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THE BOTTOM LINE
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Access
Online Information Quickly and Inexpensively
By Liese Hutchison
Forrester Research estimates one interaction with a customer costs
a corporation $33 per telephone call or $10 per e-mail, but only
$1.17 if the customer uses an online knowledge base. What is an
online knowledge base? It’s information that is stored online
through a company’s web site that is relevant to the customer.
For instance, how many minutes does the customer have left on
his cell phone plan? Or where does he send the defective product
under warranty? Or how many mortgage payments does he have left?
By storing information online for customers, businesses save millions
of dollars in customer service costs such as personnel, telephone
expenses and other overhead. Steve DeVaney, CEO of Optitek, cites
this example—Citicorp stored millions of mortgage files at its
Westport Plaza location. Its customer service center was located
on Clarkson. Whenever a customer called with a question regarding
his mortgage, the customer service rep took down the pertinent
information, told the customer he’d call back in three to five
days, put in an order to retrieve the paper file from the Westport
location and call the customer back once the file was in hand.
By having the information scanned and stored online, the customer
service reps simply pull the needed item up on their screens and
relay the information to the customers. “Citicorp saved $1 million
a quarter just in its customer service department,” DeVaney states.
The Association for Information and Image Management states that
online imaging, storage and workflow applications garnered $17.5
billion in revenue in 1999 and is expected to be a $41.6 billion
industry by 2003. According to a recent study it conducted, the
banking and financial services industry use document technologies
the most, followed by insurance, government, manufacturing, transportation
and health care.
Businesses are putting a variety of items online for easier retrieval.
For instance, when an organization opens a new business, it needs
resumes. A new casino in Las Vegas received 75,000 resumes for
its opening and the company employed document imaging and online
retrieval to find the person and criteria for the job. DeVaney
notes that by storing the information on a computer, “a human
resources person can search for a resume with a specific characteristic
and respond to the applicant immediately.”
Employers are putting information online as well, notes Mike Smith,
vice president of business development at TALX Corp. For instance,
most workers have their paychecks deposited electronically in
their banks, but still receive paper pay stubs in their mailboxes
at work or at home. “Putting electronic pay stubs online allows
employees to access their pay records from anywhere in the world,
saves money on printing and distribution costs and cuts down on
calls to personnel requesting back pay information,” Smith states.
In addition, employees can make withholding changes online, enroll
in retirement plans or monitor flexible spending accounts. This
saves money, because human resources personnel don’t have to handle
the paperwork or the questions via phone or in person.
“Payroll and human resources benefits are increasingly turning
to online technology,” Smith notes. “Employees can find out online
how many vacation days they have left or how much money they made
last week.”
TALX, a leading application service provider, developed The Work
Number, a product that allows mortgage lenders, landlords and
others verifying credit and employment history access to employee
records. This secure system, accessed online or by phone, provides
information regarding an employee that a human resources person
would have to provide every time an employee moved to a new apartment
or applied for a car loan. It saves subscribing organizations
money by freeing human resource personnel from answering those
questions for creditors on behalf of company employees. The Work
Number is the nation’s largest database of employment and salary
records, with more than 35 million users accessing the system.
Liese L. Hutchison is an assistant professor in the department
of communication at Saint Louis University and a free-lance writer.
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