Like Priceline.com, companies everywhere are leveraging e-service technologies -- Web self-service, chat, e-mail response management, collaboration tools, remote diagnostics -- as an alternative to the phone for interacting with customers. One reason is that customers today want the additional channel options that e-service offers them. According to a 2005 survey from Wellesley, Mass.-based Service Excellence Research Group LLC (ServiceXRG), 60 percent of high-tech customers attempt to solve their own problems through self-service knowledge bases before trying interactive channels.

Some vertical industries have been leveraging e-service technologies for some time, and cost reduction has been the primary driver. Conventional wisdom says you can push customers from the phone to lower-cost channels and watch service-delivery expenses drop. However, companies are finding that customer service doesn't conform to such a simple paradigm. To be effective, e-service deployments require considerable investments of time and money -- in knowledge-base creation and maintenance, sophisticated search technologies, incident tracking and workflow tools, and channel integration -- so customers get the same experience regardless of how they contact providers. So although the cost benefits that can result from e-service initiatives have not declined, businesses are increasingly looking at other reasons to justify investments.

In a recent survey conducted by ServiceXRG, 90.4 percent of respondents said customer satisfaction is the leading driver for implementing services such as remote control, chat and collaboration, while 94.4 percent named customer satisfaction as the primary driver for self-service.

"Four or five yeas ago, call deflection was the primary driver [for our e-service initiatives], but now we're looking at what additional value we can bring," says Paul Esch, director of global support services at Espoo, Finland-based Nokia Corp. Nokia has invested considerably in its third-party e-service portal and underlying intelligent search and knowledge base.

Large companies making e-service part of their CRM and other customer-facing initiatives have seen solid returns and customer adoption, but they continue to face significant technology and process challenges, according to John Ragsdale, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. Those challenges include the need to provide agents with a single view into customer interactions, ensure that customer data is consistent across channels, integrate support channels so customers can easily move from one to another, and streamline processes so contacts can be easily escalated along with their associated inquiry histories.