Customers expect more from the companies they do business with than ever before, making seamless service across all channels—including, increasingly, self-service channels—a priority across industries. When customers prefer to address their needs themselves, they want consistent, personalized self-service capabilities that make it easier for them to get the answers and resolution they expect.
A report by Aberdeen Research found that while self-service channels rank at the top of the list for planned channel adoption, simply offering self-service isn’t enough. Fully 92% of contact centers are offering some form of self-service, whether it is accessible through phone, the company website, virtual agents or mobile.
“As such, simply providing customers the option to use self-service isn’t enough for firms to create happy clients,” Omer Minkara, vice president and principal analyst at Aberdeen, wrote in the report. “They must transform and adapt these activities to the needs of their clientele.”
The report was based on a survey of more than 300 contact centers around the world. Among Aberdeen’s findings are that the complexity and pace of change in customer expectations is forcing a move from traditional self-service to smart self-service.
Smart self-service:
- Combines traditional self-service vehicles with analytics and AI to enable contact centers to continuously fine-tune activities for better resolution and customer experiences.
- Changes self-service from a cost-containment exercise to a value-add that supports the growth of the business.
- Enables contact centers to accelerate their digital transformation and generating greater ROI while improving CX.
According to the report, firms with smart self-service enjoy superior CX, drive operational efficiency, reduce costs and grow revenue. They enjoy a 2.2X greater decrease in customer effort, realize a 39% greater year-over-year increase in customer satisfaction, and benefit from a 9.3% year-over-year growth in annual revenue (compared to 4.3% for contact centers that do not use smart self-service).
In the report, Aberdeen also details the building blocks needed to transform self-service experiences. Transforming from traditional to smart self-service requires the ability to:
- Analyze assisted service conversations to reveal common issues that can be solved using self-service.
- Use analytics to reveal issues where self-service isn’t meeting customer expectations.
- Leverage machine learning and AI to monitor and adjust self-service activities as needed.