eService: Winning in the Global Marketplace

Executive Summary
The Internet, years after its emergence, continues to be a challenge for most organizations. It cannot be ignored; it has indelibly altered the customer communication landscape by adding dimensions such as Web self-service, email communication, and live Web collaboration. And, organizations are still looking for the perfect way to harness its power. What they need is a strategy to fuse the Internet with all existing marketing, sales, and customer service channels—seamlessly and cost-effectively. eService is one such strategy, and it can transform any business.
This paper examines the notion of eService and the need for it in large, global organizations in particular. It also provides guidelines for developing an effective eService plan, and concludes with a discussion of the most significant benefits of implementing such a plan.

What is eService?
So, what is eService? It is a revolution in customer care and competitive advantage. It maximizes both opportunities to retain customers and to improve return on investment. Implemented well, it can result in dramatic improvements in service experience and equally dramatic reductions in cost. And, despite the radical benefits it brings, it does not involve any radical restructuring of your organization. Quite the contrary, it preserves and enhances the value of previous investments by building on the success of existing call centers, sales teams, and bricks-and-mortar outlets—which makes it especially suitable for large organizations.
Put simply, eService is a blueprint for evolving your call center into a multimedia contact center. It is a plan for extending your existing interaction channels to include innovative Web-enabled ones in all phases of the customer life cycle—from marketing and sales to support. A modular approach, it builds on current infrastructure and grows at a pace that is right for your organization. The goal is to help you provide not just more contact points, but service that is consistently satisfactory for your customers as well as cost-effective for the enterprise.

The Need for eService
In these difficult times of poor sales and constrained budgets, do organizations really need eService? We believe that they do, particularly now. Let us take a quick look at some of the reasons here.

Communication Explosion
By one estimate, a quarter of business interactions will be over the Internet by the end of 2001, growing to over 60% by 2005. In spite of which, the demand for phone-based interactions continues to rise steeply. There is also a marked increase in customer expectations. No matter how they get in touch with an organization, customers expect rapid, high-quality, personalized service at all times. Handling both Internet and phone channels well demands an effective integration between them. It demands an eService strategy to create an interaction system designed for the Internet.

Call Center Limitations
Large organizations all over the world are trying to supplement their call centers with other customer interaction channels. What are the factors driving this effort?

Changing Customer Expectations
The traditional call center can be a very frustrating experience for customers with its long wait times, impersonal service, and limited exchange of information. Many customers are comfortable using the Internet now and expect to be able to use it to interact with organizations as well. They want Webenabled contact points that give them greater control over when and how they get in touch with you.

Poor Return on Investment
Call centers are expensive to set up and operate. High operating costs often mean limited service hours and fewer agents. Web-based communication costs much less, but organizations are loath to abandon their substantial call-center investments. What they need is a way to make their call centers more profitable, a way to extend current infrastructure to include new service options.

Impersonal Service
Agents often lack access to details of the customer’s past interactions with the organization as this information is locked away in various systems used by finance, sales, marketing, and eCommerce.