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| The Royal Mail Delivers Enhanced Online Service Through 'Ask Sarah' As part of its drive to increase self-service, the Royal Mail has delivered enhanced online customer service through 'Ask Sarah', a new intelligent web self-service system, powered by Transversal. Ask Sarah enables the Royal Mail's 4.5 million monthly web visitors to receive immediate answers to their questions online, reducing the need to email or call Royal Mail. This directly benefits customers by providing faster access to the information they are looking for. Fully launched at the beginning of June 2008, Ask Sarah has already reduced overall email queries by 50 per cent and by 96 per cent in some areas, improving service to customers. The number of routine calls to the contact centre have also been significantly reduced, freeing up staff to spend time answering more complex queries and increasing job satisfaction. The Royal Mail has seen a dramatic increase in usage on its web site – rising from 3.5 million to 4.5 million monthly visitors between 2007 and 2008. This has been driven by the increasing number of services, such as online postage, parcel tracking, redirections and redelivery now available via the site, as part of the organisation's drive to enhance the services it provides. With such a broad range of customers, spanning the whole population, Royal Mail needed a system that was easy to use, regardless of the visitor's technical ability. Following extensive research, Royal Mail chose Transversal to help deliver self-service through the approachable and engaging image of 'Sarah', providing an immediately recognisable and reassuring figure for customers on both the business and consumer parts of the site. Ask Sarah is integrated closely with Royal Mail's services available via its web site. For example, daily analysis found that customers were asking Sarah questions about the delivery status of parcels. Ask Sarah now recognises parcel tracking reference numbers and links automatically to Royal Mail's parcel tracking system, showing customers current delivery status. Following the decision to introduce self-service, Royal Mail carried out extensive research in the market. It chose Transversal as it provided advanced technology that met Royal Mail's needs combined with the experience and business understanding to help the organisation achieve its goals. The project began in early 2008, with design, development and testing culminating in the official launch in June 2008. Given the differences in answers between business and consumer questions Ask Sarah has two separate knowledgebases for each part of the Royal Mail site. Content for Sarah was built and developed by using Royal Mail's own contact centre advisors who speak to customers everyday as getting the language and context of questions customers were asking was key to the success of Ask Sarah. Using Transversal's flexible technology platform, Royal Mail analyses customer searches on a daily basis, using the insight to add new content in response to questions that don't have an answer, and align the service to customer requirements. They can easily upload new content, for example to provide answers on Christmas posting dates, ensuring that information is always accurate and up to date. write your comments about the article :: © 2008 Computing News :: home page |