eGain Best Practice Article

7 Attributes of Highly Green

Customer Service Contact Centers
Stephen R. Covey’s bestseller, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People®: Powerful Lessons
in Personal Change, has inspired many parallels in the field of business and organizational
improvement. While that book is the source for the title, this article does not discuss the
original seven habits described in Mr. Covey’s work. Instead, it looks at seven innovations and
best practices for “green customer service” that are being adopted by best-of-breed contact
centers in our clientele. It does not cover known green practices in infrastructure areas such
as power consumption or virtualization, but focuses on processes for greening complex
customer service interactions. The best part of the green habits described here is that they
are “green” from a money-saving as well as an environmental standpoint.

Habit #1: Reduce postal mail communication for confidential information

Businesses in the broader financial services sector such as banking, brokerage services, real estate
and insurance, create significant environmental damage through paper-based communications
with customers for communicating sensitive information. Secure email communications between
the business and the customer can help reduce this ecological impact.

Secure email communications can be based on either a push or pull model. In the push approach,
Author sensitive information is encrypted and sent to the customer through highly secure transport
mechanisms. This information then gets decrypted when the customer views the document. The
advantage in this approach is that customers do not need to log in to a web portal to view the
emails. In the pull approach, customers see email alerts when they log into a web portal, at which
point they can choose to view or download the information in a secure manner

Examples: A leading US bank provides secure email inboxes through authenticated customer
Anand Subramaniam
self-service portals to enable customers to view account information, check the status of service
VP of Worldwide Marketing for eGain
Communications Corporation requests, and initiate service requests. This reduces the need for postal communication and
environmental damage from paper production and consumption.

Habit #2: Reduce unwarranted field service truck rolls

A big source of customer service cost and carbon emissions is unwarranted field service trips. In
the case of big-ticket items like household appliances, manufacturers can preempt unnecessary
field service “truck rolls” and associated carbon emissions through effective problem resolution
by contact center agents and web self-service.

Examples: A premier home appliance manufacturer, a household name in the US, preempts
field service by using a knowledge management system, guided by case-based reasoning (CBR),
in its customer contact center to reduce unnecessary field visits. In the last eight years, it has been
able to save an average of $50M per year—and the planet in the process!

© 2009–10 eGain Communications Corporation. All rights reserved.

 Habit #3: Reduce unwarranted product exchanges and returns
Effective knowledge management in the contact center is eco-friendly in other ways, too.
Knowledge-enabled contact center customer service can also help reduce unwarranted product
returns or exchanges, which lead to unnecessary inspections, re-manufacturing, and product
shipping and related environmental damage.

Example: Wireless operators almost always have a policy of exchanging faulty handsets for free
and this adds significantly to their service costs and eats into their operating margin. However,
such exchanges and returns are often caused by subscribers’ inability to figure out how to use the
product and contact centers’ inability to resolve the problem and help the consumer. A leading
European telecom company has reduced unwarranted handset exchanges by 38% through
preemptive phone-based customer service by agents, empowered with a guided-help knowledge
management system.

Habit #4: Reduce unnecessary branch office visits

Consumers and business clients in the financial services sector often feel the need to visit local
branches for advice and for performing transactions due to unreliable and low-quality advice
provided by contact center agents, inadequate web self-service, or privacy and security concerns.

Best-in-class contact centers have started using secure web co-browsing in conjunction with
phone or chat to show customers how to find service information on the web site. The same
technology is also used to help customers complete online transactions such as form-filling
and stock trades. Sophisticated web collaboration systems provide fine-grained control on the
visibility of consumer information as well as transaction permissions to contact center agents.
For instance, a best practice is to hide sensitive information such as the consumer’s social security
number from the agent during form-filling. Another best practice is to prevent the agent from
executing the actual transaction (for instance, not letting them click on the “Submit” button).
Co-browsing (sometimes called web collaboration) not only increases sales and improves
customer experience but also reduces visits to the neighborhood bank or branch office, a big plus
for the environment.

In addition, the use of electronic or digital signatures can help complete more complex
transactions such as contracts and mortgage applications online and through electronic channels
such as email.

Examples: A premier asset management firm in the US uses concurrent phone conversation
and web collaboration to help consumers fill out 401K and other kinds of forms online. Agents
also use co-browsing to train consumers on how to use web self-service—it is like providing
training wheels, when kids are learning to bike.

Contact center agents in a leading international bank use a knowledge-guided process

management system to help small business banking clients open new accounts. The knowledge-
enabled customer interaction management system also automates the fulfillment of follow-on
tasks such as mailing checks and other information to the client, reducing or eliminating the
need for branch-office visits by the client for account opening and other tasks.

© 2009–10 eGain Communications Corporation. All rights reserved.

 Habit #5: Reduce unnecessary retail store visits
Preemptive or proactive customer service alerts can help reduce or eliminate unproductive store
visits by shoppers. For example, a retailer may send such alerts to consumers in “rain check”
scenarios, when an out-of-stock SKU becomes available at a store, preempting unnecessary
“exploratory” shopping trips and reducing carbon emissions in the process.

Another obvious and cost-effective way to reduce unnecessary store visits is to deliver rich web
self-service to help shoppers and business clients find the information they need and perform
transactions online through self-service or agent-assisted online service such as chat and web
collaboration.

In order to maximize web self-service adoption for before- or after-sales service, it is important
to understand that customer queries come in all shapes and sizes—from simple informational
questions to complex diagnostic or advice-seeking queries. Moreover, customers prefer different
ways of looking for content, based on their information consumption styles. For example, non-
technical customers will do better with guided-help “hand holding,” while tech-savvy customers
may prefer to search. A “one size fits all” approach, where users are forced to scroll through
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) or process hundreds of search hits, is a big deterrent to
user adoption. Providing multiple information access methods will tangibly increase self-service
adoption and reduce less eco-friendly customer communications.

Furthermore, live web chat and the previously mentioned web collaboration technology used in
form-filling can also be leveraged to answer customer questions in a timely manner, help them
find information on web sites and complete online shopping transactions in the retail sector.

Examples: A leading prescription services company and pharmacy chain uses unified cross-
channel service alerts through email, voice and SMS to alert members regarding their refill
renewals, filling status, etc., while also advertising cost savings, based on their zip code. Members
do not need to make phone calls to check the status of their refills or visit the pharmacy to see if
they got filled, reducing carbon emissions in the process.

A leading mobile operator in Europe provides multi-access web self-service, including standard
capabilities such as FAQs, search and browse, as well as more advanced yet intuitive guided-
help capability, using reasoning technology. With guided self-help, subscribers are able to get
after-sales questions answered as well as purchase new plans and devices through a natural and
intuitive online dialog. This reduces the need to visit brick-and-mortar retail stores for pre-sales
queries and after-sales service.

Another telecom company uses remote device management for preemptive services such as
remote configuration and installation of upgrades. Furthermore, the company’s contact center
combines remote device management with a reasoning tool to remotely interrogate handsets
and then intelligently reason with the data to resolve customer problems at the first contact,
preventing unnecessary store visits by subscribers and field visits by the business.

Habit #6: Improve First-Visit Resolution (FVR)

Brick-and-mortar customer service visits on the part of the business or the end-customer are
sometimes unavoidable. However, there’s a greening opportunity here as well. If a field service
technician goes to a consumer or business client’s site, repeat visits and additional carbon

© 2009–10 eGain Communications Corporation. All rights reserved.


Related Papers in the eGain
Library
eGain is a pioneer in the area of
knowledge management and eService,
and has been delivering trusted
solutions since the 1990s. Our white
papers reflect the expertise we have
gained from helping hundreds of
innovative, blue-chip companies set
up their contact center and customer
service systems. You can view our best
practice white papers at www.egain.
com/best_practices/library.asp
© 2009–10 eGain Communications Corporation. All rights reserved.
emissions can be preempted by increasing the technician’s odds of success in the first visit.
Likewise, contact center knowledge bases can be deployed to retail store representatives and
branch office staff so that the service issue is resolved in the very first visit by the consumer to the
brick-and-mortar operation.
Example: The premier appliances manufacturing company mentioned earlier also uses its CBR-
based knowledge management system to improve FVR. The system provides additional guidance
for the actual on-site fix, along with recommended spare parts and tools.
Habit #7: Reduce carbon emissions from employee commute
Emissions from employee commute is a well-known contributor to environmental damage. In
the contact center context, the need for employee commute can be reduced through the use of
Voice-over-IP (VoIP) technology, which enables easy and cost-effective call routing to distributed
agents, including work-at-home, seasonal and outsourced agents.
Smart contact center knowledge bases deployed to such agents can help significantly increase the
odds of success in this model by making them effective and efficient.
Example: A premier consumer products company uses a combination of agents in its corporate
call centers as well as outsourced agents that are distributed across the US and international
outsourcing hubs to provide multichannel customer service. Many of these agents work from
home and this approach helps reduce the contact center’s environmental footprint.
A Final Word
These seven habits can help in “greening” the contact center customer service operations of any
business and its cash coffers, while delivering superior customer experiences. It’s a “win-win-win”
for the customer, the contact center, and the planet!
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