Proven Portals: Best Practices for Planning, Designing, and Developing Enterprise Portals

Support for Self-Service

Customer portals are a cost-effective channel for supporting customer self-service, and they offer a number of advantages over other channels. They scale more easily than other channels and help reduce the load on those other more costly channels. One call center found that 55% of its support calls moved to the Web and wait times dropped from 12 minutes to 38 seconds when Web self-service was introduced [eGain Communications Corporation 2002]. Portals can speed responses to customers; however, organizations need to improve methods for responding to customer e-mails. In one survey, less than 25% of customer e-mails were responded to within 24 hours of receiving the inquiries [Kramer and Brendler 2001]. Effective self-service ...