Most customers choose self-service at some point during their support journey, making the option an important part of overall customer service operations. Yet, self-service is falling short for many consumers.
Only 14% of customer service and support issues are fully resolved in self-service, according to a Gartner survey of more than 5,700 customers released Monday.
Self-service can benefit brands and customers alike, but leaders need to develop a proper foundation to make chatbots, FAQs and similar tools work as intended. Poor self-service offerings can be more frustrating for customers than not having self-service at all.
Companies suffer too, due to a combination of higher costs due to more live calls, reduced customer satisfaction and frustrated agents left dealing with repetitive inquiries, according to Eric Keller, senior director of research in Gartner’s customer service research practice.
“No one wakes up in the morning saying, ‘Hey, I'm really looking forward to calling customer service today,’” Keller told CX Dive in an interview. “But an even worse scenario is spending 30 minutes online trying to get something done, then that not working and having to call in anyway.”
The most common point of failure in self-service is the inability to find content relevant to an issue — an issue that appeared in more than 43% of self-service cases, according to Gartner’s survey.
Leaders can resolve this problem by offering better guidance, according to Keller. Companies already have plenty of self-service content available, but actually navigating to the relevant information can prove challenging.
AI can help, but it’s not a silver bullet
A generative AI chatbot can be the perfect guide for customers by letting them state their problem in natural language inquiries, rather than having to hunt down and input just the right keyword for the information they need.
However, generative AI isn’t a silver bullet, Keller said. Companies need a proper knowledge management system in place before a chatbot can use it to curate customer journeys.
“Do you have your knowledge about your product, your answers to customer questions stored and maintained in a way so that a generative AI application can access that, make sense of it and use that to answer questions?” Keller asked.
Agents and other company representatives are ideal for ensuring relevant information finds its way into the backend, according to Keller. He cited the case study of a B2B company with a small digital services team that couldn’t keep up with regularly changing customer questions.
The company then added a new step to agents’ case flow management tools that let them track customer questions and resolutions. Any questions or answers that weren’t already available online were recorded and could easily be added to the brand’s self-service content.
“That really expanded their ability to quickly create relevant content,” Keller said. “They saw a big shift in where customers were resolving their issues, with many more customers resolving online than previously.”
Companies that bring agents into the knowledge management strategy can improve the employee experience as well.
While self-service tools are often ideal for resolving less complicated issues, only about one-third of “very simple” problems are fully resolved in self-service, according to Gartner’s survey. Identifying problems that self-service isn’t solving can help take routine inquiries off agents’ plates.
Service and support organizations can help agents handle fewer, highly-complex interactions by focusing on removing value-eroding service interactions, and redistributing simple interactions to self-service with improved site capabilities, knowledge management, and AI-driven chatbots.
This allows remaining service contacts to be channeled to live agents who are enabled with technology and possess the skills needed to resolve the issue and drive value to the customer.
“These are intelligent people,” Keller said. “They're people who like helping customers solve tricky problems. They do not want to spend all day every day answering the same three mundane questions, helping people reset their passwords day in and day out — and that's what happens when self-service isn't working.”
