Tier O Cost Reduction Strategy for 2015: The Must-Have Efficiency Maximizing Tools of Your Company’s Future

The secret isn’t the fancy computer in a box. It’s the POWER of the SOFTWARE behind it.

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What is Tier 0? Tier 0 is the level of service that enables customers, both internal and external, to find the answers they need and achieve satisfaction with resolutions without the requirement of human interaction. Tier 0 technologies will provide an excellent investment for customer-centric businesses in 2015 because it enables simple problems through automation, allowing employees and support staff to focus on more complex problems that require higher level thinking and approval to resolve. Who Uses Tier 0? According to Human Resources IQ [1], HR representatives having implemented a successful Tier 0 employee self-service program are seeing 66% of employees are capable of completing their own transactions and getting the information they need without requiring escalation, and the HR department is getting a return of 70% of their paperwork processing time back that can be allocated to more value-added initiatives. Outside the HR arena, the US Post Office is saving on staffing and time by providing kiosks that allow consumers to weigh, print postage and pay for their own shipping transactions. Airports are reducing ticket counter staff by providing self-check-in stations for patrons that don’t have baggage to check. Grocery stores are requiring fewer cashiers as shoppers check out at self-service stations, and even frozen yogurt shops are saving time by allowing customers to serve their own frosty treats. Movie goers are able to purchase tickets via their own mobile device and smartphone applications like TabbedOut are giving restaurant goers the option to place orders and pay the tab without waiting for a busy server to process their credit card payments.

More and more different types of businesses are taking advantage of technology to give consumers easy, paperless access to get the information they need and the convenience they desire. The philosophy behind this movement is simple. The easier it becomes for customers to complete a business transaction with you, the more likely they are to do it. The more time spent waiting on hold to speak to a call center representative, or waiting for a response to an email or web form inquiry, is more

© 2014 Lymba Corporation. 901 Waterfall Way, Bldg. 5, Richardson, TX 75080 (972) 680-0800 | www.lymba.com

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time they have to second guess whether they wish to become or remain your customer. If there is a faster, easier option available on the market; that is where the business will go. But one of the core values of my business is the personal attention we devote to each customer. How can I get the ROI on Tier 0 without losing the personal connection? Diebold conducted a study [2] on the benefits of self-service in one of the most sensitive areas of personal service imaginable – the process of checking in at the doctor’s office that yielded the following results:

As illustrated by the time savings and volume of transactions captured in the graphs from the Diebold study shown above, patients valued the time saved over the personal attention from the front desk staff.

© 2014 Lymba Corporation. 901 Waterfall Way, Bldg. 5, Richardson, TX 75080 (972) 680-0800 | www.lymba.com

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Much of the value associated with self-service has to do with the type of transaction or problem the customer wants to address and the level of feedback needed to effectively resolve their needs. Key factors that go into consumer evaluation of service quality are:

1. Timeliness of response. 2. Number of contacts made in order to achieve the desired result. 3. Effective resolution of the transaction.

Key points of failure to avoid include:

1. Failure to set appropriate expectations. 2. Failure to respond; or responding inappropriately. 3. Failure to complete or resolve the transaction.

So what kind of Tier 0 Solution can help me? An instant automated response can quickly reassure the customer that his or her email, text or web form submission has been received and either answer the question, set the appropriate expectation for when and how to expect a response and if additional information is needed. Opening up your Knowledge Base for consumer access via the web can be an easy and inexpensive means of allowing customers to self-serve, but it lacks the personal nature of a 1:1 response system such as virtual chat or automated email response, and gives little or no analytics to determine if questions are satisfactorily answered. Virtual chat has become a popular method as of 2014, but it also does not record knowledge gaps to enable growth and adaptation of the knowledge base to better meet consumer’s informational needs, and has some drawbacks with regard to the depths of natural language processing involved.

© 2014 Lymba Corporation. 901 Waterfall Way, Bldg. 5, Richardson, TX 75080 (972) 680-0800 | www.lymba.com

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Lymba’s PowerAgentTM software has been developed specifically for enhancing customer relation management efficiencies through integration into your existing workflows with Salesforce Service Cloud or SAP. Our patented question answering technology reads incoming service and support requests and employs semantic matching to pull relevant answers from your existing Knowledge Base, enabling the system to automate an appropriate response for as much as 30% of your inbound text based requests from channels such as web submission, SMS and email. PowerAgentTM’s CRM dashboard enables you to view statistical views as well as specific support tickets that were received and automatically answered by PowerAgentTM compared to those forwarded to a live agent with automated answer suggestions, and those routed in queue for response by a live agent in a particular department or additional information to be provided by the customer. Using the statistical tools in the dashboard can help identify knowledge gaps not covered in your knowledge base so that you can add the content, and continue to reduce the amount of inquiries that require resolution by a live agent. Sentiment ratings enable sensitive or emotionally volatile communications to be prioritized and routed directly to top tier support staff better equipped to handle the customer and achieve First Contact Resolution. PowerAgentTM’s proprietary sentiment rating feature has been through a rigorous machine learning process to identify statements and phrases within the text within the support inquiry to flag its content as positive, negative or neutral, enabling contact center management to distribute difficult customer issues appropriately and fairly, using ratings to determine which tier of support should be assigned to respond and ensure that live agents are not overly fatigued by regulating the volume of negative versus neutral inquiries each employee must resolve. Additionally, PowerAgentTM enables managers to customize the workflow sending technical questions to technical agents, satisfaction issues to customer service, and refund requests to those with refund processing privileges, cutting down on the time and number of touches necessary to fulfill the consumer’s needs. Customer didn’t provide enough information for your live agent to assist without probing further? PowerAgentTM can identify missing information needed for completing purchase order templates, billing information and other details needed and prompt the customer to provide them before a live agent intervenes. Inquiries will be held in queue as “waiting for agent” or “waiting for customer” so that it is easy to tell from your CRM dashboard which tickets to work on and which can wait.

Works Cited [1] B. Kevin, "How a Multi-Tier HR Service Delivery Model Transforms HR," [Online]. Available:

http://www.humanresourcesiq.com/talent-management/articles/how-a-multi-tier-hr-service-delivery-model-transfo/. [Accessed 23 December 2014].

[2] Diebold Incorporated, "Healthcare Self Service: Securing the Patient Experience," 2012. [Online]. Available: http://www.himss.org/files/HIMSSorg/content/files/DieboldHCSelfServicePositionPaper.pdf. [Accessed 23 December 2014].

© 2014 Lymba Corporation. 901 Waterfall Way, Bldg. 5, Richardson, TX 75080 (972) 680-0800 | www.lymba.com