Person to person and application to person SMS may drive revenues, but using SMS for customer care can lead to savings equivalent to launching a major new service, Mobile Europe hears.
Customer care is an essential service for every mobile network operator. Traditionally it has carried a high associated cost, but now operators, including Telefónica Móviles España, are showing the way to substantial savings by exploiting the ubiquity of text messaging.
Mobile operators handle millions of customer care calls per year. Phone users typically dial a short code, go through several menu options, and then queue to speak with a customer care agent. The cost to a phone user of a customer care call is often zero. But it can cost the network operator providing the service as much as
10 euro. What’s more, even if the help provided is accurate and useful, customers are often frustrated by the wait in the queue.
Many operators have already sought to reduce the costs and the queues by launching customer-care FAQ sections on their Web sites and by making use of IVR technology to give customers menu-driven audio information.
With an estimated 750 billion text messages sent during 2004, there is no doubt that people like to communicate with their friends and colleagues by text. Now, far-thinking networks are adding text to the customer care mix, inviting phone users to communicate with them in the same way.
All networks are on a mission to delight customers and develop loyalty at every touch-point, and the quality of the customer care experience is a key factor.
One solution, the SMS Wizard developed by Telsis and deployed by Telefónica Móviles delivers text answers to text questions within a few seconds. For example, a customer can text “How many loyalty points have I got?” Customer care costs are dramatically reduced as no human agents are involved, and disruption to the customer’s life is minimised — they simply send the query, get the answer immediately, and continue with their day.
This speed and simplicity will give early adopters a significant market edge. As Telsis chairman Jeff Wilson observes: “Text is extremely popular with younger people. As they mature into high-ARPU business customers, they will not tolerate listening to 20 minutes of music on hold when another operator can respond to their query instantly by text.”
The SMS Wizard uses unique natural language processing and database technology to promptly and accurately respond to each query. There are no new numbers to remember and no complicated syntax to learn — phone users send their questions, in whatever natural language form they choose, to the standard customer care short-code. Telsis’ product recognises the essence of a question and matches it to an appropriate answer in the database, and sends back a text response. The system can be paired with intelligent SMS Routing so that questions and answers are exchanged directly in real-time, unhindered by the store-and-forward delays inherent in SMSCs, and creating no additional load on the messaging network.
For phone users, SMS Customer Care has a number of advantages apart from speed. It is discreet and always available — people can send text queries from places where it would be impractical to make a voice call and at times of day when call centre agents may be unavailable. Also, by using text, phone users do not need to trust their own memory, or make a written record of the answer to their query. They simply leave the response on their phone until they need to refer to it. This is ideal for queries such as, “How can I get traffic information on my phone?”
SMS Customer Care is particularly useful to roaming customers. Often, when roaming, it is not possible to call customer care using the normal memorable short code, but a text message sent to the short code will always arrive back in the phone user’s home network. A system of this type is easily operated along side call centre, Web and IVR customer care channels.
The customer-care group can quickly configure it to handle most queries, using information from external databases where required. Typically, a small number of questions — such as “What is my balance?” and “How can I access my voicemail from abroad?” — account for the majority of traffic.
However, the real value of the service lies in questions that can be answered by text, but which cannot be answered by an automated voice response system. For example, some operators enable customers to check their balance using a menu-driven voice response system, but it would be impractical for an automated system to handle a question such as “Can I use my phone in China?” Moreover, SMS Wizard uniquely enables customers to hold a natural language conversation.
A key test of such a system is how well, or how practically, it can develop. SMS Wizard lets operators analyse records of successful and unsuccessful queries and rapidly add new content. The programming sequence for a new question and answer can take as little as few minutes, enabling SMS Wizard to quickly and naturally evolve into a powerful, responsive and highly cost-effective customer care channel. This is in contrast to Web-based customer care systems which make it difficult or impossible to follow the customer’s journey through the site.
At Telefónica Móviles España, Mario Soro Fernandez, CRM technology and Internet channel director observes: “SMS Wizard is bringing our costs down while increasing customer satisfaction and retention. That’s a rare and extremely valuable combination.”