How smart self-service creates the resolution path of least resistance

Ever had to take the long way when trying to get somewhere? It often adds time, irritating obstacles, and a whole lot of frustration to your journey.

Similarly, when a customer tries to engage with a contact center and is met with outdated and roundabout interaction channels, it can feel to them as if they’re completely lost. Or, at the very least, like countless roadblocks keep popping up throughout their journey. This friction will delay resolution and sour them to the experience and the company they’re attempting to connect with.

In recent years, customer preferences have significantly shifted, with most consumers preferring to engage with a contact center or customer service via digital channels (chat, messaging) rather than traditional channels such as voice. Gartner found that 70% of consumers use self-service channels during their resolution journey.

But the modern self-service journey looks quite a bit different than it used to as well, and 41% of customers today won’t think twice about switching their patronage to favor a competitor after two negative experiences. ^[1] That’s 41% of customers that businesses can’t afford to lose.

True positive customer experience (CX) hinges not only on merely resolving issues. Customer sentiments and expectations have evolved well past that. Now, they are looking to be “wowed.” They want businesses to cater to them, value their time, and make their experience as seamless and stress-free as possible. No pressure, right? Customer satisfaction should be a contact center’s endgame, but frankly, who has the time and resources to deliver this type of elevated experience?

It’s easier than you think when you implement smart self-service solutions. Truly listening to and understanding customers and their needs creates quick, personalized, and frictionless self-service resolutions that keep customers coming back time and again.

Read on to learn how to smarten up your own self-service solutions.

What qualifies as “smart” self-service?

Smart self-service is a large step beyond your run-of-the-mill, “figure-it-out-yourself” customer endeavor. The more advanced, intuitive solutions delivered by more sophisticated self-service don’t simply listen during conversations—they implement AI to inherently understand the context of what customers really want and how they express it. They implement proactive guidance that meets customers where they are and leads them to what they need as quickly as possible.

Companies who implement intelligent self-service launch themselves significantly ahead of their competitors who lack it. Why? Because the enhanced IQ of their applications allows them to extract detailed metrics and information from every communication. This allows an organization to continuously learn from every interaction and make improvements in the future.

Think of smart self-service this way: A city sends an entire maintenance crew to clean up a large, badly neglected park trail system. Once the overgrowth and debris have been cleared away, it leaves a clear, easily navigable path for people to get where they need to go. Everyone knows these paths are the easiest to take. And as a bonus, they can connect to an app that shows the trail system and the easiest, quickest way to get to their destination. They’re pointed in the right direction even before they head out on the path.

Smart self-service mitigates the roundabout route. It consists of the solutions you’re most likely familiar with, such as:

• Conversational chatbots
• Interactive Voice Response (IVR)

However, smart self-service also looks like the following:

• Proactive engagement on web and mobile
• Knowledge management

Intelligent self-service isn’t just a renaming of age-old solutions—it’s an entire evolution of service that significantly reduces friction throughout the customer journey.

Approach self-service with a data-driven strategy in mind

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the backbone of smart self-service. It automates self-service and delivers the ability to deploy across multiple platforms and channels, allowing customers to self-serve through their channel of choice.

Sophisticated AI can analyze voice and text interactions and then extract historical, conversational data from these conversations. From there, you’ll be able to break down each interaction into easily interpreted metrics to help you visualize the customer journey. From there, you can determine where self-service is most appropriate and effective. This generates the most complete and precise automation workflows and gives you the holistic view needed to efficiently map customer journeys.

But your self-service strategy should extend beyond reading numerical data on a chart. To be effective, you should critically evaluate each step of the customer journey, paying particular attention to touchpoints where friction occurs (abandoned interactions, stalled resolutions, bottlenecks). What’s the result of forming such a strategy? Containment. Peak digital fluency. A deeper, more accurate understanding of customer intent and communication.

The list goes on, but we think you get the picture.

Smart self-service is only as good as its foundational tech allows

A large part of intelligent self-service boils down to the intuition of the applications and technology your contact center uses.

“Self-service channels often lack the technologies needed to meet customers where they want in the digital world.”
- From the Aberdeen report, “Reimagining the Power of Self-Service: How to Deliver CX to the Digital Doorstep”

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Is your self-service smart enough?

Self-assessment time. Consider your own company’s self-service solutions. When looking through the lens of elevated CX, how do you think they perform? What’s working? What could use some improvement?

According to Salesforce, 65% of customers prefer self-service for simple matters; however, based on research NiCE conducted, only 15% of consumers are satisfied with the self-service tools they’re offered nowadays. Why is that?

The truth is that many companies either haven’t implemented smarter self-service within their operations or haven’t effectively built a smart-self service system with the end user in mind. The ability to evaluate customer expectations across journey touchpoints ensures you’re delivering the best experience possible, and smart self-service applications can help provide those insights. Below is the perfect formula to help you do just that.

A best practice to consider: Implement smart self-service where it makes sense. Establishing smart self-service within your contact center’s operations doesn’t mean you have to put it at every single touchpoint along the digital journey. Rather, it should be strategically placed based on data from your website that informs you of where the most friction and the most success are happening. That’s where it’s most useful, and most appreciated by customers.

“Companies with the best self-service systems intentionally place them in spots across the customer’s journey that are most conducive to the customer already wanting to help themselves.”

- From the NiCE CXone eBook, “Effortless service, happier customers: Using smarter self-service to accelerate the speed of full resolution”

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Providing self-service to customers isn’t just about its availability to customers. What truly makes a difference is how, when, and where you offer self-service to them. Smart self-service meets customers at exactly the right place at the right time with the right answers, so anticipating needs is essential to an ideal self-service experience.

Achieving the ideal full-resolution path with self-service

When customers come to your website looking for answers, or to complete a task on their own, they want the experience to be easy, straightforward, and customized to their needs. So how do you gauge if your smart self-service resolutions are hitting the mark and producing results? It’s hard to go wrong so long as you adhere to the following guidelines:

• Keep it fast
• Keep it frictionless
• Keep it personalized

Implementing a range of smart self-service options helps customers move quickly and seamlessly through their journey to full resolution. Intelligent self-service delves deeper, using AI to give customers a true identity in the eyes of the contact center and transitions them from being just another interaction into a legitimate human with thoughts, feelings, hopes, and backstories. This kind of personalization is crucial to creating excellent rapport with customers and really understanding their needs on a deeper, more empathetic level. Smart self-service can be where customer loyalty is born.

Help customers and agents help themselves

When you focus on reducing friction along the digital journey, you not only improve your customer experience—you will discover weaknesses in your technology and strategies. You’ll also identify gaps in agent training that, when remedied, can reduce friction as well.

And speaking of agents—when you provide your agents with access to up-to-date knowledge and content, it helps them help customers more efficiently. Agents should have the ability to help themselves just as much as customers should be able to self-serve. Though mutually exclusive, this benefits both parties if an instance of self-service must be escalated to a well-prepared live agent.

Smart self-service isn’t a ‘nice-to-have’; it’s a ‘must-have’

When customers are given the ability to quickly self-solve their own issues, without the need to escalate to a live agent, they come away happy from the experience with your organization. When agents are free to tackle more complex, challenging, and time-consuming interactions and problems because simpler issues are handled by smart self-service, their own feelings of fulfillment and satisfaction will increase.

When it comes to understanding and implementing smart self-service in your own organization, there’s a lot more where this came from. For more insight into smart self-service and crafting a strategy that delivers exceptional CX, read the eBook, Effortless service, happier customers: Using smarter self-service to accelerate the speed of full resolution.

[1] NiCE: 2022 Digital-First Customer Experience Report: Business & Consumer (2022)