Digital self-service: why it works

“I feel the need, the need for speed”.

We are all Maverick.

Every person wants one thing: a  fast resolution to their problems. In fact, the most important attribute of the Customer Experience is “fast response times”, according to a report by SuperOffice. This need is also behind the fact that 81% of people try to solve their needs on their own before turning to official channels for assistance and service requests.

Answers are sought with minimum friction: nobody likes having to wait at the switchboard, at the counter or having to postpone the resolution of the problem until the email reply to their request arrives. If more than one department is involved, the effort is multiplied: switching offices increases latency.

 Verbal modes of communication, moreover, can cause confusion: the customer tries to explain himself, but does not have sufficient skills to circumscribe the problem exactly, and if responses (and requests for clarification) are asynchronous, resolution times  can be very long.

By providing tools and resources to solve problems autonomously, people would feel more in control of the requested services, being able to use them in a timely manner.

Digital self-service is the answer

An effective digital self-service  channel would allow people's needs to be met more quickly, while reducing service delivery costs. Let's see what the benefits are:

• transforms cost centres into profit centres

Support and assistance functions (Customer Service, Technical Assistance, etc.), as well as  departments that are not directly productive(HR, Facility, etc.) are seen by companies as cost centers, with figures increasing in recent years.

But if the benefits related to employee and customer satisfaction were not sufficient to justify the expenditure - and here many are wrong, given the retention in the long run - there are other elements that organisations can leverage of self-service to establish a competitive advantage and generate new revenue streams.

One of these is predictive capability. Instead of waiting for people to raise problems, a digital self-service channel would allow them to identify and solve them before they arise. Tools for monitoring and  predictive analysis based Artificial Intelligence can gather information to have real-time situational and contextual awareness, identifying abnormal situations and modelling automatic response behaviour.

In addition, a "digital"file allows for innovation and customisation   products and services: views showing at a glance trends, recurring issues, aggregated user data help to define strategies closer to people's needs.

• delivers a multi-channel experience by centralizing and integrating disparate systems

A single request interface - also called SPOC (Single Point of Contact) — optimises the lived experience. People consult a single digital page, accessible from any device on the move and 24/7, to get the information, services and resolutions they need.

Everything is centralised and integrated in the back-end: knowledge about issues, account information, operator activities, business systems (even of different functions). Digital makes it possible to standardise flows behind a catalogue of service requests. FAQ, knowledge bases, chatbots and virtual assistants are closely linked and are ways to differentiate people's experience across multiple channels that have the same "engine" under the bonnet.

• reduces operating costs

A knowledge base integrated to the self-service portal could transform self-service into a self-help platform capable of supporting the shift-left, i.e. moving tickets to the left (from level 1 to 0 of self-service), thus freeing up operators to work on more complex problems..

Imagine that a customer turns to the IT self-service portal to find out how to solve a common problem with his laptop or an application. It could start its interaction with a chatbot, and then move on to an article provided through the bot's connection to the intelligent knowledge base, without any need for operator intervention.

In the event of unable resolution, the portal has already recorded the user's steps, automatically completing the ticket with the necessary information to be directed to the right person: the operator quickly sees the steps the user has already attempted through the self-service portal and the request context and can quickly resolve the problem. Digital makes it possible to connect requests to the right people faster and reduce the confusion of verbal and unstructured communication.

Not only is the resolution time faster thanks to clear documentation and automation, but the user can also reduce downtime during troubleshooting. All this helps to improve business results, especially in the case of internal users.

According to some data provided by Easyvista, a self-service support portal allows:

• reduce first level calls by 30 per cent, resulting in ticket deflation
• improving resolution time by 20 per cent
• optimise knowledge management of 90 per cent

Technical objectives are not enough

However, to realise a digital self-service portal that works, it is not enough to add chatbots or advanced technologies. It must be implemented as part of a strategy in which the end purpose of self-service and the impact this will have should be determined on the overall customer experience.

This is where a concept of 'functional beauty' comes into play: it is not only what is digitally appealing (UX-friendly interfaces etc.) that is beautiful, but what works. And in this case, what works is what allows people to simplify achieving their goals..

Too often, companies simply transpose their service delivery processes as they are organised in analogue to digital. But they do not realise that in doing so they also digitise inefficiencies and redundancies. For this reason, an analysis of the service delivery processes should be made, starting with the needs of the people involved, identifying the easiest and most direct route to reach them.

Only in this way can digital give added value to the services provided by the company: it becomes a simplification, the speed that was really missing to get immediate solutions to needs/problems.