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 1. Home/
 2. Digital Self-Service: How to Take it to the Next Level

HOME



DIGITAL SELF-SERVICE: HOW TO TAKE IT TO THE NEXT LEVEL

Do you remember how many times you went into a bank for service in the last
several years? Maybe once. ATMs virtually eliminated the need to go inside a
bank, and mobile banking has taken it one step further by eliminating the need
to even go to the ATM.

When it works, customers like the ease and efficiency with which they can
accomplish their goals through digital self-service. They want self-service to
be smarter and want to accomplish more with it. Here are some examples of
digital self-service failures even for common questions that we have encountered
from websites of Fortune 500 companies.


MEGABANK

 * Question: How do I sign up for autopay for credit card bills?
 * Answer: Unrelated hits. (In fact, we found that the task could not be
   accomplished online with the megabank, a common feature on the websites of
   online banks.)


INSURANCE FIRM

 * Question: Do you offer earthquake insurance?
 * Answer: No results.


COMMUNICATION SERVICE PROVIDER

 * Question/Query: Blurry image on TV.
 * Answer: Unrelated hits.


FURNITURE RETAILER

 * Question/Query: Fake leather sofa with footrest.
 * Answer: Sculpture and artificial plant SKUs.


HOME APPLIANCE MANUFACTURER

 * Question/Query: Espresso machine.
 * Answer: Unrelated products on several pages with a coffee maker far down the
   list.

Interactive voice responses (IVRs) struggle here as well — they often lead to
conversational cul-de-sacs that cause you to keep making U-turns. In a  consumer
survey on IVRs, “The State of IVR Customer Experience,” a whopping 88% of 500
respondents said they were not intelligent enough, and 73% complained that they
had to repeat what they told the IVR to human agents when their concerns were
escalated.

While technologies such as generative AI promise to improve the effectiveness of
chatbots, many of the chatbots on company websites barely go beyond
meet-and-greets and sending a link to an FAQ page.



In fact, Gartner found that only 9% of customers reported solving their problems
through self-service alone.

How can we take self-service to the next level?




THE PATH TO EXCELLENCE

To fix self-service, we first need to deconstruct the steps involved in
self-service: connecting, understanding, solving and optimizing. Coincidentally,
they also apply to human-assisted service.


1. CONNECT

Self-service can happen at many touchpoints — including an IVR, website, mobile
app, messaging function, live chat and so on. Point products support specific
channels, often just one, for connecting with the customer. And do-it-all
toolkits, while they might check all the boxes in terms of supported channels,
often fail to take advantage of the richness of individual touchpoints. Ask
potential solution partners how deeply they support individual touchpoints. Do
they have a BYO (Bring Your Own) architecture that will allow you to easily add
new touchpoints?


2. UNDERSTAND

Many self-service systems do a poor job of understanding customer intent, as is
evident through the examples I provided earlier. Customers don’t often state
their problem. They just know what the symptom is and express it in different
ways, which are called “utterances” in tech parlance. Ask potential solution
partners how their tools map utterances to true intents and go on to solve
problems.


3. SOLVE

The “solve” phase may entail finding the answer needle in a document haystack or
going through a self-service conversation with the customer to resolve an issue.
It is like what a doctor might do in the case of a diagnosis or what an expert
advisor might do in the case of a product recommendation. When it’s not done
well, this can lead to a phenomenon called tech support rage, as the New York
Times so eloquently articulated (paywall).

Legacy self-service systems often throw FAQ lists or encyclopediac documents at
the customer and do not give them the exact information they need. The result is
that the customer has to call the contact center. Or, the self-service system
transfers them to human agents, often without retaining the context of their
inquiry.

The solution is to make sure your self-service system is backed by a knowledge
management system that can help customers (and employees) find the answer in the
content haystack, including long documents, and where needed, drive a
conversation with the customer and ask clarifying questions to guide them to the
answer. For instance, eGain has a feature called Instant Answers™ that leverages
a large language model to pinpoint answers in a long document or compile an
answer from multiple sources, while pointing to the references.


4. OPTIMIZE

Without connected insights into customer journeys across touchpoints, agents’
use of knowledge, and the operation of the contact center, customer service
managers are often flying blind. We all know about Customer 360, which refers to
a state in which you have complete context about a customer. To optimize
self-service (and agent-assisted service) performance, you should also work
toward creating a state of “Insight 360” to ensure you have connected insights
across customer journeys, use of knowledge and contact center operations. For
example, connected insights can tell you how knowledge content served agents
proactively at friction points in a customer journey to reduce journey
abandonment. You can gain insights like these through A/B testing. As another
example, you can use A/B testing to assess how the use of knowledge impacts
first-contact resolution across two groups of contact center agents: one that’s
using the internal knowledge base and one that is not.


BEST PRACTICES

While technology clearly matters, so do best practices for self-service success.
Here are some you can leverage over time:

 * Make sure to back self-service with knowledge. Use the 80/20 rule to
   prioritize the scope of knowledge you use to answer customer questions,
   starting with the most common customer queries first.
 * Keep expanding your knowledge base so it can handle more complex questions
   over time. That way, customers can do more with self-service than just find
   answers to FAQs.
 * Always provide a safety net of human-assisted service, but make sure that
   customers can escalate to human assistance without having to repeat the
   context they’ve already provided.
 * Advertise self-service options when the customer is waiting for
   human-assisted service.
 * Ask for a no-risk, no-charge production pilot from providers to see if you
   like your experience with their technology. This is a novel way to consume
   technology while virtually eliminating risk.


FINAL WORD

Self-service can be a win-win for the customer and the business. Make sure you
execute the “connect, understand, solve and optimize” phases well, follow best
practices and look for risk-free adoption options to take self-service (and
human-assisted) experiences from “rage” to “rave.”

CONTACT US

 

The article was first published on Forbes.com


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