Modality Myths that Just Won't Die

This blog entry was posted by Ed Margulies, co-founder of FACE IT Corp. ("Putting a Pretty Face on Customer Service"). Margulies is a telecommunications architect, usability expert, inventor, and the author of 17 books on telecommunications, contact centers and service automation.

Will the Web Kill the Phone?

No. The death of the phone - oft-touted as being just around the corner - is pure hyperbole. The web's been around for over 20 years. The phone over 100. The phone represents a temporal experience, the web a spatial one. And now there are hybrids. Neither one will be going away. That is, unless humans decide to stop speaking altogether.

Still wrong after all these years

In the early days of the World Wide Web, customer service executives and contact center managers prayed the web would "carve off" a chunk of callers and relieve their agent load and IVR ports and be the salve for a labor-intensive process.

They were dead wrong, and--strangely--some people stubbornly refuse to understand that the web is not the answer to reducing transaction load. If it were, we wouldn't have such popular hybrid modalities represented by Smart Phones and IPTV set top boxes. In fact, call volume in most serious enterprises has only increased in the face of the web, and contact centers continue to struggle to handle the transaction volume. This, despite the pleading and begging of phone callers who often hear: "please go to our web site for fast service."

There are still some enterprises who think it makes sense to pester phone callers with robot messages with instructions to use the web instead. Consider this: phone callers are on the phone for one of two reasons: 1) They were already on the web and could not find what they wanted; or 2) They prefer to use the phone.

History can be our friend

Several years ago, I was completely immersed in a special human factors and customer service behavior project that was sponsored by a major California electric and gas utility. The company was launching a "Web Bill-Pay" feature to augment their snail mail, call center, walk-up counter and kiosk options. The big hubbub amongst the execs was the hope "Web Bill-Pay" would KILL the expensive phone calls coming in to the call center and IVR.

We conducted video-based usability testing on pilot project customers. This involved recording the keystrokes, mouse movements, facial expressions and verbalizations of customers as they were using the system. After a month of interpreting the output, we made recommendations on what to change in terms of functions and the user interface. With those improvements made, users reported a satisfying experience. After months of stabilization and bug fixing, the spike in call volume from initial questions tapered off. But guess what? The new "baseline" of calls increased. They were perplexed. How can our calls go up after we have bent over backwards to supply our customers with so many modalities and options to avoid the phone calls?

What they learned--that so many of their colleagues don't want to hear--is this:

The more modalities you offer, the more transactions in the aggregate. The whole is simply greater than the sum of its parts.

Online Americans: Big Phone Users

Arguably, customer service functions garner the bulk of transactions. Take, for example getting your bank balance. Asking for a credit increase. Or asking for an extension on your utility bill due date. Or checking flight status. There are many ways to do these things, ranging from web sites, IVR, call center agents, iPhone apps, etc.

But there is now some formal research that supports the observation we made at the California utility company. According to a survey by ATG (Art Technology Group, Inc.), speaking to an operator over the phone is still a preferred modality amongst online Americans. And it seems multi-modality is a treasured form of communication: "...two-thirds (67%) of US consumers say they would value the option of having both a live text chat and a live voice conversation to get the help they need when making online purchases." see: http://tinyurl.com/yjvq29c

The data suggests that maybe it's not about modality as much as it's about the need for a personal touch. Let's face it, the desire for customer service is simply a desire to be treated well. And it seems people are willing to satisfy that need to be treated well in whatever modality they can get it.

The Intersection of Emotion and Complexity

In the world of web transaction conversion, click-through and IVR containment, it's all about guiding people towards task completion and ostensibly doing so without the intervention of a "live" operator. In my own research and analysis of self-service transactions, I have often plotted the relationship between the complexity of the task and the level of human emotion that goes into the completion of the task. For example, getting your checking account balance from an IVR is both simple and non-emotional. On the other hand, checking into a medical insurance claim rejection is both complex and often fraught with emotion.

It stands to reason then, that the lower the complexity and the lower the emotion, the higher rate of conversion or containment. This is where modality in fact has influence on the behavior of the user. For example, for a person to speak to an IVR machine over the phone, that's a strictly temporal modality. The user must listen and process information serially and must hold choices in short term memory without simply glancing at a page. This modality adds complexity merely because of the additional cognitive load the user is forced to deal with. Remember, the more the complexity, the lower the success rate for self-service.

But on the other hand, maybe the reason the person is on the phone in the first place is because that person could not find satisfaction in the spatial modality offered by the web site. So being on the phone is a downgrade from a complexity standpoint, but a potential upgrade in terms of "being treated well" by a live agent. So it's easy to contemplate how customers are willing to make trade-offs in modality in order to be "cuddled."

Enter the Hybrid

Now take a look at Smart Phones like the BlackBerry, Android and iPhone. Sure, there's a phone function. You can talk to machines over the phone and you can you can talk to people too. And you can use streamlined visual applications that are easier to navigate than a web site. Anyone who's attempted to navigate a native web site on a mobile device will tell you it's a lot harder than using a mobility application suitable for a small screen. It's like night and day.

But the mix of web, mobile apps, and phone on one device carves a new hybrid for customer service. Now, applications can be written to provide visual, less complicated views of self service functions. And with a little work, getting hold of a live person is only a button or voice command away on the same device.

The bottom line is, I don't reckon the web is killing the phone any time soon. After all, one of the most popular devices flying off the shelves is called the iPhone, not the iWeb.