The goal of any customer-centric business is to increase value by decreasing effort. Let us see how trends in self-service can play a role here. Also, let us look at the importance of self-service, ways to improve it, and some of the best self-service strategies.
Importance of Self-Service:
- Allows your business to offer quick, easy, and cost-effective service.
- Makes service available anytime and anywhere. A needful way of service that we look out for at pandemic hit times like this.
- Speaking specifically, it helps to avoid the creation of repetitive tickets and saves a good amount of your staff’s and customers’ productive time. This also gives you better stats.
- Empowers customers by helping them fix their own problems.
- Empowers agents to quickly respond to any customer query giving you the fastest first call resolution.
6 trends foreseen to improve Self-Service in the future:
1. AI-powered chatbots-
Providing faster resolutions is an unavoidable factor of any self-serving approach. AI-powered chatbots can provide information that the customers need by simulating a person-to-person conversation. It can be deployed in the website’s self-service portal or in your business app.
Image source: Kapture’s Chatbot
The chatbot window presents itself to the user, where the user can type in the query. The chatbot compares the query with its database and presents the user with a quick response.
With multilingual AI chatbots, based on Natural Language Processing, customers can chat in the language they prefer and experience live-language translation.
The AI-powered chatbot can pick the emotions of customers from the language. This helps in identifying the mood of the customers and framing an accurate response.
Explore Kapture’s chatbot now to know more.
2. AI Empowered helpdesk teams
AI-powered assistance for your support staff, like the Agent Assistant in Kapture CRM, can give suggestions and information in no time with regards to a particular customer. Thus, making business easy for your staff and your customer.
The Agent Assistant features are so powerful in empowering your new staff in answering customer queries that they sound equally good as your old staff.
Here’s a scenario:
A customer enquiry comes up on the latest summer cashback offer on a product.
Your new staff just joined.
There is no possibility of your agent knowing about the offer and he starts to work his way to find the information.
The customer comes with the second query about the defect in a recently purchased product.
The new staff has little information about this as well.
How can the Agent Assistant help to resolve this?
The Agent Assistant goes through the entire customer query contextually and fetches the appropriate information. In addition, the agent has also identified the priority level of the customer.
The Agent Assistant which is enabled through chat can help the new staff with the information about the latest summer cash-back offer.
Also, it can provide knowledge about the warranty period of the product. The Agent Assistant suggests that the customer can ship the product back.
The customer query got resolved in a matter of seconds.
Didn’t the Agent Assistant make life easier for the customer and the agent?
Image: Kapture’s Agent Assistant
We just got a glance at how the Agent Assistant can be a game-changer in tough times. The bottom line is, AI in customer self-service can give a great user experience to your customers and agents equally.
Take a tour of Kapture and experience its Agent Assistant feature in real-time.
3. Self-serve Portals
Customers are provided with self-service options like the Customer Support Portal where they can navigate through a given list of queries. They are also provided with a search tool to find their topics from FAQs or Knowledge Management Systems. This gives them quick solutions to their issues.
If the customers are not satisfied with the solution, they can be prompted to place a service request with a live agent. It can be implemented within the app and also the web to serve as a useful self-serve knowledge source.
We can incorporate self-help video content in the knowledge base to explain complex issues to customers to improve the self-service experience.
Reports say, over 60% of US consumers prefer an automated self-service to carry out simple customer service tasks.
4. Automated phone system
The automated phone system based on IVR (Interactive Voice Response) is a great way to resolve repetitive queries by callers. The customer speaks to the automated voice-enabled by Interactive Voice Response.
Your organization can use outbound IVR to send alert messages, notifications about product offers, reminders for pending services, and so on.
5. Self-service: Community-based forums
Customer forum is an amazingly versatile tool in self-service where customers help customers. Your company just assigns a moderator to maintain the forum. In this way, you can free up your staff for other tasks.
The forum encourages the flow of ideas and thoughts between your customers and makes them feel connected to your business. It increases the productivity of your agents and brings about customer satisfaction.
6. Personalization of self-service through recommendation engines
When the customers browse through your website for products, the recommendation engine with the aid of a Machine learning algorithm can analyze customers’ behavior, preferences, and past searches. It then displays the product, content, or image at the top of the list to grab the attention of the customer.
The recommendation engines know what you would like to do next or why you opt for a particular choice. In fact, they just raised the bar of ‘self-service’ expectations.
The future of self-service can only get better and more powerful with the new adaptable and dynamic technologies like AI and Machine learning in the near future.
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Few remarkable Self-Service strategies
- Always give a thought to the usability of the self-service method by focussing on the service experience.
- Make your self-help resources very insightful, easy to find and navigate.
- Have a clear definition of the tasks that need to be handled by your chatbots and agents. Let the chatbots handle common tier one and tier two queries.
- Incorporate multimedia like video, flowcharts, or images in the self-service portal as each customer has a different learning style.
- Frequently, update and optimize the FAQs, Knowledge base, and self-help contents.
- Collect feedback on your company’s self-help features and improve on them.
- Last but not the least, notify and educate your customers about the self-help features. This is because only when features are used can it add value to the business.
Empowering Customer-led automation into the future of self-service:
As a final thought, remember, customer loyalty is no longer based on the price or product but rooted in the customer experience they receive.
Companies should adopt new methods to boost customer experience and unquestionably, technology-enabled self-service is what you should be looking at. Just as importantly, customers are busy. Life moves fast.
Why not check out Kapture’s self-service features now?
About the Author | |
 | Seema C Mohan |
| Seema C Mohan is a content writer at Kapture. She is passionate about all things XaaS and loves to write value-added content. She has been in Business Process Management in the past and has experience in streamlining processes for Enterprise Mapping Projects. She has published technology articles in National and International journals. Her job at Kapture helps her gain more insight into the SaaS industry and emerging technologies. | |
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