Customer service providers have struggled for years to encourage customers to use their self-service channels including the Web, social sites or interactive voice response (IVR) applications. Despite marketing efforts to promote higher usage, self-service often plateaus at a level somewhat lower than its potential. Many service providers indicate that its usage will not go up as customers just don’t like using self-service. The real question that needs to be asked is why customers don’t like it. While some types of transactions require human assistance, there are many others that can be successfully automated but have barriers that make it difficult to use. Looking more closely at why customers don’t like automated service I find that poor performance, such as too many responses on FAQs or navigating through long menus or speech commands are customer pain points. Additionally, some customers are uncertain that the automated systems accurately recorded their information and lack confidence in using the service. Making some basic changes can significantly improve the percentage of completed transactions on self-service channels.
The following lists two steps customer service professionals can take to improve self-service transaction rates and increase customer satisfaction on these channels.
- Knowledge Management Tune Up. Many customer support managers do not have a clear indication of the type of responses provided with the existing knowledge base or the average number of responses given. The knowledge base may deliver too many responses or provide responses that are not accurate. This causes customers to grow frustrated and place a call to an agent who will provide the needed information. Knowledge bases require continuous management and monitoring to determine if a correct response was given and the issue closed. Additionally, customers need to get the right answer quickly when interfacing with a knowledge management system or they will default to an agent.
- Personalize with contextual information. Customers appreciate it when they do not need to constantly reenter information regarding their account in order to proceed. Contextual personalization does more than just recognize a customer. It uses historical and real time information, such as customer status, recent account activity, purchases and GPS information from mobile devices to better discern the reason for the current interaction. It may also use business intelligence to predict a customer’s issue and make recommendations for proceeding. This level of understanding and knowledge makes a routine call into a positive customer experience. For example an airline service center can have current customer information available, so that it would know a flight had been cancelled and provide its customer with updated status on a new flight without the customer doing anything more than making the initial call. Contextual personalization promotes confidence with the customer in using self-service, which promotes higher use of self-service channels
When making self-service improvements proactively alert customers to your new and improved services to regain those who grew discouraged with earlier experiences. Customer service representatives (CSRs) should also suggest to callers that they can receive faster response on their next transaction by using the self-service solutions. Higher use of self-service is a major cost reducer and a self-service transaction is approximately 90% lower than an assisted call. Investments in upgrading knowledge bases and contextual personalization will rapidly provide a positive ROI. It is important to focus upgrades on the 70% of interactions (percentage varies by industry) that lend themselves to self-service and allow CSRs time to tackle the more complex and difficult issues.
