IA/UX/Call Centre ROI
To explain my ideas to some co-workers I made a diagram. It shows how poor IA and usability on the web site will increase telephone and email support calls, which in turn increase costs. Nothing ground-breaking, but I think it gets the point across:
Impact of IA and Usability on Phone and Email Support Costs View as GIF (24K) or PDF (111K) |
I'd heard an IBM guy talk about a 10-to-1 difference between call center and web cost/transaction. This Computerworld article provides some hard numbers (emphasis mine):
One customer relationship management (CRM) provider estimates that staffed phone support costs $33 per transaction and e-mail support $10 per transaction. When customers serve themselves, the cost averages $1 per interaction, and when they find their question already answered in a list of frequently asked questions, the cost for support may be as low as 10 cents.
A business might expect to save in the neighbourhood of $30,000 per thousand users it moves from telephone support to web site self service. And if those users have a good experience online, they are less likely to go back to the telephone for those services.
Here's another perspective from Voice Web Today:
For an airline agent to answer a live call from a traveler the minimum cost is $5.00 and the average run rate is $1.75 per minute. This cost is painfully high for fielding routine flight arrival information requests from everyday customers. By contrast, automated voice applications that build on airlines' existing Web-based infrastructures typically cost less than $0.10 per minute. Avon, the cosmetics direct marketer whose telemarketing agents handle 12.5 million calls per year, reports that it saves $150,000 annually for every 1% of call volume that is handled by an automated interface.
I also found (via Google, natch) a case study on the ROI of web support at Microsoft.
Although it's not explicitly mentioned, IA is a critical success factor in moving people to web site self service and away from human-assisted systems. And the vast differential in cost per transaction between telephone, email and web self service seems to make the ROI of IA pretty obvious.
(Of course, none of this counts if you're Network Solutions and it's your unstated goal to provide crappy service across the board. Ah, NetSol, you're such an easy target.)
