Web Self-Service 2008 Trends
Self-Service Success Continues to Decline; How Web 2.0 Can Help
Author: John Ragsdale, Vice President of Research, SSPA

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Improving The Customer Ownership Experience

As outlined in previous research, technical support centers are faced with increased interaction volumes due to the rise of technical complexity and other factors¹.  In order to keep operating costs in line, as many support issues as possible must be deflected to non-assisted channels, primarily Web self-service.  With an eye towards Value-Added Support, there are three high-level approaches that companies must take to improve the ownership experience for customers:

• Product supportability.  Partnering with development and sales, support needs ownership to drive more supportability into the products, making them more intuitive and automated, and eliminating defects that most impact customers.
• Proactive support. Break-fix support puts the service organization on the defensive.  With the push toward proactive support, companies are better able to monitor customer implementations and identify/resolve issues before customers are impacted.
• Web self-service. Clearly, the declining success of Web self-service requires action.  Younger customers with healthy appetites for self-service need better search technology and more current and accurate product and problems/resolution information.

This document will take on the final item, exploring why Web self-service success is declining and looking at new technology and processes to reverse this trend.

Complexity Outpaces Traditional KM Approaches

Today’s self-service industry began in the early 1990s with canned content for common problems and case-based reasoning (CBR) decision tree structures to access knowledgebase content.² Though the infrastructures and architectures have changed dramatically in nearly 20 years, the core approach to self-service, knowledgebase and search tools, has remained the same.  According to the SSPA Benchmark, the average percent of visitors to support websites who find the answer they need has been steadily declining, from 48% in 2003 to 40% in 2007.³

Figure 1 Service Success in Decline

SSPA Research believes that traditional self-service approaches are not keeping pace due to these three issues:

• Shorter product lifecycles. Diagnostic tools were developed using highly structured knowledgebases to help agents and customers find the right answer, and these tools were ideal for complex technology that did not rapidly evolve.  However, in the last decade product lifecycles have shortened dramatically, with wider arrays of products, much deeper functionality, and more frequent releases and updates. Today’s more dynamic development environments make the creation and upkeep of content in traditional knowledge management (KM) tools a huge process burden.
  
  
• Increased transparency.  Before the advent of standards based architecture and user conferences used as sales and marketing events, development of hardware and software was largely a ‘black box’ and customers had limited visibility and influence for product roadmaps.  More detailed information is now expected on defects, bugs, and enhancement priorities, and annual maintenance renewals often involve in-depth product roadmap discussions.  Today’s customers want more extensive product information and easier ways to collaborate with other users and product development.
  
  
• Broader support audience.  With both hardware and software now in the hands of practically every employee within a company, the audience for support has greatly expanded.  Support agents no longer can assume that the customer contact has an engineering degree, in-depth product training, or even primary responsibility for the technology. The same is true on the consumer side:  even basic products for the home are increasingly complex and networked, forcing technical novices to seek support more often.  Self-service tools optimized for technical experts may be ineffective for this broader audience

Web 2.0:  Major 2008 Trends for Self-Service

• Discussion forums emerge as new support channel. With SSPA members making conference presentations showing strong ROI for discussion forums, and SSPA research indicating younger audiences prefer peer support over assisted service, 2008 will be the year when customer forums are recognized as a new support channel, ideal for both novice and expert customers.  Look for eService vendors to increase messaging about how their forum offering are pre-integrated to search and knowledge tools.  Multi-channel support vendors without a forum offering are likely to make a build or buy decision—partnering will not be good enough anymore.
  
  
• Wikis find favor as a dynamic knowledgebase.  Though discussion forums dominated the Web 2.0 conversation in 2007, look for wikis to grab some of the spotlight in 2008.  This easy to access, search and edit “living document” is a logical replacement for the maintenance-intensive traditional knowledgebase.  A key new process for 2008:  identify ‘best practices’ as they emerge in discussion forums and migrate them to the wiki library. 
  
  
• Tagging replaces formal knowledgebase structures.  A ‘tag’ is a keyword or term associated with or assigned to a piece of information.  Instead of filing or indexing content within a formal structure, new content is tagged with whatever keywords, symptoms or concepts apply.  Search tools then leverage tagging to identify patterns and find required information, eliminating much of the manual work to create and maintain a knowledge ontology.

The SSPA Recommends

• Start internally.  Wiki vendors report that most customers start with wikis internally to better understand the technology and processes, identify best practices, and then introduce for external use.  This also allows the wiki to build up a good library of content so customers have something substantial to use from Day 1.
  
  
• Leverage existing processes.  As with any self-service technology, ensuring customer adoption is critical for success.  SSPA Research recommends that when introducing Web 2.0 elements to self-service, start with existing processes that lend themselves to Web 2.0 automation.  This provides a built in set of users and accepted processes.⁵
  
  
• Look to younger agents.  When first starting wiki initiatives, draft some of your 20-something agents for the initial team in lieu of your current content SMEs and knowledge administrators.  Forums and wikis may represent a major paradigm shift from traditional KM practices, and the project will have difficulty getting off the ground with too much “but we’ve always done it that way.”

¹For more information on complexity of products supported and its impact on interaction volumes, see the SSPA Accelerator, “Increased Complexity Takes Its Toll:  Resolution Time Averages Increase across Channels.”

²Where are they now? The first support knowledgebase vendors, Answer Systems and Primus, launched in the early 1990s. Answer Systems was acquired by Platinum Technology in 1995, then by Computer Associates in 1999.  Some of the original Apriori functionality still exists and is embedded in CA’s Unicenter service desk platform.  Primus merged with a competitor, Broad Daylight, in 2003, and was acquired by ATG in 2004.  Though deemphasized, the Primus products are still sold as an add-on to the ATG eCommerce platform.

The first two canned content vendors, KnowledgeBroker Inc. (KBI) and ServiceWare live on.  KBI continues to operate as a private company; ServiceWare spun off its packaged content business as RightAnswers.com in 1999.  ServiceWare later merged with competitor Kanisa in 2005 to form KNOVA.  KNOVA was acquired by Consona Software in 2007.

³The SSPA validates each entry made to the Benchmark database to ensure accuracy of our benchmark metrics. However, with new member companies adding their information to the benchmark for the first time, and industry consolidation changing the number of companies and metrics of each, year-over-year figures are not a pure “apple to apple” comparison.

⁴For more information on leveraging Web communities for support, see SSPA Accelerator, Leveraging Web 2.0 for Margin Improvements, which discusses the risks and benefits of customer support forums.

⁵For more discussion on customer processes and some suggestions on existing processes to migrate online, see the SSPA Accelerator, Online Communities Give Voice to Customers: Leveraging Web 2.0 to Improve Collaboration With and Among Customers.

If you have any questions about this article, please contact Shawn Santos at ssantos@thesspa.com or 858.674.5491.