We strongly believe in taking ownership of customer service. However, to improve peak-time and off-hours performance, judicial use of outside services could help you compete with the 24 x 7 hour staffing at your mega-bank competitors. This month we profile, the two largest suppliers to financial institutions, DecisionOne and 800 Support.

By James Van Dyke

Source: Online Banking Report, 8/99 (minor updates, 12/99)

800 Support touts its 10 years in business.

DececionOne.com’s product matrix.

How it Works: Financial institutions publish a phone number that connects users directly to the third-party call center at 800 Support or DecisionOne. Call center team members answer the phone in the name of the appropriate bank or credit union. Vendor support teams are trained in the features and functionality of each client’s products. “Most or all of the service planning and implementation processes can be conducted through conference calls,” according to Jerry Berger of DecisionOne.

Both companies have found that each new employee requires approximately three weeks to reach proficiency, including technical training, product-specific knowledge, and customer relationship skills. According to DecisionOne, the majority of their clients choose a support plan covering the hours of 7 AM to 11 PM seven days per week. However, 24 x 7 service is available.

Service levels are negotiated with each client. For example, DecisionOne says that most clients have agreements stating that 80 to 85% of all calls will be answered within 90 seconds. In addition, agreements typically stipulate that less than 5% of calls over 90 seconds will be abandoned by the end-user.

Financial Institution Benefits: The benefits of outsourcing according to The Outsourcing Institute www.outsourcing.com are as follows:

1. Improves company focus

2. Provides access to world class capabilities

3. Accelerates reengineering benefits

4. Shares risks

5. Frees resources for other purposes

6. Makes capital funds available

7. Reduces and controls operating costs

8. Provides resources not available internally

9. Helps manage a difficult function

One of the problems with the business case for outsourced service, is that many of the benefits are intangible and hard to quantify on a spreadsheet. Take the very real issue of limited resources during a new product launch. Managers with too much on their plate have a tendency to put too few resources into customer care and pay the price with disenchanted new users. This sabotages the all-important, word-of-mouth buzz that can be created by satisfied early adopters.

Let’s face it, there aren’t a lot of heroes created by having the best customer support for online products, but there is a whole herd of goats out to pasture that have neglected the end user. So even though your business case may sound better on paper if you do tech support in-house, you may have far more success in a real-world launch, if you let an expert help you take care of problems during the crucial start-up period. After things have stabilized and you’ve learned more about the support requirements of the product, you can make rational decisions about what you should support internally.

According to Dan Mendes, President of 800 Support, it’s more common for a bank to start out by creating their own support infrastructure and then later decide to outsource the function, rather than the reverse. Call it “confidence” or “burying your head in the sand,” the reality is that technical support is a challenge for existing customer support units.

The following course of action allows financial institutions to carefully assess customer support needs prior to a large-scale launch:

1. Alpha release: Distribute the new product or features to a strictly limited audience (usually internal employees) with support provided by bank employees. The alpha support staff can then provide feedback directly to the product team to correct any problem areas.

2. Beta release: Distribute the new product or features to a broader (but still limited) set of users, including at least some outside customers. Move all or part of the tech support to an outside provider. Maintain a tight feedback loop to make sure the third party is up to speed prior to general release.

3. Soft launch (general release): After completing the beta test, make the service available to all users, but don’t promote it until the final bugs have been identified and corrected.

4. Official launch (general release): Begin full promotion of the new service.

5. Post-launch evaluation: Once launch difficulties have been overcome and the first customers have moved up the learning curve, schedule a customer support evaluation. Run the numbers using actual experience to see if you can make a case for bringing all or part of tech support back in-house.

Theoretically, there are economies in having a larger third-party specialist provide tech support. This is particularly true when the vendor is already experienced supporting your specific Net banking platform with other financial institutions. For example, 800 Support recently announced a partnership with Q-UP and Digital Insight

Financial Institution Cons: Outsourcing customer service has a number of significant risks, including:

•  Lack of control: The distance, organizationally and physically, of the vendor to the client can cause miscommunications and problems.
•  Reduced customer focus: Not having direct responsibility of taking care of customers can cause reduced empathy.
•  Quality control: You are at the mercy of someone else’s human resources talents and procedures.
•  Security: Every additional point of contact is a potential source for leaks of sensitive customer data or system fraud.
•  Fewer learning opportunities: Less direct customer feedback equals fewer opportunities to learn from the customer.
•  Lack of “seamless” customer experience: Even with the tech support center answering the phone with your name, the user can often sense they are dealing with a third party (which is OK if they get fast, thorough help, but can backfire if there are problems).
•  Multi-channel integration: It is difficult and expensive patching together branch, call center, and Internet customer support teams, adding a third party to the mix can complicate it further. For example, can you provide equal service levels to customer questions coming from a branch, your regular call center, an outsourced tech support center, Webmail, unformatted email, postal mail, office of the CEO, and so on? And what if a customer puts the question into multiple channels at the same time? Especially a typical situation where the customer emails, then calls before getting an answer?

The integration of tech support with regular account service is one of the toughest issues. Many tech support calls require knowledge of the user’s financial transactions to troubleshoot the problem. For example, a customer calls saying, “Your Web service doesn’t work, it shows check number 1234 as outstanding but I just got the canceled check in my statement last month?” The first thing the support rep must do is query bank records to see if in fact check 1234 has cleared. This requires authorized, secure access to customer records. Something you may not want to provide to a third party. If these questions are routed back and forth to a third party, it can turn a routing tech support call into a lengthy game of telephone tag.

Finally, cost effectiveness must be addressed. Because of monthly minimums ranging from $3,000 to $5,000, it may not be cost effective to outsource low-volume support categories. According to DecisionOne’s Berger, “For certain proprietary or homegrown products, it may be more advantageous to keep the support in-house, because the call volume may be too small to justify the ramp-up costs, such as training.”

Financial Institution Opportunities: If your competitors have limited support hours, then third-party 24 x 7 support is a way to differentiate yourself. The companies estimated that 24 x 7 support in-house requires 75% more staff than 5 (days) x 8 (hours) support. Remote banking users often do, or at least would like to think they do, a significant amount of financial “heavy lifting” (bill payments, transfers, etc.) after hours, so this is an important program benefit.

For community banks and credit unions operating in market areas where “in your pajamas” banking has been heavily promoted by regional powerhouses such as Wells Fargo, extended support

hours may be a competitive necessity.
(Ed. Note: We think you can get away with 24 x 7 email/Webmail support and limit telephone service to daytime hours.)

As your online audience becomes more mainstream and less technology-enthusiastic, your support team will have to practice patience more frequently. It’s a safe assumption that the audience that is slower to grasp your product will struggle equally with other applications that you did not deploy.

For example, at DecisionOne, an end-user called 68 times in as many days with topics from “I want to add a new desktop icon,” to “How do I install my new modem?” After learning the user was confined to a wheelchair due to a recent auto accident and had limited access to outside resources, DecisionOne sent a technician to the individual’s home to resolve his problems.

Partners: As we mentioned, an alliance with your specific platform vendor may be the primary reason to choose a particular vendor. These alliances provide pre-training in the platform vendor’s product making outsourced support more efficient.

Partners

The Latest Developments: We’re intrigued with the increasing number of artificial intelligence support solutions that are fueled by the growth in e-commerce. While consumers currently prefer human contact for many support issues, e-commerce pioneers are providing automated self-help to curtail costs. We expect self-service support will eventually be preferable to a human response in many situations.

An example of advanced self-service is Dell’s use of the Ask Jeeves www.ask.com natural language search capability. Startups like Neuromedia.com are hoping that the more sophisticated “bot” solutions that have existed in the laboratories since the 1960s will finally catch on. Service bots would mine company databases to develop better self service responses.

Neither 800 Support nor DecisionOne has deployed such solutions at this time, preferring to stick to their area of human-based expertise. 800 Support is using what President Dan Mendes calls “Web-based collaborative contact” to allow the agent and customer to chat online and view a demonstration of problem resolution on the end-user’s screen. Both companies believe the more advanced self-help technologies are not ready for market at this time.

Analysis: For larger financial institutions with strong call center expertise, it probably makes sense to handle most aspects of tech support in-house. However, there may be situations where third-party assistance may be desired, such as peak-period overflow, new product releases, system outages, promotional campaigns, merger periods.

Smaller financial institutions may be tempted to let existing branch staff, backed up by the internal IT “help desk” handle the tech support load. Depending on the people involved this could work, but we know from experience that this isn’t usually a good long-term solution. The customer doesn’t get a “seamless” experience and branch staff may avoid online banking altogether knowing they are the first line of tech support should something go wrong.

No matter whether you choose in-house, outsourced, or a combination, you’ll need to keep close tabs on customer satisfaction and support costs. In an ultra-tight labor market with relatively low pay rates in the support arena, there is a likelihood that your end-users will hear “Hmmm, that’s a good question!” more often than you’d like. Only by making customer support a company priority, will you be able to grow and maintain a profitable online presence.

James Van Dyke is Principal of Javelin Marketing, specializing in e-banking, billing, and payment, (925) 462-6599, jvd@javelinmarketing.com

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