But given limited investment resources, the question remains which channels should be prioritized.  Some colleagues recently discussed the value of social media as a channel, but here we want to discuss e-mail and chat specifically.  In question: If you had to choose just one, is e-mail or chat the better investment?

Below my colleague, Matt Lind, and I discuss our perspectives.

Dalia:

Here are the facts from CCC’s customer channel preferences analysis:

• 5% of customers prefer using e-mail to contact service and support; 4% of customers prefer chat (compared to 52% of customers who prefer Web and 33% of customers who prefer phone).
• 47% of customers are confident they can resolve their issues via e-mail; 38% of customers are confident in chat (compared to 63% who are confident in resolving issues via the Web and 70% who are confident in resolving issues over the phone.

Given this data, and the fact that it is very simple to write an e-mail, one doesn’t have to sit in one place waiting for resolution, and an electronic paper trail exists (one doesn’t have to doubt whether the message was received), I think e-mail is the better investment.

Not to mention that in certain cultures (e.g., Japan) and certain business models (e.g., B2B customers—11% of B2B customers prefer using e-mail to handle requests v. 2% who prefer chat) really demand e-mail, e-mail is very much the preferred channel, if not something that is expected.

Matt:

I really want to believe that e-mail is a more effective channel (I personally love the channel), but we also know that e-mail resolution rates are quite poor—when you look at actual customer behavior, you find that only 36% of customers resolve their issues in one e-mail.  In fact, on average, customers send 2.14 e-mails to resolve their issues.

The benefit of chat is the opportunity to get in-the-moment clarification.  More often than not, customers write e-mails that generally appropriately identify the issue at hand, but the onus is on the customer to know what information is key to include.  If the customer omits something, then staff must initiate a back-and-forth to collect more information to resolve the issue.  With chat, this can be done instantaneously.  With e-mail, it’s a more protracted process.

And that has huge implications on cost to serve (if you want to model this for your company, use CCC’s E-mail Cost Efficiency Calculator) and customer loyalty.

Dalia:

I do agree that chat has the potential to be very effective, but I still think it’s not the e-mail channel itself that is flawed, but rather the management of the channel.  Too often organizations de-prioritize the channel, somehow perceiving e-mails to be less urgent than phone calls.  Ensuring the right technology such as an e-mail management system is in place is important, as is ensuring staff have the right skills for e-mail, but perhaps most important: Are you signaling to customers what is and is not well-suited for e-mail, and are you proactively calling customers when e-mail becomes inefficient?

Matt:

In the ideal world, I think you’re right that companies could call customers back when e-mail is not the most effective channel for resolution, but because of large contact volumes, I think organizations have a hard time making outbound calls for most issues.  This idea would work well in a B2B environment, but potentially becomes impractical in other environments.

And that’s why I think chat is so beneficial—it is much easier to put customers on the right path while they are still in the same channel in the moment—if necessary, you can push relevant Web links to the customer and you can offer click-to-call so the customer receives a phone call in the moment.

Furthermore, calling a customer who has e-mailed is not particularly dependable as it can be difficult to catch a customer in the moment.  Chat is just more efficient from that perspective—both parties are ready to talk.

Dalia:

Relevant points, though a lot of the same things could occur in e-mail as well—staff can include links to the Web site or a phone number to immediately contact someone….

I think the larger issue here is most organizations simply haven’t optimized their use of e-mail, which admittedly is very challenging to do, and they’re seeing chat as a quicker fix.

Matt:

I think that’s true—and we certainly know that chat is not a quick fix.  But companies have offered e-mail as a communication channel for a long time and have had multiple opportunities to optimize it and most simply have not done so.

***

The conversation could obviously continue a lot longer, but What is your perspective?: Is e-mail or chat the better investment?  Why?

CCC Related Resources:

1. Multi-Channel Customer Preference Data

2. E-mail Cost Efficiency Calculator

3. Managing Service Organization E-mail Volume

4. NEW: IVR Resource Center

By Kirsten Robinson

Creating the best format and voice for customer response messages is essential—especially as service reps increasingly interact with customers by e-mail.

An executive in our Customer Experience Forum was recently in the process of redesigning e-mail response at her company, and asked to hear member feedback on the best way to execute responses.

In general, your e-mails should be short, and easy to read and scan. Subject lines and sender information should be clear and recognizable. Here are a few takeaways from the rest of the discussion:

• Don’t use e-mail to cross/up sell. It might be tempting, but don’t clutter up customer inboxes with additional selling. Limit request responses to the information being asked for. One member suggests offering products only if they are a direct solution to the customer’s question.
• Do personalize e-mails. But, don’t go out of your way to build rapport. Messages shouldn’t come across as a generic response—customers need to feel that they’re being heard from a real person, not an automated system. One member changed their sign-off from “Customer Service to” the agent’s actual name.
• Don’t use a stock template. But, do mix outlines with partially written responses. One member recommends starting off with a template to expedite response time, but then having CSRs add text customized to fit the customer’s specific situation.

Here’s another tip—using a strategy of next issue avoidance, member Bell Canada uses e-mail to prevent callbacks by proactively sending alerts to customers who have called with complex issues in the past. The company’s messages are carefully designed to contain critical information only and push customers to self-service channels. Overall, Bell Canada found that 45% of customers save these follow-up e-mails, which generate a click-through rate of 42%.

View the original discussion on e-mail responses to customer requests.

I’m certainly an avid reader of trade press and secondary research, and keep a list of the top trends to the side of my desk (CCC members, find the latest here).  But in my role as a researcher, I also try to break away from the latest technology enablers and innovations and consider more holistically what an “excellent” customer experience might truly look like.

So what are the top things that would radically change the service and support experience?  Here’s my take:

1. Turn a 1-800 number into a 1-900 number—Literally eliminate all toll-free phone customer support—or perhaps even all phone support altogether—and push every customer online.  This would not necessarily mean that organizations no longer provide customer support at all (though perhaps this is a conversation worth revisiting), but rather fully staffing the online channel and forcing customers to address their queries through these mediums.  Phone literally becomes the channel of last resort.

2. Rebrand the service role as a professional extension of the company—In the new world, frontline staff become consultants and focus on value add, relationship-based customer interactions as opposed to addressing set up and billing questions.  This would imply a smaller, salary-based team with higher levels of education and no productivity guidelines, and all of this would be possible because simple issues would be resolved in self-service.

3. Reduce the number of channels offered—Specifically, eliminate e-mail and reactive Web chat (while maintaining Web, phone, and social media), which are both typically very expensive and to date are providing a poor customer experience.  This relates to the limited choice concept that I’ve discussed before—we know better than that customer, so we create fewer but better channel options for our customers.

4. Turn social media into its own form of self-service—Get customers engaged in helping one another, then scale back customer service operations and enable customers to continue to help each other.  Certainly this is applicable for technical support-related questions, but perhaps broader types of customer queries can be resolved through collaboration as well.

CCC has seen a few companies approximate some of these more radical changes.  Namely, software company has considered the idea of offering customers service solely in the Web, encouraging customers to first browse the online knowledge base, then initiate a chat if unsuccessful, and only then have a live VoIP conversation to resolve the issue.  (CCC Members, click here for more details on this software company’s plans.)

And companies are increasingly bought into building and leveraging communities to eliminate call volume and drive brand loyalty, though admittedly most have seen mixed success here—most are still actively manning and moderating the channel, so it is not truly self-sufficient.

Which begs the question: Are these truly revolutionary ideas?  What else would you add to or remove from the list?

In line with the economic downturn, many retailers and consumer product good firms have realized that limiting customer choice can actually help drive purchase decisions.

The “Paradox of Choice” movement has evangelized this idea.  But it seems the message hasn’t trickled down to service and support…yet.

In fact, channel proliferation is the norm in the service world.  It’s become a game of keeping up with the Jones’.  The average company operates at least three or four different channels—phone, Web, e-mail, IVR—and many up to eight channels with Web chat, online forums, click-to-call, Twitter, and entries into other social media spaces.  What is the implication of this?

As our data suggests, increased risk of a poor customer experience.  For example, we’ve found that the average number of contacts to resolve an issue via e-mail is 40% higher than via phone, with each e-mail decreasing the likelihood customer loyalty up to 10%.  Customer confidence in issue resolution is also substantially lower in many of these newer channels.

In many cases, this is not the result of a poorly built channels (though my colleague, Pete, may disagree), but rather that channels are a poor fit for individual customers at a particular moment.

So what to do?  The most progressive companies we work with are helping customers make the right choices, primarily by engineering the channel selection process.  There are two approaches we see: 

1. Limiting customers’ channel choice altogether by requiring customers to enter into a single channel, where intelligent triage measures steer the customer to the best fit channel.  Intuit is tinkering with the idea of having all customers enter into Web interactions through an intelligent search avatar, which helps guide users to the right self-serve channel (forums, knowledge base, diagnostic, etc.) and to a Web chat or phone conversation depending on the complexity of the issue.

2. Directing customers to pick the best-fit channel by using language that guides customers to the right channel. Customer choice plays a greater role, but the company helps the customer make that choice correctly.  Cisco CBG uses language appealing to customer knowledge to direct newbies to step-by-step guidance and gurus to online forums. Think of it as segmenting customers for best-fit service channels.  

Where do you side on the question of customer channel choice?  Are more channels and more choice better, or is guiding and limiting choice a better option for today’s customer experience?

CCC members, refer to our customer channel preferences data for more details on channel preferences and behaviors.

Fast forward 24 hours, the response read: “Go to our site, enter your User ID and we’ll send a new password to that address.”  Sounds good right?  But…my User ID was my old e-mail address. Strike #1.  So for round 2, I was more explicit in my request.

Fast forward another 24 hours to the second response: “Go to our site, enter your User ID and we’ll send a new password to that address.”

Yep.  They sent me the same response (verbatim) two days in a row. And the worst part is that this type of email “resolution” is the norm in my experience, not the exception.

Call me the jaded contact center geek, but it seems that the usefulness of email as a service channel has expired.  I recognize some B2B interactions may be an exception to the rule – given more regular customer interactions – but for most service interactions, it’s a poor channel.

E-mail sounded good to me back in the mid- to late-90s when solutions providers were trying to sell the idea that e-mail would displace the phone as the primary service channel.  But the realization soon hit that email is costly, time-consuming, and difficult to manage.  Instead of replacing one channel with another – we simply added a new one.

That was 10-15 years ago, and I still haven’t heard of a company that has solved all of their e-mail problems.  So why do companies still offer email?  I’ve heard companies say, “We can handle the volume during down times” and “Our customers really like it”. 

But do they?  I often hear many folks actually aren’t satisfied with the speed of response, no matter how fast you get back to them!  Plus, our research shows that 47% of customers are confident in the email channel (well below both phone and web self-service) & only 36% actually resolve their issue in one email.

And that resolution rate really matters – if you do the math on the email costs (labor, IT, and overhead) and multiply it times the number of contacts to resolve an issue, I’ll bet the total cost is more than you expected. 

Consider my situation – I’m getting ready to send my third email to get a simple issue resolved.  What if that issue was really complex? Despite any e-mail management system the company has, there is an increasing labor cost for each additional e-mail. Plus, I’m almost ready to call, which adds on the handle time of a frustrated customer.

The message here is clear: take a look at the number of e-mails to resolve an issue and customer experience scores in e-mail interactions, and do a quick check on this channel.  You may just find yourself eliminating one of your channels … not adding to them.

CCC Members, check out how one of your peers was able to eliminate their costly e-mail channel – without harming customer experience metrics.