The Brave New World of Self Service
Old Issues Need to Be Addressed
Our enthusiasm for the self-service doors that technology opens must be tempered by awareness of the long-standing organizational challenges. First and foremost, the operational and organizational silos in many organizations make it difficult for companies to bring self service together. With telecom/IT owning the IVR; marketing, eCommerce or IT owning the Web; and the contact center owning agent interactions, no one lays claim to the overarching strategy or has authority to set standards for presenting a unified face to the customer.
As Web 2.0 and other technologies get thrown into the mix, the situation can only get more difficult. It’s time to address the issue by creating a multidisciplinary team that defines service excellence from a customer perspective and institutes plans and reporting structures to attain it.
Second, self service cannot be divorced from assisted service. Customers are much more likely to take the plunge, and succeed, on self-help when a convenient, informed “safety net” is available to help them. Assisted service excellence isn’t simply a matter of back-room planning to ensure consistent content and design across applications. It also requires training and change management to build competency and enthusiasm among the rank-and-file service reps.
As self service grows, the role of the CSR evolves in the direction of “technical support” to help customers succeed at self service. Tying self service and assisted service together can facilitate support from CSRs rather than the perception of a threat. Perhaps the most important issue to address is the lingering attitude that self service represents degradation in customer care. Self service can mean better service, especially when informed by customer preferences and made available across a range of media. A growing population likes — or even loves — to self-serve. It’s time to treat technology as a member of the customer service “A Team.”
Getting Your House in Order
If you’re serious about delighting customers with your self-service offerings, your top priority is an obvious one: Build better self-service applications. Often self-service development and application design takes place in a vacuum by people who make assumptions about your customers. You can’t understand your customers’ needs, habits, preferences and likes/dislikes without talking to them.
Keep an Eye on Best Practices as You Craft Self-Service Strategy
If you’ve set your sights on stellar self service, make sure you factor these hallmarks of excellence into your planning process:
- Make sure all strategic initiatives align with and support the business strategy. If you aren’t clear on where and how self service fits with the business strategy, go no further until you’ve figured it out.
- Develop a comprehensive, cohesive vision of self service and assisted service that spans all media — including alerts, IVR, Web, email, Web 2.0 — with a clear focus on the customer experience.
- Look for opportunities to develop a common applications infrastructure with a consistent user interface that is media-appropriate. Use today’s standards, such as VXML, to ease integration across channels. The Web and IVR are different interfaces but they can share common applications, integration to backend systems, and reporting outcomes.
- Prepare scripted responses to common inquiries that you can leverage across all channels. Develop a process to expand and update this library.
- Customize the self-service interface to the customer desires or patterns as much as possible. The more the customer can mold their experience, the more likely they are to return and succeed.
- Create an in-house forum for synchronizing your multichannel strategy across the various channel owners to ensure that your self- service tools work together to meet business goals. Identify appropriate channels by contact type to offer the right options with high likelihood of success.
Use focus groups and surveys to find out what your customers really think about your current offerings and what they would like to use. Design applications that are easy to find and easy to use so once your customers self-serve, they won’t want to call in unless they absolutely have to. Build a userfriendly GUI/VUI and test it with real customers through structured usability testing prior to production.
There are also tools that can help optimize self-service applications by monitoring, measuring and analyzing customer use and behavior while self-serving. Vendors, such as BBN (IVR) and ClickFox (IVR, Web and other channels). record user behavior and speech while selfserving and provide analysis and reporting to understand your customers’ acceptance of, and success with, your self-service applications.
Real-time monitoring flags issues before the customer relationship is damaged or customers form negative opinions about self service. There is no self-service “application of dreams.” If you build it, they may not come. Part of your self-service strategy must be a plan to encourage use. See if you can provide incentives for customers to use the applications and for your agents to educate callers when a self-service application is available.
Don’t ever stop learning. Create ongoing dialogs about current and possible self-service applications with your agents, your customers and vendors so you have the information required to optimize your applications. There are also internal cultural changes that will take place as your self-service applications become successful. Watch the self-service usage volume and the agent-assisted volume by contact type to note the impact on your staffing requirements, both in terms of hours and skills.
The volume impact might not be a one-for-one trade-off from agents to self service. Self-service applications could stimulate new contacts from customers who only self-serve. Also, agentassisted contacts could become more about assisting those who choose to self-serve — getting set up, using it effectively, addressing issues — than processing transactions. Are your agents suitably versed in the applications to offer assistance? Can they transition from being a “player” to a “coach”? You have to manage this change so self service is perceived as a vital tool in the overall customer experience and corporate success.
Lori Bocklund is Founder and President of Strategic Contact.
Brian Hinton is a Principal Consultant at Strategic Contact.
Matt Morey is a Lead Consultant at Strategic Contact.
– Reprinted with permission from Contact Center Pipeline, www.contactcenterpipeline.com
