Comments on: Is Self-Service good or bad? http://jtonedm.com/2008/07/18/is-self-service-good-or-bad/ James Taylor on Enterprise Decision Management Mon, 01 Dec 2008 21:32:16 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.6.3 By: Are your live agents helping or hurting you with customers? » Smart (Enough) Systems, the blog http://jtonedm.com/2008/07/18/is-self-service-good-or-bad/#comment-11397 Are your live agents helping or hurting you with customers? » Smart (Enough) Systems, the blog Sat, 18 Oct 2008 01:21:10 +0000 http://jtonedm.com/?p=505#comment-11397 [...] Applying decision management can help modernize your call center by giving you business control of critical customer decisions, improve routing and call handling and give a focus to knowledge management. It can also help fix your self-service interactions as I have noted before. [...]

[...] Applying decision management can help modernize your call center by giving you business control of critical customer decisions, improve routing and call handling and give a focus to knowledge management. It can also help fix your self-service interactions as I have noted before. [...]

]]> By: David Greer http://jtonedm.com/2008/07/18/is-self-service-good-or-bad/#comment-10587 David Greer Sat, 19 Jul 2008 21:14:02 +0000 http://jtonedm.com/?p=505#comment-10587 I thought this was an interesting post on self-service.  I'm like James in that I'm a half-full kind of guy.  We've worked with financial institutions to automate scheduling of phone appointments with certified financial advisors.  The idea is that employees of their institutional 401(k) customers would go to a special web page where they could click on a "Schedule an Advisor" button.  The employee would then give a date range (much like booking a flight online).  Behind the scenes our scheduling engine would do the necessary skill set and availability match, returning solutions to the employee who can then select the one they want, or change the date range (again like online flight bookings). In a recent blog posting on <a href="http://blog.eoptimize.com/archives/11" title="customer time" rel="nofollow">customer time</a> I talked about how some enterprises take an average of 12 minutes per call to the call center to book appointments.  If you could do it online, you should be able to get the average to less than 2 minutes.  If I was a customer, I'd prefer the 2 minute choice rather than the 12 minute one, even if I don't get to talk to a person. David Greer I thought this was an interesting post on self-service.  I’m like James in that I’m a half-full kind of guy.  We’ve worked with financial institutions to automate scheduling of phone appointments with certified financial advisors.  The idea is that employees of their institutional 401(k) customers would go to a special web page where they could click on a “Schedule an Advisor” button.  The employee would then give a date range (much like booking a flight online).  Behind the scenes our scheduling engine would do the necessary skill set and availability match, returning solutions to the employee who can then select the one they want, or change the date range (again like online flight bookings).

In a recent blog posting on customer time I talked about how some enterprises take an average of 12 minutes per call to the call center to book appointments.  If you could do it online, you should be able to get the average to less than 2 minutes.  If I was a customer, I’d prefer the 2 minute choice rather than the 12 minute one, even if I don’t get to talk to a person.

David Greer

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