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Witness Systems Extends Contact Center Recording Capabilities to Customer Self-Service Interactions

eQuality Discover allows companies to record and review captured samples of actual customer Web experiences to help identify clear action steps for improving Web effectiveness. With these valuable captured samples, companies now have the insight they need to determine how consumers interact with their Web sites, which in turn helps them increase the profitability of on-line relationships while at the same time reducing customer service costs. When brought together with recorded customer contacts from other touch points, captured self-service interactions can help companies achieve a single view of customers and the way they're serviced across many channels. Subsequent extensions of the eQuality customer interaction recording suite will monitor other self-service interaction mediums - including voice commerce, interactive voice response (IVR) and kiosks - to help companies enhance these other customer touch points.

Underscoring how critical self-service is becoming, industry analysts predict the number of individuals seeking on-line customer service will more than double in the next several years, approaching 70 million. Some industry analysts estimate that as many as 65 percent of on-line shoppers spend less money on a company's site due to poor Web customer service. More than two-thirds of all Internet shoppers who abandon their "shopping carts" do so because of inadequate customer service, insufficient instructions for completing their transactions, or poorly integrated checkout procedures. Based on these dynamics, companies must focus now, more than ever, on improving their self-service offerings - or face increased call volumes to their contact centers, lost customers and missed revenue opportunities.

Today, companies must strive to provide the same quality of service over the Web that they already deliver through their call centers. As forward-thinking companies focus on optimizing their customer relationships, achieving consistent levels of service across all channels of customer interaction - telephone, e-mail and the Web - is essential. A recent consumer survey, however, suggests that only 41 percent of respondents were satisfied with the state of on-line customer service. eQuality Discover, the Web self-service recording solution from Witness Systems, helps eliminate the speculation surrounding Web user activity by pinpointing clusters of user behavior.

"Capturing and analyzing actual customer interactions has proven its value in the contact center, and companies are seeking to extend that success to the Web," said Dave Gould, president and CEO of Witness Systems. "We can help by applying our proven expertise in recording multimedia customer interactions to the Web user experience. Many companies we work with are striving to merge their Web site and call centers together to create true contact centers that offer a single view of customer service - a challenging task that requires cross-departmental support. Capturing samples of how effective customers are at 'helping themselves' offers companies an 'instant replay' of actual customer experiences, which serves as a powerful tool for optimizing what is for many companies their most important CRM initiative: self-service."

Eliminating Speculation About Web User Activity eQuality Discover helps improve service quality, not only through better self-help, but also by aiding in keeping site design and performance on-track. The powerful advanced business-driven recording capability of eQuality Discover enables companies to capture and view selective Web site interactions. The solution also can notify key individuals or groups throughout the enterprise that certain types of interactions are available for review. Key functionality of the new Web software that records and evaluates user experiences includes:

Continuous playback: eQuality Discover allows users to perform playback of a recorded Web visitor session, enabling them to view exactly what occurred during the visitor's experience on the site, including the amount of time spent on each page.

Visual flow model: Those who review sessions can access a thumbnail layout of the events that occurred during the Web visitor's session, providing a visual summary of user activity.

Business-driven recording: Users can configure eQuality Discover to specify the conditions, or business rules, to trigger an action - such as recording and notification - before, during and after a Web self-service customer interaction. The user can then easily retrieve a sample of sessions by simply searching selected criteria, including the date, time or business rule. For example, users can record every visitor who selects the "call back" button, accesses a knowledge base, or clicks on a new part of the Web site.

Notification: Advanced business rules allow users to configure eQuality Discover to notify one or more people throughout the enterprise by e-mail when the system initiates recording through a specified business rule.

Annotations: Users and reviewers of recorded Web visitor sessions can add annotations during a playback to note, or "flag," a significant occurrence on a specific page or an entire session.

Privacy filters: With eQuality Discover, users can denote areas of the Web site to be "masked" when containing confidential and proprietary information during recording and replay, such as credit card and account numbers.

Browser-based user interface: Management teams and departments throughout the enterprise can access all system functions from an Internet Explorer browser. As a result, authorized users throughout the company can replay recorded sessions from the Web without a dedicated replay client.

Leveraging Analytics to Enhance Customer Experiences Many companies engaged in e-business initiatives today have access to certain Web statistics that provide basic quantitative assessments of Web sites. These companies, however, are quickly finding that such basic site analysis does not provide enough perspective to make informed business decisions. Those that have recognized the Web channel as a focal point for lowering costs, achieving quantifiable ROI, developing marketing programs, and delivering real-time responses are now seeking insightful analysis that can be used to improve the customer experience and make Web self-service simple and convenient.

The eQuality Discover solution is a powerful supplement to analytical software applications that compile statistical data about Web user experiences. As a result, Witness Systems is partnering with such companies as NetGenesis Corporation (NASDAQ: NTGX), a leading provider of E-Metrics solutions for Global 2000 companies. NetGenesis offers e-customer intelligence solutions that measure and report behavior across the many touch points that businesses use to interact with their customers. With this level of insight, companies can take steps to prioritize cost saving measures, bring focus to marketing initiatives, drive incremental sales and maximize profitability. Using NetGenesis e-customer intelligence, combined with captured Web visitor experiences from eQuality Discover, companies can identify which Web content provides the most value, analyze commerce effectiveness, measure return on investment and build customer loyalty.

As more consumers turn to the Web to serve themselves, companies can leverage these proven solutions for optimizing quality and efficiency in the contact center to achieve the same level of success with their Web-based sales/service initiatives. By capturing and measuring Web visitor behavior, businesses can tailor their commerce and customer care transactions, leading to higher customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Optimizing All Self-Service Channel Options To fulfill customer preferences while closely managing costs, industry analysts advise that companies must offer self-serve options through all channels, including voice recognition and IVR for the telephone, natural language interfaces to Web-based FAQs and kiosks. As other self-service interaction channels gain momentum, Witness Systems is preparing its eQuality suite to capture and analyze those mediums as well.

NetByTel - the first company to deliver hosted voice commerce technology linking Web self-service, contact centers and telephones - and Witness Systems are working closely together to integrate these voice commerce modules to the eQuality software suite to enable the capture and analysis of interactions. NetByTel expands the accessibility and quality of customer self-service via all telephones using advanced speech recognition-based technology. By concentrating on self-service for routine transactions, NetByTel's modules are focused on freeing up customer sales/service representatives (CSRs) to sell more, while reducing the costs of taking incoming calls by up to 87 percent. In fact, early adopters of the technology have indicated that they prefer voice commerce in routine transactions to live operators or the Web due to fast interaction times, no hold times and friendly interfaces.

Leading retailers and other organizations also are increasing site traffic and engaging customers at kiosks, with some companies attributing as much as 20 percent of Web site traffic to kiosks - much more than initially expected. Analysts predict that consumers will purchase almost $200 million in goods and services through kiosks this year and billions of dollars over the next five years. To optimize their effectiveness, Witness Systems is working with industry leaders of kiosk technology to integrate with the eQuality solution to capture and analyze these transactions.

Availability and System Requirements Witness Systems designed the Java-based eQuality Discover solution to deploy independently of operating system, Web server and database environment. The software will initially support Windows and Sun Solaris operating systems, Apache Web servers and Oracle databases. All system functions can be accessed from an Internet Explorer browser. Pricing for eQuality Discover starts at $65,000, which includes one Web site address.

Source:Witness Systems - Nov 2001

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