New Online Assistance Guide (White Paper )

8/3/2019 New Online Assistance Guide (White Paper )

1/15

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


2/15The New Online Assistance Guide - p.2

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



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.



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?



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



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.



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.



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



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



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



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



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



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

Documents

New Online Assistance Guide (White Paper )