We're Going to Need Stronger Glue: Social Self-Service Meets Legacy Customer Service

We're Going to Need Stronger Glue: Social Self-Service Meets Legacy Customer Service published by Mercator Advisory Group, Inc. in August, 2009. This report consists of 25 pages, 4 exhibits. and the price starts from US $ 2950.

Introduction

Boston, MA., August 14, 2009 - Most Americans are amenable to automated self-service but the difficulty of providing a consistent quality experience to FI customer self-service continues to challenge the industry. In the face of today's low-cal IT budgets and rising number of options for accountholders, it is time for FI service leadership to take a hard look at what Web 2.0, web services and social self-service tools to improve customer satisfaction.

In a new report, We're Going to Need Stronger Glue: Social Self-Service Meets Legacy Customer Service, Mercator Advisory Group investigates the advantages of web services-based infrastructure, the emerging social self-service channel as employed by financial institutions and the challenges inherent in managing these new channels. The report examines the promise and threat of mobile devices that put multiple customer self-service options into a single device as financial institutions try to deliver a consistent accountholder experience.

“The temptation to employ social self-service options as enabled by Facebook and Twitter should not be given into lightly as, once in those waters, a graceful exit is difficult to engineer”, George Peabody, Director of Mercator Advisory Group's Emerging Technologies Advisory Service and principal analyst on the report. “While a committed presence demonstrates a willingness to participate in today's Web 2.0, FIs are better off improving their existing support channels and their ability to smoothly move accountholders across customer support channels. This is getting more important as mobile devices put more options than ever into consumer hands.”

Highlights of the report include:

• The challenge of delivering a consistent customer self-service experience is growing as channels multiply on PCs and smartphones.
• Automated self-service usage is increasing even among older demographics.Social self-service through the likes of Facebook, Twitter and Get Satisfaction remain in the early experimentation phase by FIs.
• FIs frequently fail to use social self-service channels effectively - for both marketing and customer service - through tepid support or outright abandonment.
• Incumbent architectures, economic conditions, and low-cal FI IT budgets, are conspiring against major upgrades and infrastructure consolidation.
• Web services will provide opportunities to simplify customer self-service as well as increase the number of customer self-service touchpoints almost exponentially

An Exhibit included in this report:

This report contains 25 pages and 4 exhibits.

Companies and programs mentioned in this report include: Metavante, ACI Worldwide, Chordiant, Convergys, Genesys, Amdocs, Pega Systems, Nuance, Postilion, SoundBite Communications, Get Satisfaction, CoTweet, Waterfield Technologies, Worklight, SmartyPig, FaceBook, Twitter, PayPal, LiveOps, Yodlee.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
  • Our Growing Self-Service Appetite

• The Magnetic Personality of Customer Self-Service
  • Multi-Channel Customer Self-Service Attractors
    • Self-Service Customers are Valuable Customers
    • It's Harder to Sell More Products When Customer Service is Broken
    • People, Get Ready, for the Digital Natives
    • The customer gets to do more than half the wor
    • Multi-tenancy
    • Other Benefits

• Multi-Channel Customer Self-Service Repellent
  • Customer Service (self or otherwise) is All About Cost
  • IT System Misalignment
  • We've always done it this way - Using People as Glue
  • Shift in Responsibility
  • Caring for the Customer?
  • Foundational Technology
• What Could It Look Like?
  • What Multi-Channel Customer Self-Service Could Look Like
  • Mobile Complexity
  • Consistency of the Experience

• Vendors
  • Postilion
  • SoundBite Communications
  • LiveOps

• Emerging Customer Self-Service Channels
  • FIs: An Uneven Presence at the Social Gathering
    • Get Satisfaction
    • CoTweet
    • Waterfield Technologies and Worklight

• Conclusions
  • Tread Carefully with Social Self-Service
  • Stuck in the Replacement Cycle
  • Aspirational Self-Service
  • Climbing into the Cloud

Table of Figures

• Figure 1: Self-service Technologies touch all ages
• Figure 2: Online and Mobile Channel Customers Matter
• Figure 3: Customers have multiple channels to choose
• Figure 4: Postilion Switch as Single Interface for Multiple Self-Service Channels

Related Reports