Source: cScape Online Customer Engagement Survey Report 2010
Three Social Customer Care Tactics
It is all about building a preferred relationship in a new channel where the company is
proactively engaging with its prospects and clients thus fostering loyalty and word-of-mouth
1. Put a Human face: Social medias engagement and interaction makes onlinepurchase more personable and makes someone feel home. Transparency
builds customer trust. To this end, its important to have social media guidelines
in place to help employees with their social media interactions
2. Create additional product related content: A wide range of
formats can be used from online videos to blogs. In addition to specific
purchase information, how to use or troubleshoot the product.
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3. Share Customer Feedback: Ratings, reviews, comments, answers... The benefit is that
reviews can help qualify and endorse your product in ways that your staff cant because
customers trust other customers. The challenge is that negative issues like United Breaks
Guitars can be amplified due to social medias free media and distribution platforms.
Having in mind that social interactions only account for 9% of the total customer interactions,
those efforts can be simply measured by tracking the number of interactions (fans,
followers), number of issue resolved, content creation, customer service toggling rate.
Companies must optimize the performance of their traditional tools by having an in-depth
understanding of the prospect behaviour within the purchase/engagement funnel.
The Best of Traditional Online Support Tools
For the past 10 years, customer success has been measured alongside customer satisfaction.
If nothing replaces the humanized contact and (supposed) efficiency of in-store visits, online
customer expectations revolve around 3 major criteria: waiting time, cost and simplicity.
When analysing the cost of incident per channel, it appears that the web chat is most
cost-effective solution while maintaining above average customer satisfaction.
CSAT and Interaction Cost by Channel
Source: TSIA 2011 Benchmark; 5 = Highly Satisfied
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Phone: Cost per incident remains pretty high. Very emotional
channel. Not easy to navigate through IVRs. Staffing needed.
Web Chat: Cost-effective. Instant ROI. Real-time.
Very focused channel. Investment needed.
Email: Asynchronous channel. Expensive yet average results in
customer satisfaction. Social media typically should take over here.
Self-service: low investment => low customer satisfaction. Attention needed.
Whatever investment in customer support technologies, companies must also
be able to define their new dimensions for success in the set of metrics theyve
been tracking for years and complement it with social data points.
The Ideal Web Engagement Metrics FrameworkIn order to get the most of a website audience, incoming traffic
shall be analysed according to 4 key dimensions:
Focus
This dimension helps to understand the general behaviour of your audience
and when prospects start drifting away from your engagement funnel.
Metrics: bounce rate, multi page session rate, browsing
sessions, shopping cart session, order session
CustomerExperience
This dimension helps to understand the generalappeal of the inventory and available resources.
Metrics: page views per session, product page views, average session length
Transactions
This dimension helps to understand the overall performance of the merchant in
converting shopping cart into orders and how often a cart has been abandoned.
Metrics: items per oder,average order value, shopping cart conversion/abandonment
Mobile&SocialImpact
This dimension helps to understand the part of sales related to social effortsMetrics: percent
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Cyber Monday 2010 Example
Source: Coremetrics Benchmark Reports Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2010
Less Page and Product views => focused audience
Higher session length => engaging content and inventory
Higher shopping cart abandonment rate => poor assistance
Social sales are happening
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III Setting up the new online assistance with Butterflive
Self-service assistance has shown its limits towards online users
expectations. They now expect real-time response and a more
humanized interaction, not just the one-size-fits-all answer.
Butterflive has been design for this purpose, so that you can create a newproximity with your visitors. It makes it unique and easy to highly personalize
and better target online customer service by blending real-time behavioral
criteria of engagement with the search context of the prospect.
1. Butterflive Concept and main featuresButterflive is a Real-Time Engagement and Lead Generation Solution composed of:
A proprietary Behavioral Engagement Scoring Engine which
evaluates in real time visitors interest for your website,
A real-time Web Analytics dashboard to monitor live visitors with their contextual data, A Live Chat, efficient and easy to install. Immediate point of contact
between a visitor and a company representative, a Live Chat is the best answer
to many issues: extra information about a product, help for filling complex
forms in the buying process, or precondition for customer reclamation ticket,
all of this can be made easier and faster with Butterflives Live Chat.
a. Smart Engagement : Detect every hot prospect to engage. Youre here to help.
Web Analytics:All the context you need
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First step towards knowing the visitors context, real-time analysis is used
to extract localization, language and technical data from the visitor.
During all of his/her navigation on the website, the visitor s behaviour is also taken into
account to determine his/her need or interrogations. Combine this with his/her search terms
before coming on the website and you get a personalized indictor of the visitors need.
Hot prospects automatic detection: instant Heat Map of your website
When the number of simultaneous visitors gets high, it becomes important to sort out
who among them are those you have to follow or even contact. Indeed, lets say you
have 300 simultaneous online visitors on your website, with a bounce rate of 40% and
an average time on site of 2 minutes, about 60 visitors per minutes are renewed, which
makes it difficult to target the hot prospects. Whereas its not so important in a quantitative
perspective, where you assign as many operators as needed, it turns crucial when you take
a qualitative approach and want to keep a small team working on your online prospects.
Butterflives scoring engine lets you keep the focus on the most promising
prospects. It assigns an instant score to every visitor based on their behaviour
and on other configurable settings to highlight any interesting profile.
Notifications: Never miss a lead again
In order to have any opportunity processed, Butterflive notifies available agents as
soon as a prospect is detected on the website. A sound alert and a sliding frame on the
agents desktop indicates this one that a hot prospect has been detected and should
be looked over, or that a visitor is trying to contact someone from the company.
In the same spirit, visitors get a message depending on their score : if this one
exceeds a pre-determined threshold, a contact frame slide from the bottomof the screen and notifies them that they can initiate a chat session
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b. Contacting prospects: dive into the context
Co-browsing: Synchronize your screens
Navigation sharing has 2 main advantages: quickly identifying a problem
or a misunderstanding from a visitor on one side, guiding visitors towards
the relevant pages, in regard of what they are looking for. Chat session
is of course still working even if users are changing pages.
Video Chat: Gain the trust of your visitors
Go further in the humanization of the customer relation: Butterflive lets you
add video chat to your live chat session. Pre-sales contact personalization
is a first step toward a trust relation between a visitor and the company, and
video is a feature that can be reassuring depending on the usage.
2. Use Cases
Pre-purchase, visitor initiative
A visitor is looking for a product and needs some more information about the shipping
fees or the payment methods. A contact zone being available at each step of the buying
process, (s)he can request a chat session and ask an agent about whats uncertain.
Estimated time before buying: 5 min
Estimated card abandonment rate:
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3. A solution which fits the trends
Visitors expectations have changed because of social medias massive adoption,
but companies are still unclear on how to optimize their conversion rates and
increase loyalty through customer satisfaction on their own websites.
Customers needs reassurance and Butterflive has you covered on this one. It combines live
chat proximity with smart engagement scores and real-time contextual web analytics so as you
never miss the opportunity to better serve your customers and welcome your new prospects.
Butterflive also provides useful tools to increase customer satisfaction by bringing
engagement analytics to the next level. For instance, knowing the visitors browsing context
can prove very effective and make makes it easier for him to find what he came for.
Detecting efficiently the needs of your live visitors is now possible
thanks to the contextual data (search terms) (s)he used, the pages (s)
hes been viewing on the website and many more.
Without any impact on the companys internal processes, Butterflive disrupts
the online assistance approach and makes it personal again for visitors.
Personalization can go even a step further: given a visitors profile (navigation
history, technical context, geolocation) and his search context , Butterflives
triggers can be used to provide a personal experience of the website.
Sources
Coremetrics Benchmark Reports Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2010
cScape: 5th Annual Engagement Survey
TSIA | The Current State of Unassisted Support - 2011
Consona | Making Support Social:Turning Customer Engagement Into Customer Success
eMarketer | Cone Survey 2010