In an information intensive environment like the financial services industry there are ample opportunities to gather, process, identify and distribute information. A high-end search solution can deliver value to financial services organizations in many ways; this white paper exploits these possibilities in Customer Service Solutions. Empower your online portal with a best-in-class search platform and drive the self-service model to new heights, as well as increase browser-to-buyer conversion rates. Spend more time on analysis by means of Search Analytics, instead of information gathering and get enhanced self-service capabilities, thus reducing manual labor.

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Increase your competitiveness
Build Findability driven customer service solutions
Findwise Göteborg
2009-­‐04-­‐02
Helge Legernes
Helge.legernes@findwise.se
www.findwise .se | info@findwise.se | +46 31 288 400 | Drottningg. 5 | 411 14 Göteborg

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Table of Contents
About this white paper ......................................................................................................... 2
Findability in Internet sites and online services .................................................................... 2
A Findability driven self-­‐service Internet solution -­‐ mechanisms ......................................... 3
Using the Enterprise search platform as an integration tool ................................................ 3
Building Findability driven customer service solutions ......................................................... 4
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About this white paper
In an information intensive environment like the financial services industry there are ample opportunities
to gather, process, identify and distribute information. A high-­‐end search solution can deliver value to
financialservices organizations in many ways; this white paper exploits these possibilities in Customer Service
Solutions.
Empower your online portal with a best-­‐in-­‐class search platform and drive the self-­‐service model to new
heights, as well as increase browser-­‐to-­‐buyer conversion rates.
Spend more time on analysis by means of Search Analytics, instead of information gathering and get
enhanced self-­‐service capabilities, thus reducing manual labor.
Findability in Internet sites and online services
Using the power of an enterprise search platform to serve your Internet site enables you to take your online
service offering to the next level. -­‐ to accessinginformation
enables your site users to start their journey through your site from the single search box. Accompanied by
extreme relevance and navigational tools, users find the information they are looking for with a minimum
number of clicks.
Online presence has become a must for companies with a large customer base. With consumers constantly
developing a higher degree of online literacy, they expect a higherdegree of online service from their
vendors including easy-­‐to-­‐find information and other services such as stock trading and bankingfacilities. An
enterprise class search solution ensures low response times to user requests, no matterthe amount of users on
the Internet site. You can easily offer your customers a unified view on your services and information even if
they originate from different source systems Findability
layer. By also linking the search platform to your transactional system, you can create the next generation
online banking experience: you can offer your customers their very own personal banking portal where they
will get a complete view of their business with you; their complete portfolio, including stocks, loans,
transactions, etc. will be available to them for easy consumption alongside any other relevant (cross/up-­‐selling)
information.
An increased online service offering will also drive self-­‐service behavior from the user side. By using
Search Analytics on the query/search logs you will get a wealth of information about customer
behavior. Take customer support as an example. By publishing the most requested support
information on your public site, and enabling the users to easily find the information they are looking
for, the need for call center support is lowered. This reduces the pressure on the basic customer
service functions, allowing you to refocus resources to other value creating activities such as
attending to the needs of high net worth individuals.
For a financial institution with large product portfolios, good search can help match users and products. The
making sure to
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allowing your company to gain an increased share of their wallet. Furthermore, as mentioned earlier, some of
your customer service resources can be freed to do other chores.
A Findability driven self-service Internet solution -
mechanisms
The quality of information provided by internet sites and sales staff can heavily influenceour purchase and is
one of the reasons why internet self-­‐service is becoming an increasingly important part of the multichannel
customer service experience.
By creatinga Findability driven self-­‐service Internet solution, which produces afriendly online customer service
experience it is possible to add new revenue streams.
For many enterprises, self-­‐service is seen as the solution that can provide customers with the support they
need while significantly reducing service costs.
Self-­‐service is regarded as an opportunity to sharply lower customer support costs by deflecting
calls. For example, respondents to a Fortune 1,000 survey expect to offload 23% of their call volume
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to Internet-­‐based self-­‐service. And there are proven cost justifications for implementing self-­‐service:
Web-­‐based self-­‐service interactions cost 75% less than a phone interaction.
However, self-­‐service must do more than just cut costs. When customers perceive self-­‐service as simply a
means to shift interaction costs onto their shoulders, it can reduce customer satisfaction. Customers need a
self-­‐service experience that provides them with higher levels of interaction convenience and information
availability, faster issue resolution and more personalized interactions. For customers to successfully adopt self
self-­‐service, it must provide several key capabilities:
Offer highly efficient ways to access and leverage useful information. Accurate information must be
combined with effective ways to search through large bodies of information so that customers can find
trustworthy answers without assistance.
Customize the self-­‐service experience, in a dynamical way, to the individual and the incident to simplify
and speed up the process of finding answers.
Ensure customers can get help from agents during self-­‐service interactions through easy escalation.
Using the Enterprise search platform as an
integration tool
Integrating two, or more, disparate IT systems can sometimes be a daunting task that just keeps on eating time
and money from your budget. Different data models and formats need to be merged together into an
overarchingdesign that often has to support both of the previous roles of the original siloed systems, as well as
the newintegrated needs. By leveraging an enterprise search platform in integration projects, significant time
and cost savings may be realized compared to more traditional approaches. The search system can be used as
an information retrieval layer on top of the systems subject to integration. As well as having the ability to
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connect to a multitude of source systems, a modern search engine will perform data normalization, cleansing
and matching that can prove to be a substantial asset in providing unified access to your data.
Building Findability driven customer service
solutions
While more traditional customer service interaction solutions tend to be based on a knowledge data
base, that needs to be built and maintained, a Findability based solution is more dynamic in its
nature and is based on a dynamical index created by the already existing data that resides in the
corporate systems. The index can be partitioned into information buckets meeting different user
needs and profiles.
to handle real-­‐time requirements,natural language style searching,
contextual navigationand intelligent relevancy models, and integration of analyticaldata and text mining
search based approacheswill significantly expandthe service level offered by the total system; end-­‐userscan
query the system from a Google-­‐like interface and get navigational aid to help themget the facts they are
looking for. The cross-­‐correlationof information from multiple sources, both structuredand unstructured,
propels the discovery of new facts,relationships and trends all this being made easilyavailable to the end-­‐
user.
The Findability (based on a search engine) approach can be deployed in different parts of your customer
service process, giving different positive effects for your organization and customers.
The solutions can be deployed for the:
Call Centre
The enterprise internet site
The online service part
Some positive effects of the deployed solutions are:
Reduced talk time
Higher first time resolution
Reduced Tier-­‐2 escalations
Increased new employee productivity (less training needed)
Less # of incoming calls
Reduced # of e-­‐mails that need to be manually answered
References
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Mastering Online Customer Service, Bruce D. Temkin, Bob Chatham, Hillary Drohan, Katharine M. Gardiner,
Forrester, July 2002.
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