Gone are the days when customers patiently waited in call queues and relied on interactions with human agents to get answers to their simpler queries, which to be honest, left a lot to be desired and led to many customers feeling unsatisfied.
However, with the emergence of automation, chatbots, and other technological advancements in the CX space, organizations can now offer seamless customer service without compromising on quality, accuracy, and speed by integrating self-service options into their omnichannel CX strategy.
This is not only a revelation for the organizations but also for customers, with 81% preferring to resolve any issues with self-service options when interacting with their preferred businesses and brands. Who wouldn’t want to save the time they would otherwise spend listening to the holding tone before getting the chance to interact with human agents?
This doesn’t mean self-service options and chatbots spell the end for agent-led customer service; quite the contrary. Agents can still step in and aid customers with more complex issues. This saves a considerable amount of time and resources, which can be spent on providing a higher level of customer service to more important issues.
So, how can organizations embrace self-service while also retaining agent-led CX delivery? What are the best practices they need to follow?
- Analyzing and understanding the self-service journey
If the organization doesn’t know the destination they seek to help their customers reach and how self-service options fit into the optimization of the overall customer journey, offering it will be a fruitless exercise.
Therefore, it’s important that organizations understand and map the entire self-service journey to provide high-quality CX through every interaction.
- Ensuring useful and relevant content is easily discoverable
Self-service CX relies heavily on customers being able to find the information they need easily. But, most of the time, all the relevant content is not stored in one centralized location and instead in disparate data silos.
To actually offer a self-service option that’s worth using, organizations need to connect all the relevant resources in an easily searchable interface. This is where prioritizing search in the UX of self-service options will be crucial.
- Establishing metrics to evaluate and adjust
Like with any effort to improve CX, self-service options should also be continually monitored, evaluated, and adjusted. Otherwise, how will organizations know if investing? thousand/millions into offering self-service is paying off?
This analysis will help organizations understand and identify instances of case deflections, successful customer journeys, and overall customer satisfaction. CX forensics tools can be leveraged to facilitate this analysis.
Self-service might be the future of CX
With pressure from customers to modernize CX delivery, more and more organizations are implementing self-service CX options. While this is indeed a step in the right direction, to efficiently roll out self-service options, organizations should follow the best practices outlined in this post.