Empowering Education: The Rise of Self-Service

While customer service is primarily focused on helping others, consumers these days want to first help themselves.

Stop us if you’ve heard this one: you discover a problem with your recent purchase, so you go online to look for solutions. Seeing the wealth of self-help options, FAQs, and tutorials available, you feel confident that a resolution is only a click away. Flash forward 2 hours, and you’re on the phone with customer support feeling agitated and wondering what went wrong in your self-help procedure.

This experience is ubiquitous in the consumer world of today. Customers are on the hunt for ways to get their problems solved without the burden of contacting customer support, giving rise to the self-service sensation that is taking hold of the customer service world.

Empowerment through Access

The incredible amount of information available online these days gives consumers previously unheard of power over their purchasing decisions. Consumers can read reviews, view video demonstrations, and compare prices across brands, all without leaving home. And according to the North American Consumer Technographics Customer Life Cycle Survey by Forrester, consumers report that they now utilize self-service FAQs for support more than the time-honored phone call. Despite this, the report found that phone channels still offer the best overall satisfaction rates. This creates two interesting phenomena in the customer service landscape:

• Customers are wanting to leverage this informational power to find answers on their own.
• When they can’t do it on their own, they still want easy ways to be connected to live agents.

Quality Self-Service

The goal of self-service is twofold: helping your customers help themselves, and easing the burden on your overworked agents. While both of these are easily achievable when the right self-service options are implemented, poorly done self-service will accomplish very little in the way of problem resolution. Gartner analyst Brian Manusama commented on this issue in his Why You Need to Rethink Your Customer Service Strategy research note: 80 percent of businesses who fail to plan their self-service improvements will receive a lower return on their investment and fewer service benefits than originally expected.

You must have a plan when improving your self-service. Examine your centre’s KPIs, customer histories, and preferred channel usage to help you decide where best to apply your improvements. Once you know what channels to focus on, establish clear timetables and project objectives to keep your efforts on track. After your changes have been implemented, test your self-service protocols in-house to make sure they’re actually as helpful and newbie-friendly as you think they are.

Include visual aids and cues to engage with your consumers more fully. People learn in many different ways; some users will naturally respond to visual representations of concepts better than text, and a few well-placed infographics or diagrams won’t hurt your text-friendly users. Effective use of mixed media is the best way to accommodate as many users as possible and create clear and helpful materials.

Moving to Assisted Channels

As we touched on above, self-service can’t be the end-all of your customer outreach. Data gathered by Parature via CEB found that while nearly 58 percent of customers will first go to a website for self-help solutions, 35.5 percent of those customers will still need help from a live agent. Though customers are favoring self-help options more these days, there will always be problems too complex or frustrating for them to handle on their own. When this happens, an easy transition to an assisted support channel is necessary.

This is where multichannel support and optimized CRM systems can really benefit your centre—data management tools can tell you what pages the customer has visited and what options they may have already tried. A contact centre optimized for multichannel support help guarantee an easy transition from the customer’s self-service channel to whatever other option they prefer. On a bigger scale, CRM systems can inform your service with all the necessary customer information previously taken from earlier touchpoints. This gives your agents the flexibility to deliver personalized service without your already-frustrated customers having to repeat themselves.

Helping Yourself

Customer self-service is all about empowerment. Your customers are empowered through the informational options you provide, and your agents are empowered by the freedom and insight gained when customers seek out answers on their own. When done correctly, this is a win-win for everyone involved.

But remember, your self-service must be improved with a guiding plan in mind. Your self-service options should be inclusive to everyone in your market and must prioritize the channels most commonly used. And if your self-service fails, an easy out must be provided to get your customers connected to an agent and back on track. Interested in other ways that self-service can be used to enhance your contact centre performance? Check out our free whitepaper!