SafeHarbor invites users into the Web

(Telephony) SafeHarbor Technology is taking Web-based customer and technical support to its next level via what it calls data warehousing.

“For the first time, you can literally track all of the touch points with the end user,” said company president Bo Wandell. “Now, end users have the ability to use the Web to go out and find solutions themselves.”

This moves the traditional telephone outsourcing model “about 20 degrees toward the Web,” Wandell said. “There are a lot of companies out there that provide traditional telephone-based customer and technical support. We do that, but what we really focus on is migrating the end user from the telephone to a self-help environment using pictures rather than words to describe situations.”

The migration makes sense, simply based on SafeHarbor’s billing model. Instead of billing per telephone interaction, the company charges a flat monthly rate. Because it’s more expensive to answer a telephone than to have a customer use Web self-help, it behooves SafeHarbor to make the Web as easily accessible as possible.

“It puts us on the same side of the table as our customers, from the standpoint that we don’t want to pick up the telephone any more than our customers want us to pick up the telephone,” Wandell said.

The Web process “doesn’t answer every question” but it can move about 70% of all end users to the Web, he said. That’s a lot of people, when you consider one customer, Washington Mutual Bank, has about 25,000 Web hits per day.

Data is stored on SafeHarbor’s servers in Satsop, Wash., and backed up at an Exodus site, Wandell said.

“In just about every case, we do all of the updating,” he said.