Category: web-self-service

1. Contact Centre Costs Are Considerably Reduced

Before self-service contact centres, getting a resolution to a customer query went something like this: 

Not only are there multiple steps to this process, making the overall experience cumbersome for the customer, but each step that involves handling the query itself has overheads attached to it.  

When we consider just how many queries a company receives each day, these support costs accumulate and can prove particularly costly over time. 

However, with the introduction of AI-powered self-service tools, getting a resolution to a customer query looks like this: 

70% Experience A Reduction In Call Volumes When Chatbots Are Deployed. 

Not only is this a shorter and smoother journey for the customer but it involves zero agent involvement, removing those costs associated with handling the query. 

Through the automation of routine queries and even tasks such as quotes, payments and ID&V, support costs are significantly reduced for the contact centre. 

2. Resolution Times Shrink For Better CX

A critical factor affecting good customer service is resolution time, the total time in which it takes for a customer’s query to be resolved – from start to finish. 

As demonstrated above, there are far fewer steps in the customer journey that utilises self-service in comparison to the one that does not utilise self-service. This is because the latter relies on agent availability and depth of specialist knowledge – which can be limited.  

AI, on the other hand, is available 24/7, produces automatic responses and therefore will never need to put a customer on hold to find the correct article or to consult a manager. 

This slashes resolution times and is made possible through an AI derivative known as Natural Language Processing (NLP). NLP receives the customer query on behalf of the chatbot or self-service tool and by unpacking each of its components and analysing them, can understand intent. This allows the very best and relevant results to be produced quickly. 

67% of customers prefer to solve issues themselves 

Self-service is quick, convenient and has quickly become the now tech-savvy consumer’s preference. 

3. Improved ESAT Positively Influences CSAT 

In a recent survey, contact centre executives were asked about their experiences. It was revealed that 74% of those asked felt that agent experience had a significant impact on customer experience.  

This suggests that there is a correlation between empowered employees and satisfied customers; when agents have job satisfaction, customer service is better. 

But what does this have to do with the self-service contact centre? 

Through powerful AI and by harnessing NLP, self-service software independently handles 20% of all routine queries online. This means that significantly fewer routine queries and tasks end up reaching contact centre agents. 

Instead, with routine queries partially filtered out, the agent gets to interact and help customers with complex and serious issues. By reducing the mundane from their job roles, agents feel empowered – particularly by finding resolutions to complicated questions. It gives them job enrichment and purpose. 

In short, self-service enhances employee satisfaction, which in turn can improve CSAT.

4.  Overall Agent Efficiency Skyrockets 

Self-service tools such as chatbots or FAQ widgets are powered by one centralised, intelligent knowledge base. This is central to the company and not only utilises AI to fuel customer service tools but also powers the interface in which agents use to resolve customer queries in the contact centre. 

When a company adopts a self-service contact centre, they begin to reap the benefits of the agent-facing console, with productivity and efficiency skyrocketing. 

The agent interface includes an integrated mini knowledge base so that hundreds, maybe thousands of articles of knowledge are available at agents’ fingertips.  

For optimal efficiency, AI-predictive suggestions recommend relevant articles on every key-press which significantly reduces the time in which it takes to handle a query, minimising Average Handling Time (AHT) and promoting CX.

Further, for self-service contact centres that include live chat as a contact channel, the live key-press feed feature allows agents to preview what users are typing in real-time before they hit “send”. This allows agents to sometimes craft a response before the query has even been sent, reducing wait time considerably. 

 Read: Choosing A Knowledge Base For The Multi-Tenant Contact Centre.

5. Continual Optimisation of Knowledge Through Feedback

Self-service software not only reduces routine contact levels but also helps companies with optimising the knowledge that resides within their centralised knowledge base.  

By including customer feedback prompts within each knowledge article, companies can grasp an idea of whether the content is serving its intended purpose – that is, resolving customer queries or not.  

The wider knowledge base analytics centre can tell companies which articles were effective or optimisable over time, making it transparent and easy to identify which require improving and which are working. 

Similarly, data will show if an article is optimisable by comparing the query with the position of the article. If the article did not show as a first-page result then its keyword matching and intent will need looking into. 

Here’s How Synthetix Self-Service Solves Contact Centre Problems 

Over 80% consider bots and AI robotic automation to be an important function of the contact centre, yet only 48% have deployed such technology into the contact centre. 

With a fast-changing, customer-centric landscape it is vital to the success of CX and general business that self-service is incorporated into the contact centre.

Self-Service Software for Customers: The Considerations 

Rather than recommending something that should be subjective to each company’s needs, we have put together some considerations that will lead you to the best self-service software for your customers: 

• Does the self-service software utilise Natural Language Processing? 
• Is the self-service software fuelled by one centralised knowledge base? 
• Can the FAQ articles be found organically using search engines? 
• Can the self-service software be optimised for different customer journeys? 
• How easy is escalation between self-service and agent-assisted channels? 
• Can the self-service software’s content be improved over time? 

How Easy Is Escalation Between Self-Service And Agent-Assisted Channels? 

There will always be occasions where queries are too complex by nature to be handled using AI alone. This is where seamless escalation between self-service software and agent-assisted channels such as live chat is critical to CX.  

Your users don’t want to be told: “Sorry no results found. Please contact support”, to then have to find a contact number,  wait on hold and then repeat themselves. For your customers, it’s a huge waste of time. 

Instead, Ensure your customer service tools are integrated, working together frictionlessly. When your self-service tools suspect that human intelligence is required, automatic escalation to live chat takes place, all within the same window to prevent repetition, improving CX. 

Can The Self-Service Software’s Content Be Improved Over Time? 

When it comes to self-service software for your customers, it’s important that knowledge article content is helpful and being optimised regularly. 

One of the most effective ways to ensure your FAQ content is serving its audience effectively is by encouraging interactive customer feedback options. Asking users if a knowledge article helped resolve their issue can help uncover areas for improvement and ultimately other users’ journeys. 

Self-service software that includes a prompt for query feedback is particularly effective when it comes to optimisation, by getting users’ take on why an FAQ did not help contributes to constant optimisation. 

What Is Customer Self-Service?

A fundamental support tool, customer self-service provides customers, visitors and prospects with the option to serve themselves online. This means users can find answers to their own questions, resolves their own issues and discover critical information by themselves.

Not only does this contribute significantly to contact reduction in the contact centre – as AI-powered customer self-service tools automatically handle routine questions – but customers love it too. By cutting out the need to find contact information, get in touch with an agent and by giving customers the tools to help themselves, things become much easier, quicker and more convenient, which of course helps to improve the customer experience.

67% of customers prefer self-service over speaking to a company representative.

The global self-service technology market size is expected to reach USD 46 billion by 2027, registering a CAGR of 6.7% from 2020 to 2027. The growing demand for self-service solutions amongst businesses can be attributed to their successes within customer satisfaction and operational efficiency.

Customer self-service reduces contact volumes by up to 50%. When we consider the sheer volume of routine queries that make their way to contact centres to be dealt with and the costs associated with handling them, this contact reduction translates into huge cost savings. The AI-powered self-service tools can recognise multiple variations of questions, matching them with relevant knowledge articles and providing customers with the most relevant results.

When configured correctly, customer self-service can intercept customers when they need help, removing the need for agent assistance and therefore reducing the volume of routine questions received. This means that agents have more bandwidth to deal with customers’ complex issues.

Through the utilisation of Natural Language Processing (NLP), customers are always delivered the most relevant results. This is achieved by NLP unpicking sentence structure and ultimately understanding context to successfully answer questions. This and the freedom to serve themselves helps to increase CSAT and positive associations with your brand.

For more on the fundamentals of self-service software, click here.

Different Forms of Customer Self-service

Depending on your business, website and how customers interact with your brand you might choose to offer self-service on its own page, as a widget, or both.

Whilst an FAQ-style self-service page offers customers a hub to which they can independently search for what answers they want, a widget can be configured to display when certain conditions are met. Using trigger management, customer self-service widgets can offer help when, for example, when certain pages are visited, or a certain amount of time is spent on one page. This increases the chances of customers reaching their destination and can even contribute to revenue.

An AI-powered chatbot is also a form of self-service, providing an additional conversational element to CX.

4. Map Your Customer Journeys

Having a clear, holistic view of your customer journeys encourages cost-efficient routes whilst enhancing experience.

Its good practice to understand customer journeys, from start to finish – especially those that are common. By mapping these out, it quickly becomes obvious any roadblocks users might be experiencing, as well as opportunities for automation to take place.

For instance, if you found a pattern in a journey where users were requesting a particular form or task, you might look at ways in which to automate this task through self-service opposed to introducing an agent. This would cut support costs and prove smoother for customers.

This is also a great opportunity to configure custom triggers to pages or events that warrant additional help.

Customer Journey with Roadblock

1. Customer identifies an issue
2. They use a search engine to find a resolution
3. No results are found, this is a roadblock affecting CSAT poorly
4. Customer continues research on company website
5. They contact Customer Service
6. Issue is resolved

Customer Journey with Roadblock Resolved

1. Customer identifies an issue
2. They use a search engine to find a resolution
3. An SEO result is found quickly and efficiently contributing to CSAT
4. Issue is resolved

Which Is Best for Your Customers?

Every company is different, with a number of factors that will influence your self-service decisions, therefore there is certainly no cookie-cutter solution.

Read: The Best Self-Service Software For Customers

For your customers, perhaps just one type of online self-service will suffice, or perhaps a blend is more suitable in order to complement other tools and subsequently the whole customer journey.

Check the benefits listed for each type of self-service against your customer profiles and customer journey maps. You will then have a clearer idea of requirements and solutions.

An intelligent Knowledge base

Self-service software connects to a customer-friendly version of a wider knowledge base to deliver customers accurate and consistent information on every occasion. A knowledge base contains thousands of articles that include everything from company return policies to opening hours, troubleshooting videos to terms and conditions – sophisticated technology serves customer relevant results based on what is typed into the self-service search bar.

Not only is web self-service a key tool for facilitating good customer service, but it is an imperative part of the wider customer journey. If a customer has a question or issue that needs solving, it is likely that they will self-serve before ascending to other forms of contact. In fact a study by Microsoft revealed that 66% of customer will engage with self-service first rather than immediately talking with an agent.

Why Is Self-Service Software So Important Today?

The customer self-service software market is estimated to grow from USD 4.33 Billion in 2016 to USD 9.38 Billion by 2021, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 16.7% during the forecast period.

Self-Service Is the Key to Efficient Customer Service Operations

Growing contact volumes are a huge challenge for customer service and contact centre teams. Increasing support queries are putting a huge strain on support teams and agents unnecessarily, flooded with routine questions, they cannot focus their full attention on complex customer queries. This in turn can affect resolution times and quality, causing them to drop and customer satisfaction to suffer.

The reason that self-service software is currently so valuable to customer service teams is that is mitigates contact significantly. It can automate the entire question and answer process for a huge segment of customers, allowing agents to sufficiently deal with those in need.

Read: The Top 5 Benefits Of A Self-Service Contact Centre

Changing Customer Needs and Expectations

Customers’ needs and the way in which they engage with customer service is frequently changing, it’s one of the reasons why so many companies incorporate self-service options into their customer service offering; to build adaptation into their customer service front-lines.

It is becoming increasingly common for customers to consult a search engine or website for answers before reaching out to a support agent. In fact, a study by Synthetix revealed that 90% of consumers will always check a website before e-mailing or calling a company to find information.

Customers want the freedom to serve themselves and find out information on their own terms. There is a reason that self-service has been normalised for simple day-to-day operations such as paying for shopping, checking in for a flight and even self-ordering in restaurants. It has become many customers’ preference, and the same applies to online customer service. So much so that more than 90% of consumers expect organisations to have an online customer self-service offering. To ensure customers remain satisfied, companies must react to their needs and offer web self-service options.

We live in an increasingly fast paced world. As humans we are doing more at a quicker rate – customers are interacting with brands more, purchasing more, returning items more and subsequently, expecting more. A pwc study revealed that speed and convenience mattered most to customers, each hitting over 70% in importance when it came to experience. Fast solutions have become an everyday expectation for customers, which is why self-service software, that is easy to use, provides answers instantaneously and is available 24/7 is in such high demand.

Millennials and Gen Z prefer Self-service

Millennials (born between 1980 – 1995) and Gen Z (born between 1996 – 2012) now make up over 60% of the worldwide population. Having grown up in the digital age with smartphones, e-commerce and broadband, the internet is a comfortable place for them – and this applies to their customer service habits. Millennials and Gen Z would prefer to help themselves than engage with a support agent. A recent study revealed that 75% of millennials would rather use self-service and avoid picking up the phone.

Millennials and Gen Z, who constitute a significant portion of your customer base are self-reliant, expect things ‘on-demand’ and like to answer their own questions – it even makes them “feel good” when they can solve a problem solo. This generation has particularly high expectations when it comes to customer service – they want convenience, flexibility and instant answers – but most importantly, they are the future and companies should be catering to their preferences.

Shift in Digitisation

By 2023, more than 60% of all customer service engagements will be delivered via digital and web self-serve channels, up from 23% in 2019.

There has been a steady shift in digital transformation over the last decade, making online versions of shopping, banking and even counselling available and convenient for anyone to use. But are we moving towards a time where everything will be digitised?

External challenges like the shift in digitisation along with additional pressures such as those related to the COVID-19 crisis are causing customers to visit brick and mortar establishment less and less. The impact of which means consumers turn to digital substitutes for their needs, including costumer service. Consumers no longer visit physical businesses to solve problems, seek help or complain, just like their business transactions, they do it online. This is why self-service is effective, it simplifies things for the customer, but also alleviates the pressure put on support teams who are feeling the burden of a recent upward trend in online support requests.

What Are the Benefits of Using Self-Service Software?

Improved CSAT

A study by Microsoft revealed that 95% of respondents cited customer service as important in their choice of loyalty to brand, with 61% having switched brands due to poor customer service.

All too often customers are unnecessarily kept waiting in line for long periods of time to speak to support agents, subsequently causing frustration. This can easily be avoided using a self-service offering. Not every customer who is on hold needs to be there – which is why it’s vital that a ‘do it yourself’ option is available and accessible to avoid not only disgruntled customers, but strain on customer service.

Serving customers quick, accurate answers using a easy to navigate solution, can help build a lasting relationship between you and your customers and as a result, positively impacts your CSAT scores.

Reduced Operational Costs

Supermarkets that utilise self-service checkouts save operational costs by requiring fewer employees to oversee and assist customers – and the same applies to online customer service.

Self-service software helps to automate routine queries and by doing so the volume of support tickets, phone calls, emails and live chats are considerably reduced. This means employees spend less time dealing with routine questions and therefore the backlog is reduced, cutting operational and staffing costs significantly.

It can also impact operational efficiency positively, for example by reducing Average Handling Times (AHT). Because self-service is designed to deal with routine queries, time that agents would have otherwise spent answering high volumes of FAQs is significantly reduced. Self-service ultimately allows customer service to offload an entire category of enquiries, giving them greater capacity to dedicate more time to solving complex customer issues.

Consistent Answers

The beauty of self-service software is that it connects to the same library of knowledge that the entire customer service team consults when dealing with customers. The results that are served to the customer are pulled from your company knowledge base using sophisticated algorithms and AI.

This ensures that all answers that are delivered to your customers are consistent with the company and accurate. Companies that do not utilise the same source of knowledge across teams and contact channels risk providing inconsistent or inaccurate answers that could significantly harm their company and reputation.

Human-like Understanding

Self-service software utilises AI-powered Machine Learning (ML) so that it can learn from every customer interaction. This helps identify any errors, learn terminology and grammar and also serve the most popular answers in order to optimise customer experience.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is also used to help self-service software understand exactly what the customer is asking, using algorithms, it takes into consideration the keywords, intent, grammar and popularity of the question. This way the software can correctly respond to customers’ naturally phrased question, similar to how a human would.

Enhanced Customer Experience

Online customer experience has never been more important, with expectations higher than ever, customers want a smooth journey to their resolution, without roadblocks that create frustration.

With two thirds of customers preferring to first try solving their issue on their own, it is important that companies provide self-service software that supports this. It is equally important that self-service software offers escalation points, such as live chat to put customers in touch with an agent who can help with complex issues that cannot be solved using self-service – all of this contributes to an positive customer experience and therefore satisfied customers.

Empowered Employees

Self-service software proves not only advantageous for customers, but for employees too.

Because self-service software effectively automates questions and answers, employees who would otherwise be dealing with repetitive, mundane routine queries can now focus on helping customers with complicated issues. This not only relieves pressure on employees who were before flooded with routine qyestions, but it contributes to their sense of purpose, empowering them, which in turn can improve staff attrition rates.

Implementing Effective Self-service Software

When implemented correctly, self-service software benefits your company, employees and customers greatly. But there are challenges surrounding this tool, including:

Visibility – can your customers find it?

Functionality – does it work as intended?

Content – is there adequate knowledge available? A recent study revealed that 43% of respondents believed there was not enough information available through self-service

Ascension – if a customer’s query cannot be solved, is there an alternative channel offered?

Good self-service software can deflect customer contact by up to 50% (Synthetix research), improve customer satisfaction, enhance customer experience and make businesses more efficient overall. Here’s what to look out for effective implementation:

For tips on getting self-service implementation right, Check out this article

Low/No-Code Implementation

When looking at self-service software, it is important to choose your vendor carefully. Integration of these tools into your website can either be simple, installing 1 line of code, or a costly process involving many development hours. Make sure that you work with a vendor with a no-code philosophy, where all of the development work for the look, feel, design and operation of the tool is handled on the vendor’s end, requiring zero ongoing development work.

Streamlined Integrations With 3rd Party Systems

Choosing self-service software that can easily integrate with existing workflows and processes is crucial – the more platforms that can communicate with one another the greater access you have to better decision making and efficiency.

Effective self-service software is built on open RESTful APIs to ensure seamless integration with other existing tools such as a company knowledge base , other customer-facing applications such as live chat or 3rd parties including CRM and email integrations.

Allowing such connectivity can save time and resources and give your company a ‘360 degree’ view of your customer base, encouraging better service.

Escalation

Good self-service software should not only facilitate customer service, but the overall customer journey, start to finish.

It is important for self-service tools to include pre-configured escalation points to promote a smooth and successful experience. Escalation points offer a means to transfer the customer to an agent who can offer additional support and by doing so increase positive CSAT scores. If the self-service tool cannot find an adequate match for the question that is being asked, an escalation option can be included, transferring the customer on to an agent assisted channel such as live chat.

Using trigger management, Knowledge Managers can also configure escalation points based on the keywords that customers use. Keywords such as “cancel” or “renew” involve revenue and warrant agent attention opposed to a self-service response and can therefore be set up to introduce an escalation point. This gives customer service teams greater control over customer churn and upselling opportunities, contributing to revenue over time.

Reporting and Analytics

It is fundamental that self-service software includes comprehensive reporting and analytical tools. Companies can frequently improve the content and the way in which self-service software engages with customers thanks to its reporting features.

Not only can you identify your most popular questions, any errors or gaps from the analytical reports, but customer feedback can explicitly tell you how to improve. The “Did you find this article useful?” prompt can tell you a lot about your content and how effective it is – or isn’t in some cases.

Because customer needs and behaviour are constantly changing, self-service reporting is key in ensuring you are keeping up with any major trends.

If companies want to retain customers by offering them great a customer service experience, whilst benefitting from a multitude of operational wins, they should have a range of customer service offerings in place, including self-service technologies.