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INTELLIRESPONSE 5.6
Delivering One Answer to Each Customer Question
By Mitchell I. Kramer, April 10, 2008
NETTING IT OUT
Your customers may need your help with every activity that they perform
in doing business with you across every channel across which they choose to
interact with you. Customer service products and services create the customer
experience to deliver that help.
IntelliResponse is the customer service offering of IntelliResponse Systems
Inc., a Toronto-based software supplier. It’s an on-demand SaaS offering
that you license via annual subscription. IntelliResponse was introduced
in 2001. To date, 91 customer organizations, mostly universities and colleges,
have implemented it, although the product has also been adopted by large
commercial enterprises including some of the world’s largest banks.
IntelliResponse 5.6 is the current version of the product, the version that
we evaluate in this report.
On the PSGroup Report Card for Customer Service, IntelliResponse exceeds requirements
in search, analytic functionality, and architecture. It needs improvement
in content management.
We recommend that you consider adding IntelliResponse to your customer service
portfolio. Add it to your Website to let customers ask questions about the
capabilities of your products and services, your policies and practices for
doing business with them, and, even, for helping them navigate your site’s
content. IntelliResponse complements site search and Internet search. It
delivers answers to customers’ questions, not lists of documents.
CROSS-CHANNEL, CROSS-LIFECYCLE CUSTOMER SERVICE
Cross-Channel Customer Service
Customers will do business with you across every channel that you provide them
and, in the course of doing business, they’ll need your help to perform
the activities that they want to or need to accomplish. You should deliver
cross-channel or multi-channel customer service to deliver the help that
your customers need.
You support two types of customer service channels: self-service channels like
the Web and assisted-service channels like your contact center. So, we classify
customer service offerings as supporting self-service, assisted-service,
or cross-channel service. A product’s cross-channel support classification
helps you determine how it will fit into the customer service experience
that you deliver. It’s an important evaluation criterion.
Cross-Lifecycle Customer Service
The activities that your customers want to or need to perform in doing business
with you occur within the lifecycle of their relationships with you—from
their initial contact with you through their retirement. We organize this
lifecycle into phases and organize each phase into sets of activities. The
phases are:
- Explore, wherein customers
- Select, wherein customers
- Purchase, wherein customers
- Install and use, wherein customers
- Maintain, wherein customers
Customers traverse these phases continually in their relationships with you,
exploring, selecting, buying, using, and maintaining your products and services.
Of course, they’ll need your help along the way. So the customer service
experience that you deliver should be a cross-lifecycle customer experience.
You won’t find any single product to deliver your entire cross-lifecycle
customer service experience. You’ll implement a set of products for
complete coverage. When we evaluate a customer service offering, we identify
and describe the lifecycle phases and activities that it will help you support.
A product’s cross-lifecycle support description helps you determine
how it will fit into the customer service experience that you deliver. It’s
also an important evaluation criterion.
In Table A, we list the phases of the customer lifecycle and the key activities
that customers perform in each phase. We say “key” activities
because they’re the activities that customers most commonly perform
within their Customer Scenarios®—those sequences of activities
that customers want to or need to perform in order to get their work done
with you or to accomplish one of their objectives.
Cross-Lifecycle Customer Service
(Please see the formatted PDF to view the table.)
Table A. The phases of the customer relationship lifecycle are listed and the
key activities within each phase are described in this table.
EVALUATING CUSTOMER SELF-SERVICE PRODUCTS AND SERVICES
Through our work with you, our work understanding software solutions, and our
ongoing customer-centric analyses, we’ve identified the requirements
for customer service products and created a framework that will help you
evaluate how well products address those requirements. Like all of our product
evaluation frameworks, this one delivers the following significant benefits:
- It shortens your time to market.
- It saves time and reduces your costs in
product evaluation, comparison, and selection.
- It reduces your risks in product evaluation,
comparison, and selection.
The framework for customer service has five top-level evaluation criteria
and sets of sub-criteria for each top-level criterion. We show the criteria
and their factors in Illustration 1. These are the top-level evaluation criteria:
- Channel and Lifecycle Support
- Key technologies
- Operational functionality
- Analytic functionality for customer self-service
- Architecture
- Product viability
- Company viability
Customer Service Evaluation Framework
© 2008 Patricia Seybold Group
Illustration 1. This illustration shows the evaluation criteria of the customer
service evaluation framework.
In this report, we evaluate IntelliResponse 5.6 against that framework.
EVALUATING INTELLIRESPONSE
Product Introduction
IntelliResponse is the cross-channel, cross-lifecycle customer service offering
of IntelliResponse Systems Inc., a privately-held software supplier founded
in 2000 and based in Toronto, ON. IntelliResponse was introduced in 2001.
To date, approximately 91 customer organizations, have implemented it. While
the majority is universities and colleges, the original target market for
the offering, the product has been adopted by large commercial enterprises
including five of the largest financial services institutions including,
for example, CIBC, ING Direct, ScotiaBank, and TD Canada Trust. IntelliResponse
5.6 is the current version of the product, the version that we evaluate in
this report.
Product Positioning
IntelliResponse Systems positions IntelliResponse to deliver answers to “informational” questions
that customers ask on and about your Web site. By informational, IntelliResponse
Systems means questions that can be answered with content as contrasted with
data, such as the data of transactions or customer profiles, for example. Search
and knowledge management are the key technologies of IntelliResponse. Customers
ask the questions by typing natural language queries into a search box.
IntelliResponse searches for and retrieves answers from a knowledgebase and
delivers them within Web content.
IntelliResponse Systems told us that the value proposition for IntelliResponse
is built on these four key elements, elements which it believes distinguish
its products and give it significant competitive advantages:
- ONE RIGHT ANSWER THAT REALLY WORKS. Regardless of the hundreds or thousands of ways that customers may ask
a question, IntelliResponse delivers the “one
right answer.”
- REAL CUSTOMER SELF-SERVICE. One hundred percent
of IntelliResponse customers have deployments that really deliver customer
self-service. IntelliResponse
claims that its competitors’ deployments are mostly assisted-service
where agents use the competitors’ products on behalf of customers.
- TURNKEY DEPLOYMENT AND RAPID TIME
TO VALUE. IntelliResponse guarantees a go live in 60-90 days with 80 percent minimum
performance levels (80 percent
of
customers’ questions are answered correctly).
- CONSISTENT, CROSS-CHANNEL CUSTOMER
SERVICE. Whether customers or agents ask the question, IntelliResponse delivers
the same answer. A single knowledgebase
of answers is utilized by multiple channels.
As you’ll see in our evaluation, these four are distinguishing features.
One right answer that really works and the turnkey deployment and rapid time
to value distinguish and also differentiate.
We feel that IntelliResponse is distinguished by its approach to customer service
and in the areas of customer service that it addresses. It complements the
site search and Internet search facilities that you’ve already deployed
on your Website and it complements the customer service offerings that are
designed to answer more complex customer questions and to resolve customer
problems. Its most distinguishing characteristic is the delivery of a single
answer to each customer question. Its search technology matches a customer
search query with the single, best match in the knowledgebase.
CHANNEL AND LIFECYCLE SUPPORT
IntelliResponse Cross-Channel, Cross-Lifecycle Support
Our evaluation of a product’s or service’s channel and lifecycle
support helps you understand how the offering fits in your customer service
experience. The evaluation is fairly straightforward and requires little or
no analysis.
IntelliResponse supports the Web and email channels. It delivers self-service
across the Web, helping your customers get answers to questions. Email is
IntelliResponse’s assisted-service channel. Customers can send you
emails when you don’t answer their self-service questions. Your agents
handle these emails. Through Web Services, IntelliResponse can be integrated
with external Web chat and click-to-call applications for escalation to those
assisted-service channels.
IntelliResponse best supports activities in the explore and select lifecycle
phases, helping customers learn about your products and services, your policies
for doing business with them, and your processes for delivering customer
service. In Table B, we highlight the key customer activities that IntelliResponse
supports.
This report continues...
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