Web sites can also have the unfortunate effect of increase e-mail volume, since customers find it easy to fire off a missive to any address they find on a site -- whether its a customer-service oriented e-mail address or not. And because of the nearly instantaneous nature of e-mail, they may expect an answer quickly.
How about in a few seconds?
"An e-mail is a very asynchronous thing, and the customer expects an answer. We usually give an answer within 30 seconds," said Kirk Oatman, chairman and founder of YY Technologies, which offers natural language processing software that can be tied to databases.
"The core of our system is the ability to take everyday language in and output an XML description of what the person asked for," Oatman said. "Around that, weve built a couple of applications that can be a complete autoresponse e-mail system. We can take in 100,000 e-mails a day and understand a good percentage of them, hit back ends and send an e-mail back to the customer."
Were not talking about the kind of automatic responses you often see -- a form letter thanking you for your letter and sometimes, through a keyword search of the e-mail, offering an answer to a question you might have asked.
"We offer very high accuracy," said Oatman, "and the ability to understand multiple request in a single e-mail. This allows our software to hit the back end and get very precise answers, where other technologies that are more statistically oriented can come back with a FAQ -- but its much more difficult for them to get an exact answer."
How accurate is "high accuracy?" About 99 percent, Oatman said, which is actually more accurate than human customer service representatives -- who on the average have a 2 percent to 4 percent error rate. "You never know if the customer service representative is at the end of his shift, or hasnt had his first cup of coffee yet," Oatman noted. "We wont answer an e-mail if we dont understand it. We dont make a guess and have a significant chance of getting it wrong."
Even with such a conservative trigger, the system will answer about 50 percent to 60 percent of incoming requests -- which can mean a significant cost and timesavings.
"The ICSA (International Customer Service Association) said that an e-mail or Web question costs $4.32 to answer," Oatman said. "The industry numbers are all in the $4 to $5 range. We charge less than $1 for the ones we answer, and nothing for the ones we dont."
Not Just for E-mail
The software isnt limited to e-mail. Forms on Web pages, chat and instant messaging systems, for example, can all be linked to back-end databases, as well, offering multiple ways to help customers. "There is no one right interface," said Oatman. "Whats happening in the whole world of customer interaction centers is that were finding the customer wants to interact with the vendor in the easiest or most appropriate way possible."
Talkie, Inc. is another company offering natural language processing, but with a twist: animated characters that interact directly with customers.
"Our technology is making computers human-literate," said Robit Hairman, Talkie Inc.s chief software architect and a co-founder of the company. "Our focus groups are consistent: People respond to Talkie characters because they are uniquely life like." The company boasts that these characters are a more intuitive interface than text-based alternatives.
Talkie software also links to back-end databases, delivering the same consistent message to potentially thousands of concurrent users. And you never have to worry about these animated characters becoming cross with belligerent customers.
Virtual People for Real Problems
"Talkies," as these characters are known, are rendered using Macromedias Flash technology, which makes them quick to appear -- even on slow dial-up connections -- and quick to respond with appropriate gestures and facial expressions.
Talkies also, as the name implies, talk. They can be programmed either with human voices or with synthetic ones.
The Talkie and YY Technologies software packages have obvious benefits for e-commerce sites, both in support costs savings and offering instant help to customers during transactions -- which makes it more likely that a customer will complete the transaction. But can government agencies take advantage of such offerings?
Obviously, any agency that has a high volume of customer requests could save money with automation. Oatman offers one example: A large government contractor of a military logistics system has a Web page that offers statistics on performance. "The contractor gets e-mail from users who dont want to use the query system," Oatman said. "Because of the path the e-mail follows to be answered, it costs over $2,000 to answer each e-mail. Thats a wonderfully easy justification for our system."
These software solutions can also improve the efficiency of human customer service representatives, because they can query the software when they need answers, too. This can reduce training times and improve accuracy. "Turnover is 40 percent annually among customer service representatives," Oatman noted. "If we can make the customer service representatives more efficient and more accurate so that a rep who is newer can get the right answer, thats a huge gain."
Ultimately, automated customer support systems are only as good as the databases supplying the answers. And humans are still needed to make sure those databases hold the correct information. "We will always maintain some level of human involvement in the teaching of the system, because you need to ensure that what the system knows is correct -- or it will supply wrong answers," said Oatman.
