10 Customer Self-Service Best Practices To Power Your Contact Center Results
Most of the customer journeys begin with a simple search of FAQs on a company’s website but many DIY-ers have more sophisticated options available to them, including chatbots and automated assistants. As a contact center professional, you become more focused on agent assisted customer service methods that you may forget many customers prefer self-service.
Day or night, meeting customer expectations has never been easy but your contact center can still offer a mix of agent-assisted and self-service options. Implementing self-service is effective while providing good Customer Experiences (CX) requires operational discipline and customer-centric design. In this article, we are going to uncover why self-service is important for your business and 10 best practices for getting self-service right.
Smarter CX and brilliant self-service is changing the way customers interact with many businesses. Why is self-service very essential in today’s contact centers?
Why Is Self Service Essential For Your Contact Center?
1. Provides 24/7 Coverage
You might want to provide your customers with better service 24/7 but does keeping your contact center open and staffed with agents overnight make financial sense? The after biz hours volume is not that high or enough to justify the cost. The easy and preferred way for your customers is self service, it’s cost-effective and provides customers with round-the-clock support.
2. Self-service interactions are easy on the budget
Saving costs is good for your business. A Gartner study estimated that an average interaction costs $8 while the average self-service contact costs 10 cents.
3. Allows contact centers to maximize agent value
The common questions answered by your agents are better managed with self-service methods and even the simple transactions like scheduling appointments and paying bills are done easier with the optional self-service. When these mundane tasks are lifted from agents’ shoulders, they can spend time handling more complex issues.
4. Can be scaled easily and cost-effectively
Most days, customers are satisfied with tech like chatbots and virtual assistants. They are good at handling a multitude of simultaneous tasks and interactions. This is much more cost-effective than staffing an army of agents to handle the same workload. The best part about chatbots and virtual agents is that they don’t need to participate in time-consuming onboarding and training, meaning they can be up and running much faster than new agents.
5. Agent assistance makes way for better self-service and effective CX
The best self-service design includes a way for customers to seamlessly transfer to an agent for more advanced assistance. When done right, the elevation can happen without missing a beat and the agent can jumpstart the interaction by using the information the customer already provided.
6. Self-service AI can become smarter over time
Artificial Intelligence (AI) self-service is the new hype. The methods that use AI including machine learning can get smarter with use. It means their responsibilities can be expanded to completely handle more contact types over time.
7. It can expand on what is already happening
Many customers use the website or company app for assistance, and it’s good for you as they are already used to the DIY frame of mind. Your contact center can extend self-service offerings with AI to more advanced tech that can solve more problems.
What are these “Advanced tech”? Contact centers are equipped with some great options to choose from, many infused with AI. Self-service capabilities have come a long way from touch tone to IVRs. Organizations can now customize their-service solutions based on customer preferences and biz needs, prominent modern self-service service options such as voice self-service which are interactive voice response (IVR) systems either virtual assistants or bots.
8.Virtual assistants
They are good at answering queries and can walk callers through transactions. They can also be used in conjunction with agent assistance. For example one of our customers uses the help of a virtual assistant to authenticate callers prior to talking to an agent which has substantially reduced average wait times and handle time. They provide a more natural self-service experience and as more people use virtual assistants in their personal lives, self-service use is expected to increase as well.
9.Bots
Have you ever visited a website and had a bot ask if you need help? Bots are everywhere these days, even on blogs and small business websites. Companies have been successfully using customer service chatbots to provide web chat support, and they can either handle the entire transaction or escalate the chat session along with the customer information to an agent. But bots aren’t limited to the web chat channel. Pizza Hut and Staples use bots in Facebook Messenger, Starbucks has a bot in their app, and Sephora has one in Kik.
10.Other self-service methods
Even FAQS and searchable knowledge base in your website helps customers get the information they’re looking for or they can host user or customer forums so customers can support each other by posting and answering questions.
How to create a smarter self-service strategy
Whether you’re just now implementing self-service or need to refresh your current capabilities, taking a structured design approach will ensure your self-service offerings will meet your customers’ requirements and help you meet your business objectives. Contact centers should identify optimal capabilities and collaborative efforts and finally, define and implement a new or improved solution. Here’s what these steps look like in more detail:
1. Document your existing self-service solutions.
2. Use the documentation to determine your updated or new contact center self-service strategy.
3. Use the following 10 contact center self-service best practices to design and execute your new strategy.
Best practice 1: Don’t bite off more than you can chew.
Best practice 2: Communicate with all stakeholders throughout the process.
Best practice 3: Select the right types of interactions for customer self-service.
Best practice 4: Don’t try to “get rid of” customers at all costs.
Best practice 5: Provide customers with guidance and context.
Best practice 6: Create A Smooth Path To An Agent
Best practice 7: Don’t use self-service AI just because you can.
Best practice 8: Measure, report and analyze, repeat.
Best practice 9: Reduce management effort with a tightly integrated solution.
Best practice 10: Choose a solution that provides more flexibility and scalability than you currently need.
Self-service is a win-win for you, your business, customers and agents when self-service is well done but bear in mind, you need to have the right strategy, hire the right people and having the efficient technology in place.
When self-service is well-designed and implemented, everyone wins. Customers get 24/7 support and the ability to solve their own problems. Agents can do less mundane tasks and flex their problem-solving muscles. Create customer-first and personalized Customer Experiences with Accordia chatbot and live chat. Your contact center can reduce costs and increase its volume capacity. For more helpful advice and to learn how AI can help your business flourish, watch the video.
Source: https://www.niceincontact.com/blog/10-customer-self-service-best-practices-to-power-your-contact-center-results
