In this period of fierce competition and tough economic times, businesses are seeking ways to increase their competitive advantage. This is particularly important for businesses in the business-to-consumer sector, such as consumer banking, retail, and insurance. Key opportunities for developing and sustaining a competitive advantage can be achieved through:
- Customer loyalty
- Reduced operational costs
Customer loyalty is the commitment of a customer to continue doing business with a particular company, regardless of whether a similar business offers enticements such as superior product selection at lower prices. Offering excellent customer service is an important means of building customer loyalty. However, providing consistently good service continues to be a challenging prospect because customer service is usually provided by unpredictable humans.
Many businesses are improving customer service by tackling the problem of the human element. Consumers are given the means to serve themselves. Frequently-used services are made available through a variety of channels, including the Web and interactive phone applications. Consistent and reliable customer service is delivered directly to consumers. In addition to improved consistency and reliability of service, consumers tend to be more satisfied with a self-service experience. There is no waiting for help from a customer service representative (CSR). Instead, the consumer can quickly access information and successfully complete a number of business transactions unassisted. These improvements in service and customer satisfaction lead to loyal customers.
The introduction of consumer self-service also leads to a reduced number of customer service calls. A lower call rate lets the business reduce call center staff and thus reduce operational costs. A consumer self-service solution addresses both customer loyalty and operational costs, which together provide a good opportunity to develop competitive advantage for the business.
Another advantage of the self-service solution is the rich communication channel to the consumer. The business may choose to deliver news and information of interest to the consumer. With some solutions, it is possible to personalize the delivery of content or tailor the content to particular groups of consumers.
There are some interesting consequences to providing the consumer with a single point of Web access to the business. A single Web site sets the expectation that the consumer is dealing with the enterprise as a whole rather than individual lines of business within the enterprise. Ideally, the underlying parts of the business need to consolidate consumer information and business transactions to form a unified view from the consumer's perspective. It is important to consider a solution that will allow easy integration of the various back-end systems and data within your business to meet these expectations.
Another way of reducing costs is to improve employee productivity. The consumer self-service solution can be extended to allow CSRs to take advantage of a single Web-based interface to handle services on the consumer's behalf. As with the consumer interface, the customer service interface consolidates access to customer information and financial systems, making it easier to deal with customer requests.
The basic self-service solution can be extended to provide other interesting services that differentiate the business from the competition. For example, consumers can be given the opportunity to carry out online chats with sales representatives or other special personnel within the business. This eliminates the need for the consumer to arrange personal appointments or calls with specialists. Situations where customer service staff try to coordinate the interaction between consumers and specialists, or try to convey information from internal staff to the consumer, are also avoided.
The rest of this article presents more details on the consumer self-service solution. To make the context clearer, consumer banking is used as the sample business.
The roles in our scenario are shown in Figure 1 below.
- Consumer
- Interacts with the Web-based interface provided by the banking institution to conduct financial transactions, manage customer information, or to chat with a financial advisor.
- Customer Service Representative (CSR)
- Interacts with the solution to update customer information or perform financial transactions on behalf of the customer.
- Financial Advisor
- Advises consumers on financial matters. The financial advisor, a skilled professional, uses the solution to chat online with consumers and to provide financial advice.
Figure 1. Business context
The following are some of the business scenarios that will be supported by the solution.
- A consumer has recently moved. She logs into the bank's Web site and is presented with her personal home page. She needs to update her address in her personal information. While she is there she decides to transfer some money from her savings to her checking account, and then pays some bills using the funds from her checking account. All transactions are logged and stored in the customer's record.
- A new customer calls the bank wishing to have an account set up. The CSR captures all necessary information from the consumer to create the customer record and any new accounts. The system also creates the necessary user information so that the consumer can use the Web interface. The successful creation of the customer record is communicated to the CSR and includes the initial password. The password is communicated to the consumer over the phone.
- A CSR gets a call from a customer. The customer has noticed that her phone number is wrong on her statement. The CSR searches for the customer and retrieves her customer information. She updates the phone number as requested and saves the information. The CSR's actions are logged as part of the customer record.
- An irate consumer calls the bank to cancel all accounts with the bank. The CSR makes every attempt to placate the customer but fails. All accounts are closed, and the customer record and all related information is marked for eventual removal from the system.
- A consumer logs into the bank's Web site to do a financial transaction. The home page includes information about new bank products and services. One of the new products looks interesting but the consumer is not sure if he is eligible. He notices the online chat feature and is able to get advice immediately from one of the bank's financial advisors.
- At the end of an online chat with a client, the financial advisor realizes there is some critical information within the session that he'll need later when he acts on the client's request. He saves a transcript of the chat before closing the session. Later that afternoon, when he's finished his responsibilities as an online advisor, he retrieves the information he needs to deal with the various client requests from the morning.
To speed the process of developing Web-based applications, IBM has developed the Patterns for e-business. These patterns are divided into categories:
- Business patterns
- Describe the objectives of the solution, the high-level participants that interact in the solution, and the nature of the interactions between the participants.
- Integration patterns
- Connect other business patterns together to create applications with advanced functions. Integration patterns are used to combine business patterns in advanced e-business applications.
- Composite patterns
- Are combinations of business patterns and Integration patterns that have themselves become commonly used types of e-business applications. Composite patterns are advanced e-business applications.
- Application and runtime patterns
- Are driven by the customer's requirements and describe the shape of applications and the supporting runtime needed to build the e-business application.
Together the patterns assist in the identification of key aspects of the solution architecture, and ultimately the choice of IBM products to realize the solution. For more detailed information see the Patterns for e-business site.
Because our solution requires self-service, access integration, and application integration, the Portal composite pattern is the best fit. More detailed information on the Portal composite pattern is available in A Portal Composite Pattern.
Figure 2 below shows the architecture for the consumer self-service solution. Descriptions of each component in the architecture are provided below the figure.
Figure 2. Architecture
- User Interface Manager
- Is responsible for rendering the user interface within a browser. User interface fragments are arranged within a layout container (the Web portal). Communication between UI fragments is facilitated by the User Interface Manager. The User Interface Manager also provides personalized layout and content presentation.
- Security
- Is responsible for authenticating users and controlling their access to services provided by other components in the solution. This component provides "single sign-on" capability to the solution.
- Directory Server
- Provides the user registry for the solution.
- Customer Information
- Repositories of information about the user beyond that stored in the user registry. In this case, the information is related to the financial institution, such as account information and customer service records.
- Customer Information Manager
- Provides a consolidated view of customer information. It controls access and coordinates updates to, and retrievals from, both the directory server and the Customer Information repositories.
- Customer Information Management UI
- Supports interactions with the consolidated customer view.
- Collaboration Server
- Manages online chat sessions.
- Collaboration Manager
- Maintains the queue of available financial advisors and matches a customer request for an online chat with one of the advisors on the queue.
- Online Chat UI
- Lets a user chat online with another user.
- Financial Application
- Provides various financial services and transactions.
- Financial Services UI
- Supports user interactions with the Financial Application.
This introductory article gives you a basic overview of a consumer self-service solution. The solution can be broken down into building blocks needed to construct the solution from end to end. The major building blocks required to develop a consumer self-service solution are:
- Build a secure portal
- Establish a single sign-on process for the portal
- Enable collaboration on the portal
- Aggregate user information on the portal
- Develop and deploy rich clients on the portal.
The next article in this series will present the core building block: developing a secure portal. It will cover the design of a secure portal; the products required to build it; and the steps to install, configure, develop and deploy it.
Other articles in the series will present the remaining building blocks.
- Read the next article in this series, Consumer self-service, Part 2: Build a secure portal, for the details of designing, developing, and deploying a secure portal with IBM WebSphere® Portal and IBM Tivoli® Access Manager.
-
For information about the compatibility and integration of the products used and tested by the IBM Software Group System House Solution Test Team in the "Consumer self-service" solution, see the "Customer loyalty scenario" section in
Integrating IBM middleware to develop business solutions (developerWorks, February 2005).
- Find loads of information about WebSphere Portal on the Portal Zone at
developerWorks WebSphere.
- Determine the best architecture for your solution and identify the products required to build it with
IBM Patterns for e-business.
- Consult the
Portal composite pattern and the IBM Redbook,
A Portal Composite Pattern Using WebSphere V4.1,
for guidance on designing and building a consumer self-service solution.
- Innovate your business with the latest technology from IBM. Get trial downloads of IBM products now.
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