In the current global environment, lacking well-performing self-service technology in call centers can mean risking a competitive edge and potentially falling behind.

Challenges, arising from the global pandemic, have accelerated changes in consumer behavior and expectations. Employees working from home and widespread lockdown restrictions have increased contact center volumes, creating more pressure to deliver better experiences. The latest contact center annual report confirms this, with self-service enhancements a top priority for 2021.

Fortunately, self-service technology is maturing, offering flexible solutions designed for businesses of all shapes and sizes.

The term ‘self-service’ covers many different technologies, including driving cash machines, online banking services and supermarket self-checkouts. Ultimately, the goal of ‘self-service’ is to get results, quickly and effectively – for both customers and businesses.

To deploy self-service successfully requires a combination of different technologies, data collection processes and analytical approaches for both voice and text interfaces. This requires intelligent, tightly integrated solutions, to ensure the right results and experiences are delivered.

One of the keys to delivering an intelligent solution is to leverage a growing ‘knowledge base’ — one that captures a user’s journey and provides real-time support and contextual information specific to that customer. The ‘knowledge base’ will enable machine-learning technologies that will also provide analytics for continuous performance improvements.

Organizations will also benefit from advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Understanding (NLU), which are part of Interactive Voice Response (IVR). These technologies deliver solutions that are more responsive and more relatable to humans than ever before.

Serving Ourselves Every Day

Even if you don’t have the latest self-service technology in your business, there is a good chance you are already encountering different types of the technology with varying performance levels. For example, you may unknowingly use self-service when you are searching the internet, booking doctors’ appointments or researching a new car insurance rate.

Whatever the process, we all want to get the result we are looking for as easily and quickly as possible. Customers don’t need to speak to a human if the experience is relatable and gets the job done effectively in less time. So, when a self-service experience goes smoothly, everyone wins.

Contact Centers’ Call For Self-Service

There is a strong case to be made for not only using self-service technologies but also ensuring it is optimized for your business.

In fact, according to the Contact Pipeline Special Report, January 2021, self-service has remained the top priority for contact center investment with almost a quarter of all respondents confirming that they will be implementing, or improving, their self-service capability this year. Their number one challenge though is not having enough staff to manage the volume of work. Further complicating the issue is the finding that this year, organizations asking for additional staff was down by 40% as compared to the previous year.

After meeting these challenges, self-service has the opportunity to help businesses. It helps businesses respond to peaks in workload, without increasing staffing, or compromising on the quality of service. This can make a significant contribution to a healthy bottom line and the ability to grow. It can also take some of the more mundane work away from agents. This provides them additional time to help solve the tougher queries – further enhancing the experience for all parties.

Pandemic Drives Tech-Savvy Customers

It almost goes without saying that self-service is more critical today than ever, given the challenges contact centers have faced during the ongoing global pandemic.

When it hit in 2020, an estimated 13% of U.S. agents worked remotely on a permanent basis, according to a leader for omnichannel customer experience and contact center solutions, Genesys. In addition to transitioning to work-from-home environments, for which many organizations were ill-prepared, specific industries had to respond to dramatically increased call volumes.

Covid-19 has not only increased the volume of interactions with contact centers but also accelerated changes in the way customers want to interact. Remote living and working mean more of us are relying on technology to connect with the outside world.

Technology is playing a bigger role for all of us, and customers of all ages are increasingly more tech-savvy. Today, it appears to us that customers are keen to be in control of their transactions. As chief revenue officer at a company supporting various sectors, I and my team observe customers happier using self-service to resolve some queries and serve themselves when quick and easy. This helps create alignment between what contact centers are striving for and what customers are seeking.

Customers are showing a preference for self-service, where it is appropriate. Given that this trend is unlikely to change, it is definitely time to think about self-service solutions and what it could mean for your brand.

The good news is you can start small and automate individual processes to deliver results relatively quickly. Focus on repetitive high-volume activities, which address your customers’ pain points, to optimize the benefits. Choose an experienced technology partner to keep you on the right track. This will connect your business to invaluable experience, guiding your strategy, technology choices and implementation approach, so you can deliver what you need right now with effective foundations in place to enable your self-service solutions to grow with your business.

Conclusion

Self-service technology is becoming a top investment priority for many contact centers. Its capabilities have advanced in leaps and bounds, opening opportunities for return on investment.

Covid-19 has also increased the importance of self-service solutions. It is now a ‘go to’ component of CX. An effective self-service deployment enables organizations to manage increasing workloads and customer expectations while delivering better brand experiences without breaking the bank.

Source: Self-Service Technology Becomes A Top Priority For Contact Centers