CX Network’s Global State of Customer Experience 2022 report found 52 percent of customers wanted self-service channels to be available to them when sourcing products and services.
Businesses have also seen a rise in demand for self-service, according to software developer NICE, which found 95 percent of businesses are seeing an increase in self-service requests. Furthermore, its research found consumers also want more sophisticated self-service channels to address more complex tasks.
Yet self-service is about much more than self-service. When set up correctly, this vital function can play a pivotal role in profiling customers and reducing cost to serve.
When budgets are tight, cost efficiencies can transform a business’s bottom line. In fact, Aberdeen Strategy and Research found that those who lead in self-service see an average 79 percent decrease in service costs.
In this article, CX Network looks at three factors driving demand for self-service and explores what they mean for customer-facing businesses.
Contents:
• Businesses are hungry for first-party data
• Self-service data can be utilized to boost satisfaction and personalization
• Customers want control during uncertain times
Businesses are hungry for first-party data
Data is the building block of great CX and with cookies on the way out, businesses need to find their own sources of data, bringing a new need to mine digital self-service channels.
In self-service, every channel holds data on how it has been leveraged by a customer and, depending on how a channel is set up, it can also provide insights on the customers’ wider behaviors.
For example, self-service data can reveal insights on the customer’s journey, the obstacles customers face when purchasing products and common questions asked during the ordering process. Through purchase data, it can even show how loyal a customer is by presenting insights on their previous buying patterns with a focus on their frequency and value.
With the right policies in place, such behavioral and sentiment data from self-service channels can then be leveraged by decision-makers in contact center, marketing, sales and commerce functions to refine the overall customer experience.
Self-service data can be utilized to boost satisfaction and personalization
Collecting data is the first step but utilizing it is just as important.
There are dozens of ways to utilize the data collected in self-service. In 2022, Aberdeen confirmed 22 percent of businesses are already finding ways to leverage self-service data to achieve their CX targets, including greater personalization, based on first-party self-service data.
Further analysis by Aberdeen found companies leveraging AI, machine learning and automation with their self-service data average 38 percent greater year-on-year increase in customer satisfaction rates.
Specifically, self-service data can be leveraged to pinpoint opportunities to reduce customer
friction and effort, offer effective channel choice, share data across the journey and provide real-time resolutions to issues that arise.
Self-service data can also predict and optimize channel use and preference throughout a customer’s journey.
Customers want control during uncertain times
The business benefits of self-service are undeniable but there are benefits for customers too.
While most customers crave self-service for its 24/7 availability, convenience and efficiency, Jan Richards, CX Network advisory board member and head of customer experience for Irish Life Group, says consumers’ are also driven by the need to feel a greater sense of control during uncertain times.
Richards says: “We live in an increasingly uncertain and complex environment. At a strategic level, enabling self-service is about the balance between empowerment and trust. The customer’s expectation for us to deliver that balance means the important drivers of customer experience are increasingly nuanced. Drivers of satisfaction are changing and require a deeper understanding than ever before.”
In response, CX practitioners must give their customers the deep sense of control they want.
Richards adds: “That is what we need to remember when we are deciding how to let our customers self-serve.”
As the evidence confirms, customers want more self-service options and businesses certainly benefit from them, too. To find out more about how and when to leverage self-service download the CX Network report Personalize CX with data-driven self-service, and let us know in the comments below if you have experienced an uptick in self-service demands from your customers.