Remington chose hosted self-service CRM because it relieves the company's 10-member IT staff of direct application development and maintenance. Andale, on the other hand, opted for an in-house application that runs on two mirrored Hewlett-Packard servers. Regardless of the delivery method, self-service CRM is very much a hands-on application, with special attention needed to maintain the FAQs and knowledge base. "Self-service CRM isn't worth committing the resources to if a company isn't going to do the required maintenance to the data," says Esteban Kolsky, senior research analyst at the Gartner Group. In fact, customers may not only get frustrated, but they may also resort to picking up the telephone, shooting down the whole premise of self-service. With about 250 FAQs on Remington's Web site, the knowledge base, and 30,000 Web pages, Moore and his team are always reviewing questions to look for trends and repetition. Russo says that Andale has a person dedicated to making sure that the right questions are getting answered. "We refresh the FAQs every other day or they get stale," he says. One of the other key issues to making Web-based self-service work is focusing on internal processes and getting your customer service reps to buy into the proposition. "You don't just put a self-service component on your Web site and expect it to solve your customer service problems," says Moore. "It's not self-service for the organization implementing it."
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