Development Process And Evaluation Of A Customer Service Chat Application

Description

 

ABSTRACT

This thesis presents a customer service chat application: Livezhat mobile application. Its purpose is to allow customer service representatives chat with website visitors in real time, independent of the location. We examine the functional requirements of such an application. The requirements are: interactivity, enhancing customer relationships and satisfaction, good quality and fulfilling a need.

The application is communicating with two servers to provide notifications and enable information exchange. It was found to enhance customer relationships with its quality and interactivity. According to survey evaluation, the application was easy to use and appealing. Out of two customers who used the application during a test period, one used the application rather much. Other feedback from the evaluation provided us a chance to improve the application in the future.

The thesis’ contributions are: the design, implementation and evaluation of a novel customer service chat application used in mobile devices.

Keywords: application development, application, chat, customer service, mobile.

Kallio R. (2015) Asiakaspalvelun chat-sovelluksen kehitys ja arviointi. Oulun yliopisto, tietotekniikan osasto. Diplomityö, 42 s.

TIIVISTELMÄ

Tämä diplomityö esittelee asiakaspalvelun chat-sovelluksen: Livezhat mobiilisovellus (Livezhat mobile application). Sen tarkoitus on antaa asiakaspalveluhenkilökunnalle          mahdollisuus                                                                                            keskustella (chattailla) verkkosivuvierailijoiden kanssa reaaliajassa, sijainnista riippumatta. Työssä tutkimme tällaisen sovelluksen toiminnallisia vaatimuksia. Vaatimukset ovat: interaktiivisuus, asiakassuhteiden ja asiakastyytyväisyyden parantaminen, hyvä laatu ja tarpeen täyttäminen.

Sovellus kommunikoi kahden serverin kanssa, jotka mahdollistavat ilmoituksien (notifications) kulkemisen ja tiedonsiirron. Se parantaa tutkimuksen mukaan asiakassuhteita laatunsa ja interaktiivisuutensa vuoksi. Arviointikyselyn mukaan sovellusta oli helppo käyttää ja se näyttää hyvältä. Testiperiodin aikana kaksi asiakasta käytti sovellusta, ja heistä toinen käytti sitä paljon. Arviointikyselystä saatu muu palaute antoi meille mahdollisuuden parantaa sovellusta tulevaisuudessa.

Diplomityön työpanostus on: uuden mobiililaitteissa käytettävän asiakaspalvelun chat-sovelluksen suunnittelu, toteutus ja arviointi.

Avainsanat: asiakaspalvelu, chat, mobiili, sovellus, sovelluskehitys.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT TIIVISTELMÄ

TABLE OF CONTENTS FOREWORD ABBREVIATIONS

5. Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………………. 1
   • Motivation 1
6. Literature review…………………………………………………………………………………….. 3
   • Customer Relationships………………………………………………………………………. 3
   • E-Service Quality 3
   • Trust And Loyalty 4
   • Interactivity 4
   • Customer Satisfaction & Online Chats…………………………………………………. 5
   • Uses And Gratifications……………………………………………………………………… 6
7. Livezhat mobile app………………………………………………………………………………… 8
8. Design & Implementation………………………………………………………………………. 10
   • Scheduling 10
   • Design Process 11
     • Login 11
     • Main Activity 12
     • Settings 14
   • Final UI And Functionality……………………………………………………………….. 14
     • Translations 14
     • Login 15
     • Main Activity 16
     • Settings 17
     • Light Theme 18
     • Mute And Close Chat……………………………………………………………. 19
     • Evaluation Of The Design………………………………………………………. 19
     • Security 19
     • Notifications 20
     • Google Cloud Messaging……………………………………………………….. 21
9. Evaluation 22
   • Results 23
   • Test Period 26
10. Discussion 29
    • Mobile Customer Support…………………………………………………………………. 29
    • Real-time Customer Engagement……………………………………………………….. 29
    • Functional Requirements For Mobile Customer Support 29
11. Conclusion 31
    • Limitations 31
    • Future Work 31
12. References 33

FOREWORD

I would like to thank my thesis supervisors Prof. Vassilis Kostakos (University of Oulu) and Ph.D. Denzil Ferreira (University of Oulu) for giving me guidance and support in writing this. Thank you all my colleagues at ZEF. You have provided me the support in developing the application. You’re like a second family to me. A big thank you to my family. My mother, Heli Kurki, thank you for always believing in me and being a loving mother. My father, Kari Kallio, thank you for spending time with our common hobby, motorcycles, and believing in my talents. Thank you my sister, Niina Kallio, for giving me the initial spirit to follow my enthusiasm towards technology. You are one of the main reasons I am now writing a thesis for a university degree in computer science and engineering. A great thank you goes to my girlfriend, Maija Niemelä, for understanding me when I was working late. Thank you for being there when I needed you.

Helsinki, 17.11.2015

Riku Kallio

ABBREVIATIONS

API	Application Programming Interface
CSR	Customer Service Representative
GCM	Google Cloud Messaging
HTTP	Hypertext Transfer Protocol
JSON	JavaScript Object Notation
UI	User Interface

1.        INTRODUCTION

Motivation

Traditionally customer service people sit at their computers and answer to customers’ inquiries. For small company’s website, e.g., less than 10 employees, a website visitor may ask a question sporadically. In this scenario, it makes no sense to hire dedicated full-time customer service personnel to sit at a computer and wait for customers to pose a question. On the other hand, a mobile support application is ideal: when a notification on the mobile device is triggered, the support personnel may respond immediately and carry on to other work tasks when finished. Compared to email, for example, a live chat software handles the chats better, being synchronous, showing them individually in a list, and each chat can be closed after the customer’s needs are satisfied. For the customer (i.e., website visitor) it is far easier to use the chat box located directly on the bottom corner of the website than sending an email to support staff. All the basic functions such as listing chats, receiving visitor messages, sending message and getting visitor information can be easily implemented to the mobile application.

ZEF’s original mission and goal is to help people in decision-making [1, 2]. ZEF is currently helping in decisions like what product to buy but later ZEF will be helping in other decisions as well, such as choosing a partner based on all your opinions. In addition, ZEF has five other goals: bringing transparency and democracy to the world; making most popular comparison applications in the world; offering the best SaaS in the world; have an excellent international team who all match our values Love, Passion and Bravery; and have a turnover over one hundred million euros. With the four products VotingAid, Matchit, ZEFsurvey and Livezhat, these goals can be achieved.

“We founded ZEF to help people in decision-making. Our dream and  purpose of being is to build a decision-helping community where people worldwide help each other in all life’s choices.

With our popular online tools, you make and help your customers make better decisions. With our most well-known tool, VotingAid, we support democracy and transparency all over the world.

We have over 1000 satisfied customers including Rovio, Al Jazeera, MTV, IMF, Reuters, ITV, Vianor, Marimekko and Disney. 95% of them recommend us for their friends.“

VotingAid is ZEF’s most famous application. It is fulfilling the goal of bringing transparency and democracy to the world by offering a software that helps voters to choose their candidate to vote [3]. VotingAid has an outstanding reporting included in the software. After the elections, a report can be published (or shown locally) where users can compare candidates’ answers or parties’ answers and/or see how parties agree with each other. A good example of this is found in MTV’s article [4], where newly selected (in April 2015) Finnish parliament can be tested based on their answers to questions on MTV’s VotingAid test.

Matchit is the cornerstone of ZEF’s ideology. With Matchit, entrepreneurs can increase sales and by creating fun product selectors to help customers select the right products or engage and educate website visitors with fun quizzes [5]. Obviously, Matchit is closely related to the community idea and the mission of helping people in decision-making.

With ZEFsurvey users can create and publish different kind of surveys, for example, a employee satisfaction survey [6]. A reporting tool is in an important role with this product as well as with VotingAid. In this case, entrepreneurs will see how their employees answered in the survey and has a clear vision of how to improve the satisfaction (for example).

The fourth product, Livezhat, is the most closely related to this thesis and where the contributions of this thesis lie. Livezhat is a software that allows Customer Service Representatives (CSR) to chat in real time with their website visitors [7]. With the chat, CSR’s are able to select potential customers and help them in making a buying decision answer any questions they might have.

Before this thesis was made, Livezhat was restricted to the browser, where customer service staff can answer to website visitors’ questions. The chat box, where website visitors ask their questions, is also restricted to the browser. To make CSR’s work more efficient, a mobile application is needed (Livezhat Mobile app). This thesis’ goal is to reduce the drawbacks of a web-based only solution. The application implemented does all the basic functions that the browser version of Livezhat does but adds one major addition into customer service experience: the aspect of mobility. Hence, the main research question is:

What are the functional requirements for a mobile customer support service?

In this thesis, we describe the requirements, architecture, implementation and evaluation of Livezhat Mobile app. With the evaluation, we investigate the impact of Livezhat Mobile app in CSR’s workflow – in practice and by using a survey – with the following questions: How frequently the app is used? What’s the busiest time of day (when app is used)? What is the overall user satisfaction score?