Enhancing a Customer Self-service Strategy in the Digital Age

In today’s digital era, self-service choices are a necessity to inform, involve and engage consumers.

It’s significant for CX managers to deliver customer self-service benefits, which essentially means finding a way to enhance the user experience. Self-service devices henceforth will not only incorporate a knowledge base and search abilities; the most profitable strategies will include artificial intelligence and virtual assistants.

According to Gartner, as much as 40% of today’s live volume could be resolved in self-service channels.

Here are 5 steps for CX professionals that will enable them to enhance their self-service strategies.

1. Set business operators for driving a self-service transformation

Business leaders must communicate to CX, sales, marketing, and product development heads for them to understand how self-service can elevate customer experience. Even today, many interactions still need human support, but for those that don’t, self-service can give a personalized experience that leads to high customer fulfillment.

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CX directors need to know which drivers are essential to their business and map customer self-service strategy. Here are a few drivers to consider:

• Speed: Waiting time to speak to a human is notably long, and hence their issues don’t get resolved promptly. Before diverting customers to self-service, businesses must learn what customer support queries are most relevant. For instance, voice chatbots can lead customers to self-service for overnight mailing addresses, account insights, and product data.
• User experience: Having an existing knowledge management system where the user experience is less than appealing, they should add multimedia content, including podcasts, videos, and pictures, to pull customers in and provide them with the data they require.
• Revenue: It’s a big concern for sales leaders that by turning phone calls or live chats to self-service, income will decrease. But by attaching predictive analytics to AI virtual assistants, companies can offer product recommendations to help boost revenue.
• Operational costs: Expenses to manage contact centers are soaring, and live agents are the most expensive means to handle customer requests. Although advancing self-service options can reduce the cost of customer support.

2. Establish practical expectations for self-service volume

Organizations need to be assured that they have masterminded their knowledge base, network storage, virtual assistants, and network infrastructure. This engineering involves the quantity and size of servers, bandwidth linking to the servers, and a host of virtual assistants to manage the predicted volume. Initially, it will be challenging to determine the percentage of transactions that self-service will process.

3. Update information bases and combine with AI

In most organizations, knowledge bases need an overhaul because they are outdated in content, technology, and usability. Content developers and product managers need to improve the content, modernize existing content, and refresh multimedia content. Databases should be regularly updated to give appropriate and valuable information to customers.

4. Discuss prevalent self-service pitfalls

There are numerous traps businesses often fall into once they address and roll out self-service devices that can prevent a successful implementation.

There will be bugs in virtual agents that businesses need to work out. Moreover, organizations must have the data to comprehend if their strategy is working for them and also the scope to revise if it isn’t. Businesses should use analytics tools to see where consumers get stuck and append escalation hooks at those points.

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5. Measure success

If done correctly, customer self-service tools will further promote business metrics. Businesses must determine the success metrics they will use from the project’s source and collect baseline values to have a base for comparison. This may sound shallow, but many businesses are in a race to get the project off the ground and don’t consider baseline metrics as they should.