December 2001 

Developing Portals For E-Business

BY KARL A. WALDER

The role of the portal for working the edge of a business in an e-business solution varies depending on the needs of the business: the target market segment; the business type; and the business model and the business processes that it enables. Portals must provide a customer-focused and collaborative environment for interaction with all aspects of the business. A portal has traditionally been characterized as an Internet-enabled means of delivering information and services from an organization or from a series of organizations.

This first-generation definition of a portal has been categorized by connection to resources of the Internet through search engines; content in the form of news, entertainment, and resources; access to electronic shopping and commerce; and definition of community forums and interaction management for the Web communication channel.

Second-generation portals developed into two types: megaportals and vortals. Mega-portals are designed to provide the primary entry point to the Web for a large, multi-dimensional market segment. Yahoo! and AOL are examples of a megaportal. Mega-portals provide general capabilities and Web utilities such as search engines, e-mail, and instant messaging. Vortals have a vertical focus for a particular market segment, or a related set of market segments, to build a community around the topics of interest and services of interest. WebMD and Motley Fool are examples of this type of portal. These types of portals emphasize community building and information dissemination as an essential part of their business model and market growth strategy.

The emerging third-generation portal, or enterprise portal, provides the entry point for creating dialogs with enterprises. Enterprise portals may focus on a vertical segment, a specific set of business processes, or a particular business ecosystem. For example, many of our customers are deploying Web payment portals designed to enable an accounts receivables process. This type of single business process focused portal is known as a Vertical Enterprise Portal (VEP). By incrementally coupling multiple VEPs together over time, a business may evolve its portal capabilities into a full enterprise portal supporting a majority of their business operations. In addition, these portals provide new distribution channels that grow market share by fostering the creation of federations of businesses focused on the same target market segment.

E-business solutions that require an enterprise portal must incorporate two types of communication transaction mechanisms to obtain effective Interaction Management (IM). These portals have traditionally been seen as self-service customer management channels. But, now, the following two concepts should be integrated:

• Assisted Communication Transactions (ACT) require human resources to represent the business and process communication requests.
• Unassisted Communication Transactions (UCT) require no human counterpart to represent the business or to process unassisted self-service communication requests.

These types of communication transactions are now required to create a dialog with the enterprise through a multi-channel portal. Therefore, I propose to the Communication Solutions™ community that enterprise portal definitions include the elements of a dialog strategy:

• Connection to the primary interaction and communication point for an organization, business, or community.
• Support for unassisted communication transactions that can use Web, SMS messaging, IVR, cell phones, and wireless devices as communication channels.
• Support for assisted communication transactions using the communication channels of e-mail, asynchronous messaging, Web collaboration, community forum management, and inbound and outbound telephony.

AN EXAMPLE
Let’s look at a customer service or sales support process enabled by a dialog strategy. Many financial institutions want to interact with their customers, but will not use e-mail to send sensitive information. They solved this problem by using assisted communication transactions. These transactions include notification of issues or requests associated with their accounts using e-mail and SMS messages. For security purposes, sensitive information is only communicated using a personalized message posting and retrieval service for conducting a secure text dialog.

The notification contains the URL addressed to a personalized message board and posting service. The customer can view the message containing sensitive information only after gaining access through a secure login. A business-specific message is posted to the message board to be read by the customer. This can be an automated notification triggered by a business process driven by a customer list for a specific target segment, or generated by a customer service representative processing an assisted communication transaction request. This asynchronous dialog may continue until the issue is resolved.

To maintain the established communication level of service required for processing these types of ACTs, a Message and E-Mail Dialog Service (EMDS) is used for sending the notification e-mail and processing messages posted back to a message dialog area. The skill sets of the agents are similar, and the operational process can be established for both purposes. Posted messages are automatically packaged in an e-mail sent to the e-mail response management system for a CSR to process. Once processed, a notification e-mail is sent to the customer while the sensitive message is posted back to the personal message board. For list-driven processes, once the issue is resolved, an attribute of a contact record is updated with an appropriate disposition code and processed by a campaign management or customer service process. This is a repeatable pattern or dialog strategy that can enable multiple value chain processes, including customer service, sales, marketing, or other dialog-intensive processes.

Another variant on the concept of dialog strategy uses the notifications by employing various communication channels of e-mail, SMS messages, print mail, wireless devices, and telephony to drive the customer to a self-service application for processing UCTs. Each notification contains return addressing information to this application. Clicking on a URL brings the customer to a particular form for entering information, or produces a guided navigation set of Web pages for opt-in to a communication interaction transaction. To support an accounts receivable process could lead to a self-service bill payment Web application. This type of notification process could also be used to renew vehicle registrations using guided navigation for registration renewal and payment. The notification can use existing postal mail with the same addressing information to a department of motor vehicle vortal.

ONE STEP FURTHER
A dialog strategy could also be developed that would track the notifications over time and monitor for a response. If neither an ACT or UCT response is received within a specified period of time, rules are executed that generate a second notification. This time, alternate contact channels and addresses are used to send an e-mail and SMS message to the customer’s cell phone. This message also contains the URL to the same registration and Web payment portal application. If no response is received, a final notification message could be generated by an outbound phone call with a message indicating that the registration is due, giving the address of the payment portal. Here again, this can be a list-driven process where only those contact records indicating customers that have not responded transition to the next notification application and communication channel. Each escalation of the message to the next channel increases the cost of the notification. But each notification drives the customer to the same lower cost interaction point. Of course, the customers can opt-in to assisted service from this self-service entry point.

This type of dialog strategy-driven interaction can be adapted to any business process by designing a series of notification and response dialogs governed by rules that set the contact channel change order for initiating subsequent notifications based on:

• Communication channel type (for example e-mail, telephony, postal mail).
• Aging time and response criteria.
• Response rates.

Notification rule setting is not enough for the interaction management of an enterprise portal. The customer must also be able to opt-in to assisted service. These same strategy rules also control the availability of the appropriate inbound communication channels for handling the responses. The dialog strategy controls the following dialog services and associated applications:

• Web site dialog services.
• Message and e-mail dialog services.
• Community dialog services.
• Telephony dialog services.

WEB SITE DIALOG SERVICES (WSDS)
Web sites are fast becoming the central interaction point for the 30- to 50-year-old demographic with average incomes of more than $80,000 and disposable income levels of about 35 percent. Web site response management is essential to building relationships with your core Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) customers by providing both self-service and assisted service interaction entry points. These interaction entry points enable your business partners or customers to create ACTs with live agents that can interact using one-on-one chat, Web collaboration, and chat forums, as well as via scheduled and requested voice callbacks. Each type of entry point is managed and monitored using Web site response management.

As you design and analyze your Web site, you can establish contact zones and associate these zones with your customer segments and marketing campaigns. Accordingly, an association could result between a particular zone, a business process, and the type of interaction that your customers want to initiate with your business. The dialog strategy provides a mechanism to guide the customer to the most appropriate interaction method used to control the costs associated with edge-intensive business processes. These processes are directly responsible for creating a dialog with your customers.

Perhaps you want to associate a zone with a consumer selection to obtain a Web collaboration and chat session with an agent. These zones may also be configured to have the business initiate an ACT using the Web collaboration and chat channels if a customer enters a specific zone. For example, you could set up a consultative selling zone that is triggered by consumers looking at competitive rates for a home-equity loan, or at various financial products that are best sold with company assistance. These zones must be able to route these customers to licensed financial-planning representatives.

Optionally, these high-value zones could also be associated with direct callbacks over a PSTN or VoIP connection to create a one-on-one meeting to discuss what products and services best meet these customers’ needs. Alternatively, these zones may be configured primarily for interactive chat and semi-automated responses, designed to move the customer to self-service transactions. Here, a representative would handle up to six sessions at a time in asynchronous mode. The Web site response management must provide productivity optimization that can invoke automated interaction scripts. These scripts enable the representative to push questionnaires, presentations, automated chat responses, and self-service Web pages to the customer based on the interaction zone. Each of these areas can be incrementally added to a Web site by zone or added to every page in the site in a queued design model.

COMMUNITIES DIALOG SERVICES (CDS)
Not all business processes are best implemented with a workflow-oriented ACT. Peer-to-peer, peer-to-group, or group-to-group chat rooms used to create online communities create customer-interest or training forums for your customer target market. These chat rooms can also be used to set up virtual training on your products or services, seminars on industry topics and issues, and virtual group consultative selling meetings. Establishing your site as a portal of information about your company’s core capabilities is essential for building relationships and gaining permission from your customer base.

Forums can also be linked to telephony conference calls to create both one-on-many or many-on-many communications opportunities. This contact-strategy design also enables a participant to transfer to a one-on-one interaction with a representative. These forums are very effective for gaining customer permission (opt-in) to an outbound e-mail or telephony direct marketing campaign, or for requesting a callback. In addition, these forums can effectively train your customers on how to use your Web site’s self-service options. This strategy can be successfully used to transition your customers to a self-service mode of interaction and assures that they have a productive experience in this contact channel. Customers are usually very active in community forums. This is a critical ingredient in recruiting customer advocates, which enables a viral marketing strategy. In addition, these customer advocates represent a zero cost to the business.

MESSAGE AND E-MAIL DIALOG SERVICES (MEDS)
This component enables both assisted and unassisted transactions for e-mail management. The e-mail response management (ERM) system must be able to provide both automated responses to e-mail, as well as partially automated responses routed to agents for review, processing, and reply. In an outbound campaign three response options can be listed in the e-mail (phone number, e-mail reply, URL). Each of these channels can be configured to send responses to assisted or unassisted response resources. Web collaboration, chat, and automated and assisted e-mail response resources must be prepared to handle the number of transactions triggered by the campaign.

In addition, these solutions have an outbound capability that enables personalization and campaign management. Personalization enables your customers to modify their contact profiles with opt-in/opt-out capabilities for e-mail campaigns. Personalization also feeds a campaign and list-management component that controls the creation of targeted direct marketing campaigns. This component can be added to supplement your marketing and sales force automation processes, and it’s an effective and inexpensive mechanism to test market your top customer segment. In most cases, e-mail addresses of your most recent and best clients can be obtained from your sales force. Small, targeted marketing e-mail campaigns are highly effective in generating more revenue from these customers. This capability can be set up and deployed within weeks for selected marketing and sales processes. Return on investment measurement and analysis should be available within one month after the deployment date.

TELEPHONY DIALOG SERVICES (TDS)
This traditional contact channel is still vital for maintaining dynamic customer communication. It may be configured for both response and proactive communication management and is highly effective in building relationships when combined with the new channels. In direct marketing campaigns, the combination of e-mail, voice, and post mail is used to elicit a response from your targeted segment. If there is no response to the initial e-mail, a list can be developed for an outbound calling campaign. In the course of this calling campaign, the e-mail is returned with the requested information. It is crucial to remove the customer from the calling list and not interrupt him or her with a redundant request. In the business-to-business environment, the availability of an Internet connection and a telephone creates an opportunity to collaborate by using an assisted Web transaction with a phone call. The number of combinations is virtually endless. Therefore, it is very important that the customer interaction management solution chosen can seamlessly integrate the telephony channel into an overall communication strategy that utilizes the emerging capabilities of e-mail and Web interaction. In addition, as Web-enabled cellular phone interaction becomes more prevalent in the market, the merging of voice, Web interaction, and e-mail response will differentiate your company’s customer relationships from your competition. In many cases much effort has been spent to develop sophisticated business-process models for managing customer relationships via the call center, providing an opportunity to adapt these processes to include the other CIM channels.

Enterprise portals create a rich environment for collaborating with your customers, business partners, and employees. These enterprise portals combine three generations of portal concepts to create a dynamic, dialog-driven environment for conducting business. In summary, the definition of the current generation of enterprise portals now includes the following:

• Connection to resources of the Internet through search engines.
• Content in the form of news, entertainment, and resources.
• Access to electronic shopping and commerce.
• Definition of community forums and interaction management for the Web communication channel.
• Connection to dialog services for an organization, business, or community.
• Support for unassisted communication transactions that can use multi-channel dialog services.
• Support for assisted communication transactions using multi-channel dialog services.
• Support for a dialog strategy and rules for connecting multi-channel dialog services for use by the customer, business partner, or supplier.

Developing this type of portal is a necessary ingredient for any e-business solution. Effective dialog management is a required ingredient for an enterprise portal used to grow market share and revenue.

Karl A. Walder is director, E-business Product and Service Strategy for eshare communications. Please direct questions or comments to or by accessing www.eshare.com/vsolutions.

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