Chatting Their Way to Sales

Sometimes companies find it more advantageous to outsource their on-line service handling. This is the case with BlueCross BlueShield of Florida, an independent licensee of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association serving residents and businesses of Florida.

BlueCross BlueShield of Florida contracts with Connextions, a service bureau based in Orlando, FL, to handle the selling of health insurance directly over the Web.

Customers browsing the company's Web site, which Connextions manages, can reach agents through the phone, e-mail or live text chat.

"Being able to provide on-line support is very important because we don't want customers in need of help while completing applications for health insurance to abandon the Web site to make a phone call," says Rob Panepinto, executive vice president of Connextions. "We want to be able to assist the customer while keeping them on-line so we can close that sale."

Customers on the Web can search for information about the different health plans available and submit applications to join a plan. Customers typically have general questions about the plans and often ask for assistance when they're in the process of filling out an application for insurance.

There are 30 agents at Connextions who work on the BlueCross BlueShield program. This includes agents licensed to sell insurance as well as non-licensed agents. (Only licensed agents can handle the selling and application process but non-licensed agents handle general customer service information and necessary follow-up work.)

"We really pushed text chat as a valuable tool because selling health insurance is a complicated process and we were concerned about the potential abandonment rate of people in the application process," says Panepinto. "Chat is the best way to simulate the experience of buying health insurance from an agent who's sitting at your kitchen table. It allows us to walk them through the application process."

Connextions uses Aspect's (San Jose, CA) Aspect Contact Server software to route phone, e-mail and text chat requests to the most appropriate agents. All of the agents working on the program are capable of handling all forms of communication, however, Panepinto points out that depending on contact volumes, there may be times when he dedicates agents to handle only one medium, like chat. The Aspect software allows him to make these routing changes on the fly.

"In many businesses it's often the on-line channels that get ignored," says Panepinto. "But here it's the opposite. We're more likely to dedicate agents to answering text chats. We've found that chat requests come from people who are already in the application and ready to buy so the last thing we want is to keep them sitting in a chat queue."

Customers who seek chat assistance, must first submit their names and e-mail addresses and choose from a menu of health plans as to which they're inquiring about. This gives agents information for handling the requests without requiring too much data from customers. Connextions maintains a 60-second service level for responding to chat requests.

To comply with the recent Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), agents let customers know up front that there may possibly come a point in the chat conversation when they might have to switch to a phone conversation as to not violate the legislation. In addition, customers encounter a disclaimer on the Web site before they open up an application.

Connextions also communicates with prospective members via e-mail but it's actually the least used channel. E-mails typically concern general questions about the different insurance plans available.

"Customers who are actually in the application process want an immediate response," says Panepinto. "Whether they're more comfortable speaking to us on the phone or communicating through chat - either way it needs to be immediate."

To ensure that agents can communicate effectively on-line, Connextions spends a good amount of time assessing candidates' writing skills during the hiring process. "Because writing skills are difficult to teach, there's a much higher bar in terms of who you can even bring in the door," says Panepinto. "And in the training process, written communication has become an additional training module."

Panepinto also points out that it's important for agents to have good reading and comprehension skills. "It's easy to tell the intent and attitude of a customer on the phone because when they're angry, they sound angry," he says. "It's much harder to detect these feelings through e-mail and chat. We place a high emphasis on soft skills to ensure that what an agent reads is really what the customer is intending to say. We don't want to underreact or overreact in our responses."

According to Panepinto, this is one of the main reasons BlueCross BlueShield of Florida decided to outsource the on-line portion of their business. "Although BlueCross BlueShield has a ton of experience with selling insurance over the phone, they weren't comfortable doing it on-line," he says.

One of the distinct nuances of selling insurance on-line is the subtly of the process. "Because of the medium, it's much harder to be aggressive," says Panepinto. "Agents have to subtly guide customers through the sale. But one of the nice things about the technology is that we have white boarding capabilities and can push pages to customers, which enables us to cut out the extraneous stuff and really move the process along, which is one of the reasons why we're more successful in using chat to close."

Shifting Gears

One company that has proven the success of its on-line initiative is Fourth Shift, a Minneapolis-based company owned by Soft Brands, that offers a Web-based ERP and supply chain management solution for small to mid-size manufacturing companies.

In 1999, 95% of Fourth Shift's customer issues were handled over the phone. Four years later, only 51% of customer issues are logged over the phones.

Fourth Shift has five call centers located worldwide, which each assist customers within their local regions. The company's Minneapolis, MN call center serves more than 800 customers throughout North America. These customers purchase a yearly contract that entitles them to customer support and service over the phone or on-line. There are 27 agents in the Minneapolis center in three groups that serve the appropriate customers: tech support, finance and manufacturing.

In 1999 Fourth Shift purchased ServiceWare's (Oakmont, PA) eService Suite 4.0 knowledge base software to provide customers with a self-service option.

"Our customers treat the knowledge base like a library," says Karen Lound, customer support manager, knowledge base with Fourth Shift. "They do search for issues on the knowledge base but they also use it to learn about things."

As part of their job duties, agents are responsible for submitting knowledge cases for the Web site. Each of the three main departments within Fourth Shift employs a knowledge base administrator who reviews and approves cases before adding them to the knowledge base.

Customers also have access to Fourth Shift's on-line Support Incident System, which is powered by Pivotal (Vancouver, BC, Canada). Each individual within a company has a unique ID and password that allows them to access their support accounts on-line. Customers can log their own support issues; get the status and details of open issues; and view their company's history of support incidents.

For customers that prefer to send e-mails, a group of first-level agents, who also answer phone calls, monitor and manage the e-mail queue. If a first-level agent cannot answer the customer's e-mail, the agent logs the support incident and queues it to the most appropriate group.

The latest option added to Fourth Shift's Web site is a message board that allows users to dialog back and forth with one another. The boards are divvied up similar to the phone queues. For the most part, Fourth Shift's involvement in the boards is limited but agents do monitor the boards weekly, if not daily. "If we see something wrong we'll fix it," says Lound. "But our users post serious questions and expect serious answers, so we haven't had any problems with bad behavior."

Fourth Shift also uses software from WebEx (San Jose, CA) to conduct support sessions with users, which is useful for when customers have a hard time explaining exactly what their issues are. Using WebEx an agent is able to guide the customer through the technical support system.

For Lound, one of her biggest challenges has been effectively marketing on-line service to customers. To promote it, Lound hosts monthly 30-minute Webinars on different topics that customers ask about. Lound also writes articles for a monthly customer publication and sends periodic e-mails to alert customers of new service initiatives like a new item added to the knowledge base.

Lound realizes that there's still more Fourth Shift can do and is currently looking at ways to devote more resources to improving self-service. Part of this process involves gathering feedback from customers about what they expect from on-line service.

Fourth Shift plans to upgrade to latest version of eService Suite early next year, which Lound says will take care of many users' requests. "Because our product line used to be much more complex, we did much more customizing than we should have," she says. "To ease these difficulties, we're going to stick with more of ServiceWare's out-of-the-box functionalities with the new version."

Taking It All In

Some companies are taking advantage of Web site traffic to garner valuable feedback from customers, which is something you can't easily accomplish on the phone lest you lengthen call handle times.

UK-based ntl:home, provider of telecom, cable and Internet services for residential customers, prides itself on the level of feedback they get from customers. "The feedback we get revolves around our customer and company processes," says Aizad Hussain, ntl:home's managing director. "It's so much more valuable than generic info that measures whether or not customers are satisfied with your service. I don't understand how CEOs can stand up and say '85% of our customers are satisfied'. What does this mean? What are those 85% satisfied with?"

To obtain customers' opinions, ntl:home uses software from ResponseTek (Vancouver, BC, Canada). What's unique about ResponseTek's software is that it leads customers through several menus to target their feedback to specific departments and issues. This gives ntl:home a wealth of valuable information that they can take action on.

An icon on ntl:home's Web site invites customers to "Help ntl improve service." Customers who click on this link go to a page that lists eight areas of the company from which they can choose to comment on. Some of these areas include the call center; installation; telephone; cable; and billing. From the department menu, customers select a specific issue they want to rate. For example, under the call center heading, customers choose from issues that include time to answer; knowledge of rep; issue resolution; and even an "other" category. After using ResponseTek's scale to rate these issues, the customer has space to write in their specific thoughts, comments or complaints.

Hussain says the software's comprehensive reports allow him to monitor the performance of all the company's different departments. Since the call centers serve customers within their local geographic regions, customers who use the tool provide their zip codes so that the feedback is associated with a specific call center or department allowing managers to take immediate action on the issue.

"ResponseTek tells me which line of command led to that bad customer experience," says Hussain. "I know which region they are in and whether it was a call center, an installation or a service call. It gives me a very good idea of where the problems are and when you're a manager trying to fix things, you've got to know where to look."

The Keyboard Is Mightier Than The Sword

Managers are faced with the task of screening new-hires for skills they never had to worry much about before, such as grammar and spelling. And if the agents in your center are handling customer issues through means like e-mail or text chat, it's imperative that they're able to communicate effectively.

Investing in technologies that can help you assess these skills pay off in the long run by helping you avoid expensive misunderstandings with customers. Companies like Employment Technologies (Winter Park, FL) offer multimedia simulation software to assess how well agents respond and interact with customers on-line. Employment Technologies' e.Skills, for example, is comprised of three optional sections that measure e-mail composition, data entry, and keyboarding skills. The company also offers a version for assessing the skills of bilingual agents.

Weighing the Means

There are some cases where no matter how well you've implemented an on-line customer service strategy, reps are still inundated with phone calls.

According to John Kirst, vice president business development with TuVox (Los Altos, CA), a speech recognition software provider, this often happens when companies have too much information to put on their Web sites.

"A lot of companies have reached an equilibrium where they've automated about as much as they can through their Web sites and they're now starting to reach diminishing returns," says Kirst. "This is driven by the fact that to keep an edge in today's markets, companies have to constantly add products to their portfolios. As this content expands dramatically, it drives more calls into the contact center."

Kirst cites two of TuVox's clients as an example: TiVo, a provider of digital video recording services, and appliance manufacturer Maytag. Although these companies have sophisticated Web sites with many on-line service options, they continued to have rising call volumes.

To complement their Web strategies the companies implemented TuVox's software to provide customers with a self-service speech application. What makes these implementations unique is the fact that as opposed to transaction-based interactions, customers can conduct more informational-based interactions with the speech system.

According to Kirst, TuVox's software mines knowledge content from a company's Web site, CRM software or any other customer service app and interacts with customers in a conversational manner. "This conversational approach puts the caller in control rather than the system," he says.

Kirst adds that speech recognition technology is complimentary to Web self-service: "You still can put much more information out on the Web than you can in voice self-service. But in many cases when customers are looking for help, it's easier to be on the phone while standing in front of their dryers or their TiVo sets, then it is to be sitting at their desks on the computer."