Self-Service: The New MantraLetting customers do it themselves is the dream of many intelligent enterprisesHorn & Hardart: The words still bring warm thoughts to those over the horizon of a certain age. In the days before fast food restaurants, Horn & Hardart Automats were temples of self-service and immediate gratification. There were no pushy waiters: instead, you'd choose anything you wanted from a cubby grid of glass doors arrayed on a gleaming Art Deco wall. I'm lucky enough to remember going to a Horn & Hardart Automat in New York City at a (very) young age. I'd drop a coin in the slot, grasp the old-fashioned glass and porcelain knob, and slide the door aside. Then I'd reach in for a piece of cake, glass of milk, or an assortment of food selections. Self-service: It was automatic. Well, not really. Horn & Hardart was in reality a buffed-up illusion of automation. Behind the scenes, considerable hard work was going on. You could see the cooks and servers working furiously to fill the little windows with food — if you thought to take a peek through the opening once you had withdrawn your selection. "Automats enforced quality control," writes Carolyn Hughes Crowley in Smithsonian Magazine (August 2001). "The leather-bound rule book every manager received listed the proper handling of the nearly 400 menu items, described precisely where to position the buffet-style food on the plates, and stated the number of times employees were to wipe tabletops each day." What customers saw was the glorious end of a carefully premeditated series of business processes. As IT solution providers try desperately to ignite demand, many have latched on to this ultimate gift of automation: self-service. With sophisticated back-office, front-office, and customer-touch technology, IT solution providers are giving their prospective clients a vision of how they can bring down costs, reduce headcount, and reap the benefits of letting their customers and business partners do things themselves. By deploying self-checkout services and kiosks, supermarkets, department stores, and even government agencies are getting ready to replicate the great success of such technology-based innovations as automatic teller machines and self-serve gas stations. Closed-Loop BenefitsAlong with their development partners, vendors such as Sun Microsystems and IBM are touting leading-edge inventory control systems. At the opening of Sun's iForce Solutions Center at the company's headquarters, partners were showing off an Internet-based real-time retail inventory system connected in a closed loop with distribution, financial, and marketing management applications. Using inexpensive sensors on products, retailers could go beyond merely recording point-of-sale data to discover which items have been removed from shelves, perhaps even by whom. The same technology could work inside customers' refrigerators to tell them which items they need to restock or might be in danger of spoiling (which might be about half the stuff in my personal chilled domain). Thus, rather than selling their latest benchmark numbers, IT solution vendors are working with partners to show off technology packages that start with customer self-service and then use technology-driven process automation to drive strategic business applications and analytics. Odds are that some stores will experience snafus that might bring back memories of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton movies. But with any luck, customers will enjoy greater efficiency and be unaware of the complexity hidden from view. Data from self-service systems will be critical to building credible knowledge of demand, and thereby reorienting supply chains. AMR Research's Kevin Scott, writing in a July 2002 report, declared that the "Field of Dreams" approach to product development — that is, "if you build it, they will come" — must change if companies are to realize the benefits of a closer understanding of customer demand. "A Customer Needs Management (CNM) strategy involves the deployment of applications that manage the collection, flow, and analysis of product designs, marketing materials, customer requirements, and feedback." CNM will also draw on a new array of data resources, including what companies are learning from customer interactions on the Web. And that makes sense: E-commerce is all about self-service. Successful Web sites will make self-service a two-way street that encourages a data flow vital to CNM and other automated business process applications. Searching for ServiceSearch engines are naturally at the vanguard of helping people find things for themselves. Inquira, the product of a merger between former rivals Answerfriend and Electric Knowledge, is one of the more exciting companies to emerge in 2002. The company's Inquira 5 products for call centers, search, and self-service applications features the Natural Interaction Engine, which can be made knowledgeable about language and business relationships, meanings, and rules. Inquira's president is Chuck Williams, a veteran of a number of software ventures that have employed artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies. Chris Danzi, senior vice president for Internet e-commerce at Bank of America, is an Inquira customer. "We are very bullish on self-service capabilities for our customers," said Danzi. "Online banking customers tend to be very heavy channel users — they use the Web, call centers, and go to bank branches. The more functionality we can put on the Web to make it easier for our customers, the more we can deflect traffic away from more expensive channels." Danzi also said that coordination between call center agents' scripted processes and what's made available via self-service Web features has helped the bank streamline customer experiences across channels. A knock against natural language rules products is that training the engines is onerous. "One of the reasons we didn't go to a competitor product was that it would be a huge effort to craft our content to fit their paradigm. We would have had to add headcount just to maintain it," said Danzi. "Training the engine is not a huge issue [with Inquira]," Danzi stated. Self-service is the payoff for a deep commitment to building an intelligent enterprise. IT solutions providers of all shapes and sizes are reconfiguring their offerings to allow customers to not only have it their way, but do it themselves. Perhaps even Horn & Hardart should attempt a high-tech comeback. I'd be there. David Stodder [dstodder@cmp.com] is editorial director of Intelligent Enterprise.
|
 |
Most Popular This Week
IE Weekly Newsletter
Subscribe to the newsletter
| |
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
