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According to Forrester Research, 72 percent of online consumers prefer to use a company’s website to get answers to their questions rather than contact companies via telephone or email. How many times a day does a call center hear customers complaining about problem solving capability using Web-based self-service?  Hence self-service needs to do much more than just let customers hunt around on your Web site for answers. Web self service should effectively help you balance customer demands for high quality service, to easily find the information they need anywhere, anytime, without the need for  Knowledge Management assistance and also meet your company’s need to contain costs.

Self-service offers a lot of potential with 24×7 availability, quick information access and lower call volume. Customers find self-service easy and convenient, especially for product research. As Gartner reports, customers can complete 60 to 80 percent of a simple service interaction without the assistance of a service agent.  But as the complexity of the transaction increases, self-service success rates and customer satisfaction drop.

Your customers need to find their answers quickly with clarifying questions, dynamic interviews, topic search, search-term highlighting and document summaries.  Your knowledge base needs to be updated regularly every time a customer interacts with a website or asks a question.  This information should be dynamically added to the knowledge base and made available for the next customer interaction.

Why is Customers Staying away from Self-service?

Too often, self-service is a poorly designed experience that frustrates customers. According to Forrester Research, after five to seven attempts at using Web self-service a customer will never try again.  In today’s increasingly competitive marketplace, companies are looking at ways to strongly differentiate products and services. Making web selfservices competent is the key to lowering the time it takes for them to get the help they need and remove frustrations that build up while they’re looking around for solutions. Companies need to provide a quality customer service experience across every communication channel including phone, email response and Web. There needs to be increased self-service adoption with knowledge retrieval, user profiling and session tracking methods that help customers reach the best solution quickly.

Customer Centric – An Easy Solution
To effectively meld Web collaboration with self-service, enterprises should look for solutions that:

• Improve customer satisfaction and online adoption by supporting self-service with on-demand assisted service.
• Reduce online abandonment rates by guiding customers during self-service interaction.
• Enhance agent productivity with automated collaborative message routing and instant communications between agents
• Increase customer loyalty with the perception of the enterprise as one that is “easy to do business with” by offering real-time communications

For long term benefit make the effort to design, support and implement customer service consulting Web self-service.  This will help customers gravitate to this cost-effective web self service channel and experience faster return on investment.