NETTING IT OUT

Your customers may need your help with every activity that they perform in doing business with you across every channel across which they choose to interact with you. Customer service products and services create the customer experience to deliver that help.

IntelliResponse is the customer service offering of IntelliResponse Systems Inc., a Toronto-based software supplier. It’s an on-demand SaaS offering that you license via annual subscription. IntelliResponse was introduced in 2001. To date, 91 customer organizations, mostly universities and colleges, have implemented it, although the product has also been adopted by large commercial enterprises including some of the world’s largest banks. IntelliResponse 5.6 is the current version of the product, the version that we evaluate in this report.

On the PSGroup Report Card for Customer Service, IntelliResponse exceeds requirements in search, analytic functionality, and architecture. It needs improvement in content management.

We recommend that you consider adding IntelliResponse to your customer service portfolio. Add it to your Website to let customers ask questions about the capabilities of your products and services, your policies and practices for doing business with them, and, even, for helping them navigate your site’s content. IntelliResponse complements site search and Internet search. It delivers answers to customers’ questions, not lists of documents.

CROSS-CHANNEL, CROSS-LIFECYCLE CUSTOMER SERVICE

Cross-Channel Customer Service

Customers will do business with you across every channel that you provide them and, in the course of doing business, they’ll need your help to perform the activities that they want to or need to accomplish. You should deliver cross-channel or multi-channel customer service to deliver the help that your customers need.

You support two types of customer service channels: self-service channels like the Web and assisted-service channels like your contact center. So, we classify customer service offerings as supporting self-service, assisted-service, or cross-channel service. A product’s cross-channel support classification helps you determine how it will fit into the customer service experience that you deliver. It’s an important evaluation criterion.

Cross-Lifecycle Customer Service

The activities that your customers want to or need to perform in doing business with you occur within the lifecycle of their relationships with you—from their initial contact with you through their retirement. We organize this lifecycle into phases and organize each phase into sets of activities. The phases are:

• Explore, wherein customers
• Select, wherein customers
• Purchase, wherein customers
• Install and use, wherein customers
• Maintain, wherein customers

Customers traverse these phases continually in their relationships with you, exploring, selecting, buying, using, and maintaining your products and services. Of course, they’ll need your help along the way. So the customer service experience that you deliver should be a cross-lifecycle customer experience. You won’t find any single product to deliver your entire cross-lifecycle customer service experience. You’ll implement a set of products for complete coverage. When we evaluate a customer service offering, we identify and describe the lifecycle phases and activities that it will help you support. A product’s cross-lifecycle support description helps you determine how it will fit into the customer service experience that you deliver. It’s also an important evaluation criterion.

In Table A, we list the phases of the customer lifecycle and the key activities that customers perform in each phase. We say “key” activities because they’re the activities that customers most commonly perform within their Customer Scenarios®—those sequences of activities that customers want to or need to perform in order to get their work done with you or to accomplish one of their objectives.

Cross-Lifecycle Customer Service
(Please download the PDF to view the table.)
Table A. The phases of the customer relationship lifecycle are listed and the key activities within each phase are described in this table.

EVALUATING CUSTOMER SELF-SERVICE PRODUCTS AND SERVICES

Through our work with you, our work understanding software solutions, and our ongoing customer-centric analyses, we’ve identified the requirements for customer service products and created a framework that will help you evaluate how well products address those requirements. Like all of our product evaluation frameworks, this one delivers the following significant benefits:

• It shortens your time to market.
• It saves time and reduces your costs in product evaluation, comparison, and selection.
• It reduces your risks in product evaluation, comparison, and selection.

The framework for customer service has five top-level evaluation criteria and sets of sub-criteria for each top-level criterion. We show the criteria and their factors in Illustration 1. These are the top-level evaluation criteria:

• Channel and Lifecycle Support
• Key technologies
• Operational functionality
• Analytic functionality for customer self-service
• Architecture
• Product viability
• Company viability

Customer Service Evaluation Framework

© 2008 Patricia Seybold Group

Illustration 1. This illustration shows the evaluation criteria of the customer service evaluation framework.

In this report, we evaluate IntelliResponse 5.6 against that framework.

EVALUATING INTELLIRESPONSE

Product Introduction

IntelliResponse is the cross-channel, cross-lifecycle customer service offering of IntelliResponse Systems Inc., a privately-held software supplier founded in 2000 and based in Toronto, ON. IntelliResponse was introduced in 2001. To date, approximately 91 customer organizations, have implemented it. While the majority is universities and colleges, the original target market for the offering, the product has been adopted by large commercial enterprises including five of the largest financial services institutions including, for example, CIBC, ING Direct, ScotiaBank, and TD Canada Trust. IntelliResponse 5.6 is the current version of the product, the version that we evaluate in this report.

Product Positioning

IntelliResponse Systems positions IntelliResponse to deliver answers to “informational” questions that customers ask on and about your Web site. By informational, IntelliResponse Systems means questions that can be answered with content as contrasted with data, such as the data of transactions or customer profiles, for example. Search and knowledge management are the key technologies of IntelliResponse. Customers ask the questions by typing natural language queries into a search box.

IntelliResponse searches for and retrieves answers from a knowledgebase and delivers them within Web content.

IntelliResponse Systems told us that the value proposition for IntelliResponse is built on these four key elements, elements which it believes distinguish its products and give it significant competitive advantages:

• ONE RIGHT ANSWER THAT REALLY WORKS. Regardless of the hundreds or thousands of ways that customers may ask a question, IntelliResponse delivers the “one right answer.”
• REAL CUSTOMER SELF-SERVICE. One hundred percent of IntelliResponse customers have deployments that really deliver customer self-service. IntelliResponse claims that its competitors’ deployments are mostly assisted-service where agents use the competitors’ products on behalf of customers.
• TURNKEY DEPLOYMENT AND RAPID TIME TO VALUE. IntelliResponse guarantees a go live in 60-90 days with 80 percent minimum performance levels (80 percent of customers’ questions are answered correctly).
• CONSISTENT, CROSS-CHANNEL CUSTOMER SERVICE. Whether customers or agents ask the question, IntelliResponse delivers the same answer. A single knowledgebase of answers is utilized by multiple channels.

As you’ll see in our evaluation, these four are distinguishing features. One right answer that really works and the turnkey deployment and rapid time to value distinguish and also differentiate.

We feel that IntelliResponse is distinguished by ...