Web Self-Service Suite - Lower costs with customer self-service 'e-support'

Web self-service can be delivered with four Web Labs products. These can be configured to any degree or used to complement each other. By layering the Workflow engine and Integration Master to provide two-way back-end communications it is possible to leverage these tools to provide aspects of the transformation government strategy. The following diagram represents the relationship described above.

The benefits

Web Self-Service Suite purpose is to improve public engagement with an organisation through a self-find knowledge base and extended search with a fallback mechanism that allows the enquirer to pose the question to an expert who can respond, via an editorial process, back to the enquirer additionally adding that information back into the knowledge base thus reducing the possibility of the same question being asked of the expert again. The expert is chosen by an editor but suggestions are made based on previous assignments as well as the classification(s) designated to the question.

Process Flow

Using Web Labs Workflow: a Flexible and extendible workflow system to push and drive information around the system with control exposed to specified users or external systems where relevant on the workflow paths.

The following process flow describes how the system interacts with its users from the initiation of a question through to the final stage of (potentially) storing the question and answer back into the system for future use.

Process Details

The process flow diagram provided a visual overview of how the system operates in terms of prime objective from an enquiry to a suitable answer. Each step is reviewed in more detail below.

Enquirer poses question to system
Using some kind of web form the enquirer asks a natural language question and submits it to the system.

System searches Question-Answer database
Depending on the integration requirements the system initially searches the FAQ database, if no matches are found the system can also offer (or automatically perform) a full site search. The subsequent search operation is defined during the integration process and not an internal operation of the system, however storing of results statistics from such a subsequent search will be supported.

Enquirer views answers obtained
The results are displayed in a form determined during the design and integration process, for a given answer the enquirer can provide a rating. Typically only a single 'best' result is shown but it should be possible to offer other results if more have been found.

Enquirer asked if they wish to submit the question
If the result(s) found are not satisfactory the enquirer can submit the question into the system for an expert to answer, the timing of this will be recorded including statistics on the results found (and which answers were offered at the time of the enquiry).

Editor reviews and assigns question to expert
The system provides a list of outstanding questions requiring attention. For those not assigned yet the system will automatically classify the question and present the editor with options to either select the stored expert for the given classification, select from a list of all experts used by the system (from current classifications) or to specify a new expert with the option to remember the expert for future suggestions. The information required for an expert are; email, first name, surname and optionally their contact number/extension. On assignment an email is sent to the expert, a timestamp is recorded for when the assignment took place.

Note: if more than one classification is found, it might be a good idea to offer the editor the top (say) 5 classifications so they can pick which one they feel is most appropriate. Also during the suggestion of expert phase, if no expert existing for the given classification the system will look further up the 'tree' of classifications (ancestors) and offer the first expert it finds.

Expert accepts or rejects question
The expert will receive an email with details of the question being posed, the email will comprise of a specially formed link that is only active while pending the expert response. The expert can follow that link to be presented with a number of options; reject the question giving a reason, respond to the editor (give me more time etc) leaving the response open or respond with an answer. On the form the expert can see the contact details for them and adjust them too resulting in a database update.

Editor approves (with edits) or rejects answer
The response from the expert can be edited before responding to the enquirer or can be simply rejected with a reason back to the expert.

Editor sends response to enquirer
The editor previews exactly what information will be sent to the enquirer and then confirms the email to be sent.

Editor optionally publishes question-answer to system
The editor then chooses if the question should be submitted to the system, in doing so will create a new FAQ record which can then be edited for the purposes of general public display (e.g. may need to remove enquirer personal/specific details etc).

Additional Notes

All of the actitivities, particularly and response-rejection iterations will be timestamped and logged for the purposes of response time analysis etc.

It might be necessary to allow the expert to add comments to support the submission response for the editor's eyes only.

There is no 'address book' functionality for maintaining a list of experts, their information is stored against the classifications. However tools for maintaining the classification tree will be provided allowing preloading of experts as well as mass remove/replacement features.

National Targets 'NI 14 - Avoidable Contact'

Today Web Self-Service is empowering managers to produce reports, detailing service failures and all the reasons behind them. Ultimately the increased customer service request profiling that comes with Web Self-Serice, will lead to reduced service failure so you have a happier customer base which is cheaper and easier to serve!

Customer Insight - a scenario with Web Self-Service & Mosaic*

Export your reports in CSV format detailing all your customers, and use Experian's automated reporting tool to produce customer insight reports based on MOSIAC data (*MOSIAC licence needed).

Using the two above tools you will be able to gather information on why your customer is contacting you and use customer profiling should you want to target campaigns in a certain area. E.G. With customer profiling information from data produced by Web Self-Service you can find out if a customer set from a postcode area are getting fined for dog fouling. You can now target a campaign to inform the customer base of the dog fouling laws in their preferred media. This means that your council gets a more effective marketing strategy and anticipates the possible customer service requests for that area.

Web Self-Service Software Modules

Document Master comes with a rich array of functions and additional modules to extend the powerful storage ability of this product.

CMS components: Extended your website advantage

Components can be integrated with your CMS or set as stand alone web applications. Click on a component below for more information.