Self-service is an increasingly important priority for CX organisations, empowering the customer, reducing service queues, and lowering your costs. As Salesforce mentions, 69% of the industry’s decision-makers mention self-service as a major component of their strategy. And last year demonstrated how crucial it is to invest in a self-service portal, as contact centre call queues extended for hours amid the pandemic.
According to Bain & Company, there’s 68% self-service adoption currently, expected to reach 88% by 2023. If you are yet to get started with your self-service strategy (or are looking to revisit your existing one), here are the steps to follow:
- Leverage speech analytics to identify the most relevant topics
Right at the get-go, one must accept that self-service can never be exhaustive, and customers will have to interact with a live agent for more complex queries and nuanced issues. Instead of trying to build an exhaustive portal, it is a better idea to analyse voice or written interactions using speech or text analysis and mapping the most popular keywords. This will indicate which are the top queries that you can address using self-service.
- Start simple, scale-up
It can be tempting to implement self-service capabilities through a big bang approach, deploying portals, online FAQs, in-store capabilities, AI chatbots, automated IVR assistance, etc., all at one go. But this will only extend your lead time for self-service implementation and hold back ROI. Our recommendation would be to start with a basic but functional self-service portal that addresses the most common queries identified using speech analytics and gradually scale based on customer feedback.
- Speak the language your customers understand, expect, and prefer
Copywriting in a self-service portal can make a massive difference to your adoption rates. For example, your contact centre might internally refer to a shipping monitoring task as “plot product coordinates,” which indicates a shipment’s location on the map. But this may not be part of the customer’s lexicon, and a direct query like “where is my parcel?” might be more effective for both comprehension and searchability.
- Use screen analytics to measure customer engagement with self-service
Screen analytics monitors customer behaviour on your self-service portal to give you important insights, such as which page is getting the most visits, which elements are impeding navigation, where is the customer dropping off, etc. Regularly update your self-service portal based on recent analytics results for greater adoption.
- Link self-service with your other service channels
Organisations often make the mistake of treating self-service portals as a blind alley. This only leaves the customer befuddled and frustrated, making them more likely to have a poor experience when they do connect with a live agent. Remember, customers genuinely want self-service and it isn’t just a way to shrink call queues. Embed other forms of contact information like email IDs and call centre numbers to maintain engagement.
Online self-service is an essential component of the customer experience in a digital world. With the right UX, copywriting, and analytics implementation, you can leverage self-service for dramatic CX enhancements while keeping your support costs in check.
