In recent years, self-service has become the silver bullet for businesses looking to boost efficiency, cut costs, and better meet customer expectations. Self-service technologies are changing how customers interact with businesses because they allow customers to solve problems without calling or emailing for assistance.
Many businesses have incorporated self-service into their operations, and when done correctly, it can significantly improve the customer experience. However, many businesses have expressed dissatisfaction with the low Self-Service adoption rate among their customers, despite having made technology available to them.
Self-service can fail for various reasons, resulting from a variety of factors. The most significant and damaging factor is poor customer service. Frustration and irreparable brand damage can result from a poorly implemented self-service customer support system.
This post presents six major reasons why your self-service initiatives can fail.
1. Complex navigation
Across all channels, self-service must be extremely simple and intuitive to use. Confusion, frustration, and drop-off result from open-ended navigation, poor hierarchical menu structure, buried content, multiple tabs, and a lack of standardized document formats and inputs. Customer annoyance can also be caused by missing, outdated, or incorrect information.
2. Lack of focus
Lack of ongoing focus is another reason for the failure of self-service platforms. Many executives believe that it will run on its own once the platform is launched. Interactions with the self-service platform, like any other website, must be continuously analyzed to optimize and improve the experience. To reduce clutter, stale documents and FAQs should be removed regularly. Content tags should be updated based on visitor search engine queries to improve results. To improve resolution times, machine learning should be used. To improve the experience, new technologies such as voice, video, and augmented reality should be tested.
3. Lack of flexibility
Self-service can fail if it isn’t adaptable enough to changing customer and business requirements. Organizations that build platforms that are difficult to change or update are setting themselves up for failure, as demands change all the time. Using cloud and open source technology to build a system that iterates with customer data and provides accurate and relevant content can save time spent reworking platforms on keeping them up to date and meet current needs.
4. Ignoring feedback
Businesses that refuse to pay attention to how their customers and employees interact with customer service can get themselves into trouble. It is critical to ensure that customer and employee feedback is considered before self-service projects begin. Companies must ensure that feedback is gathered both at the start of the project and as the platform is developed and used. Then, as customer and employee preferences shift, adjustments must be made. Customer feedback not only aids the company in improving the product and the processes that surround it, but it also aids customers in having a better experience when these improvements and changes are implemented.
5. Adding extra effort
Sending users through a portal that asks for information that the company already has is another point of failure for self-service platforms. Users find it extremely inconvenient to repeat information every time they access a portal or call a company’s contact center. A customer should be able to log in to the portal, allowing the portal to present relevant data and options tailored to the user.
Here are the ten essential best practices of future-ready self-service.
- Create everything from the customer’s point of view.
- Reconsider policies as well as the need for manual intervention.
- Demand that the entire procedure be automated.
- Provide a stateless workflow that allows customers to provide real-time feedback.
- Develop a balanced set of metrics for the self-service experience of customers.
- Develop and implement a programme to reduce contacts in a systematic manner.
- Use Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) and Web Services to unlock data and systems.
- Make an investment in user interface design to ensure that all interactions are exceptional.
- Establish excellent usage metrics
- Build a solution that is both integrated and agile