Why self-service
Self-service is a core element of the customer experience and has advanced rapidly since self-service supermarket checkouts were introduced in the 1950s. Today, businesses are offering more options to their customers than ever before (see Figure 1).
Driven by digital, businesses use self-service to reduce costs and drive better experiences. To rethink customer service outside of traditional channels and effectively meet customers in the self-service space requires new strategies and investment, not just in the self-service suite itself, but in how it is operated and mined to support better customer experiences in future.
But there is a problem with self-service at present: only nine percent of customer inquiries that begin in self-service are resolved there and VoC research shows customers want more sophistication in the self-service tools that are available to them.
This report assesses how a proliferation of digital self-service options are being utilized in advanced ways to meet this demand, with insight on the opex reductions and satisfaction gains that have been recorded by those who have excelled in this so far.
With insight from Irish Life, Pendragon and NICE, as well as insurers and communication service providers, this report outlines how self-service can be expanded to drive process refinements and deploy new channels, while offering more personalized and convenient service.
Figure 1
Which self-service technologies are you using now or planning to add in 2022?
The state of self-service
The modern consumer is digitally savvy and fiercely independent. As such they expect hyper-personalized, friction-free experiences that work around their schedules.
While this trend emerged during the digital business boom of the 2010s, it accelerated during the Covid-19 pandemic and is now driving demand for, and use of, self-service channels.
CX Network’s Global State of CX Report 2022 found 52 percent of customers want self-service channels. Meanwhile, in its own research, CX software developer NICE found that 95 percent of businesses surveyed are not only seeing an increase in self-service requests, but consumers want more sophisticated self-service channels to address complex tasks.
According to Jan Richards, CX Network advisory board member and head of customer experience for Irish Life Group, these findings could be rooted in the consumers’ 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.”
Investing time and resources in driver analysis can establish which self-serve options are likely to drive empowerment and trust and, Richards says, this can guide a business on where it needs to cede or take control during customer interactions.
Satisfied customers will naturally return to the brands and organizations that are most successful in this. But those customers also then expect that same experience from other, unrelated brands.
NICE refers to this trend as expectation transfer, the idea that consumers recognize and enjoy a frictionless, effective and empowering experience from one brand and carry those expectations to their interactions with other brands.
Michele Carlson, senior product marketing manager at NICE, explains: “Technology advancements enable consumers to interact with more brands and more channels than ever before. With more interactions, brands must manage the increasing opportunity for comparisons and higher expectations. The increasing emphasis to meet customer needs on digital channels is rapidly shifting their expectations and, therefore, businesses’ priorities. Consumers’ lives are ever increasing in complexity, making effective self-service a welcome way to resolve needs, if it works well.”
She adds: “In practice, if given a choice to update an address through a webpage instead of spelling out my name, email, town and repeating the information over the phone, consumers – myself included – will choose the digital option every time.”
The importance of trust in self-service
When self-service does not work well – whether that is due to a trust imbalance or technical issues – the operational impact resonates across the business.
One household media company launched a promotion to keep up with its competition, but its customers could not find the additional details they needed to realize the promotion through a self-service chatbot. Instead, they turned to live service, which saw contact volumes spike. The approach created more problems than it solved despite the aim of attracting new customers and reducing churn.
To better understand the customer questions that were driving up its average handle times (AHT) the company deployed NICE Enlighten XO, a purpose-built AI for self-service, across its 500-strong sales and service team. Its analysis confirmed the high contact volumes were driven by a small number of specific enquiries that a limited number of agents were effectively handling, thus indicating where improvements needed to be made.
Following its deployment of Enlighten XO, the company updated its bots with new intents and saw AHT fall and conversation rates steady or improve.
The next section of this report highlights the operational efficiencies that can be achieved through effective self-service and examines the emerging use of smart self-service. Source: CX Network and NICE Key figures on self-service
“At a strategic level, enabling self-service is about the balance between empowerment and trust.”
Jan Richards, CX Network advisory board member and head of customer experience for Irish Life Group
Key figures on self-service
- 52 percent of customers want self-service channels
- 95 percent of businesses see demand for advanced self-service
- 9 percent of inquiries that start in self-service are resolved there
The self-service business case
By its nature, self-service brings many operational efficiencies. Frost & Sullivan states that live interactions can cost companies 24-to-48 times that of self-service. It calculates that phone, live chat and email channels cost an average of US $8.01 per contact, while self-service channels such as company-run websites and mobile apps, cost approximately $0.10 per contact.
In short, there is a two-fold business case for self-service: it improves CX and reduces costs.
NICE’s Carlson explains: “In building the business case, CX leaders will gain traction in introducing a self-service solution that is purpose-built for their business. While AI-driven solutions are driving the greatest ROI, the technologies that are most beneficial are those that continuously learn from the historical conversational data from the businesses’ voice and chat interactions.
“CX leaders succeed in their key metrics when bot developers can make accurate updates in minutes instead of months. With NICE Enlighten XO they realize 100-fold increase in time-to-value, making it a win for the CX leaders, conversational AI teams and bot builders,” she adds.
Self-service, however, bypasses the opportunity to interact with a customer – to intervene on negative sentiment, rectify frustrating experiences or drive further sales. In placing data at the heart of the solution, smart self-service can bring more opportunities in these areas than ever before.
The need for smart self-service
Leaning on AI, smart tools extract data from each customer conversation, for example, to uncover the top intents, workflows, priority and specific data elements that improve digital CX. Aberdeen Strategy and Research calculates that businesses which implement smart self-service tools typically see more than twice the year-on-year growth in annual revenues, which increase at 9.3 percent compared with 4.3 percent. They also see a 2.6-times greater year-on-year growth in cross-sell and up-sell revenues.
“While AI-driven solutions are driving the greatest ROI, the technologies that are most beneficial are those that continuously learn from the historical conversational data from the businesses’ voice and chat interactions.”
Michele Carlson, Senior product marketing manager at NICE
Carlson says: “Customer expectations continue to evolve, with increasingly complex demands for personalized, seamless experiences across a growing number of channels. At the same time, contact centers are challenged to find and retain the qualified agents needed to maintain assisted service. This means the ability to offer self-service is more important than ever before.”
More and more businesses today are exclusively offering digital channels over traditional call centers and Carlson says a future where self-service is a top channel for customer resolutions, is not too far away.
She adds: “The key to success is investing in intelligent ways to improve self-service, learning from customer chats and phone calls to begin, then making sure developers have the key insights readily available to implement at-the-speed of business.”
Smart self-service is particularly beneficial when self-service choices are vast or complex. In these cases, businesses can use analytics and AI to optimize their current activities while leveraging automation to expand and improve the use of self-service channels.
Smart healthcare insurance
Within healthcare insurance, self-service has become an important element of the experience, allowing policy holders to access and submit important information at their convenience – for example, while attending a medical appointment or after business hours.
Yet a proliferation of policy types and products has made healthcare insurance a customer minefield. Benefits change frequently and once price concerns and the stress of illness are added to the mix, policy holders are likely to perceive their experience of an insurance provider as overly complex or, in extreme situations, negative.
Faced with this situation, one US-based healthcare insurance provider found its self-service channels were becoming increasingly complex and difficult for customers to navigate. This placed additional strain on the call center where operational loads increased as customers turned to agents to address the shortfalls they experienced in self-service.
The provider knew automation had a role to play but needed to identify which tasks could be automated to address the self-service pain points.
In adopting a data-driven approach the provider deployed Enlighten XO to allow it to better listen to customers. It was able to identify which operations could be automated and understand which self-service responses were striking the right chord with customers.
This allowed the provider to program its chatbot to converse more successfully. The senior director of digital services said: “Simply put, our self-service needed to get better, and Enlighten XO got us on the path to success.”
As a result, the provider saw an increase in digital member satisfaction, and it was able to build new self-service options in hours instead of months.
Additionally, its automation approach drove a reduction in voice call volumes. The learnings from this deployment were applied to streamline the development of new intents.
Leveraging data for smart self-service
Irish Life’s Richards identifies three foundations for seamless self-service: customers need a common point of entry to the channel; empathy is more important than ever; and data security is paramount.
She explains: “We increasingly need an emotional connection. This is about showing you understand your customer and care about them. The human touch, in person or online, is crucial, as is trust. Keep my data safe. If there has been a problem, tell me. Years of overselling and data breaches mean it is harder for companies to earn this trust.”
Backing Richards’ point, research from Forrester confirms that at least one quarter of global consumers now use privacy and security tools to prevent firms from tracking their online activity. This drives the need for CX practitioners to design privacy and consent journeys that place the customer at their center. It is particularly important as data depreciation and the phase out of cookies pushes enterprises to collect more and more first-party data for the personalized experiences they offer.
In preparation, Richards advises: “CX leaders will need to collaborate closely with marketing, IT, security, risk and any other departments that are important for your teams to carefully design and measure journeys that are based on compliant standards that vary by industry, business type and individual customer. We should include privacy related KPIs and metrics in our CX measurement programs to measure journey performance.”
The self-service goldmine
With the right policies in place, behavioral and sentiment data from self-service channels can be leveraged by decision-makers in contact center, marketing, sales and commerce functions.
Self-service data can reveal the obstacles buyers face when purchasing products, common questions they ask during the ordering process and previous purchases. These data points can be analyzed to identify cross sell and up-sell opportunities to deliver a unique omnichannel, self-service experience.
Analysis by Aberdeen found that companies leveraging AI, machine learning and automation with their self-service data average 38 percent greater year-on-year increase in customer satisfaction rates and 79 percent decrease in service costs, as well as other benefits (see Figure 2).
Aberdeen’s CX Executive’s Agenda survey found as many as 22 percent of businesses are already finding ways to leverage this data to achieve CX targets.The next section of this report assesses the relationship between data and customer trust and explores how self-service data can be analyzed and leveraged so organizations can continue to personalize experiences.
Figure 2
Side-by-side: self-service data leaders vs. the rest
These businesses have found they can lessen customer friction and effort, offer effective channel choice, share data across the journey and provide real-time resolutions to issues that arise. They can also predict and optimize channel use and preference throughout a customer’s journey.
The financial services industry has become particularly adept at this. Self-service mortgage tools, for example, provide marketing departments with behavioral data that can be used to trigger personalized, automated outreach providing the customer with more options and the lender with a wider scope for engagement.
Rerouting finance queries
In consumer finance, external events such as political developments or rate changes can drive significant traffic spikes to self-service channels.
Following a decrease in interest rates, one large bank saw strong interest in its refinance options, but it also saw handle time and frustration increase as customers explored their options. This element of the customer journey had previously been analyzed by the CX team, but it was unable to identify where improvements were needed. Despite this the team knew it had to understand what customers were asking, identify the best resolution path and pinpoint the changes needed in the self-service system.
The bank deployed Enlighten XO to gain new voice of the customer insights from its self-service, analyzing every interaction for every customer need, task and conversational turn.
The vice-president of the bank’s digital CX function said: “Enlighten XO provides the data to make our self-service work.”
The feedback allowed the lender to streamline refinance applications through self-service. This improved self-service containment and the number of queries being directed to live service and increased customer satisfaction scores based on their self-service experiences.
The next section of this report assesses how to build self-service capabilities for the greatest impact and the information CX practitioners require to identify where and when self-service can be most successful.
Building self-service capabilities
Despite its importance, a business’s self-service strategy is often shaped by what its competitors are doing.
Richards says: “If you want self-service to be your gateway to a more loyal customer base you need to think more strategically than before the Covid-19 pandemic, not less.”
Research published in 2022 by NICE found that 81 percent of consumers surveyed said they wanted more self-service options, yet only 15 percent expressed a high level of satisfaction with the options provided. On the other hand, businesses believe 53 percent of consumers are very satisfied with their self-service offerings.
Advising CX leaders on how to strategize a self-service build out, NICE’s Carlson reiterates the importance of data. She says: “Without data, CX leaders will continue guessing how to improve their self-service resulting in poor CX while increasing their costs.”
Pendragon’s pandemic pivot
With the right planning and tools, self-service can be integrated with any customer experience, even those that traditionally require a face-to-face interaction, such as car sales.
During Covid-19 lockdowns, UK-based automotive retailer Pendragon was forced to shift all sales online, demanding significant self-service support to preserve the customer experience.
The end of lockdowns, however, saw Pendragon faced with a customer engagement conundrum. Self-service had seen the business through adverse circumstances and customers had enjoyed the flexibility it allowed. Yet a customer survey found that only 13 percent of Pendragon customers wanted an online-only, fully self-service interaction post-pandemic. For a big-ticket purchase such as a car, the result was not surprising, but it did point to a change in customer demand and preferences.
CMO Kim Costello says: “From all our research we found people do not want to be forced down one path. They will tell you what they want to do.”
The decision was taken for Pendragon to evolve to a hybrid sales environment that would allow customers to choose which parts of their experience could be addressed in self-service and which in-person. Pendragon remodeled its digital and self-service channels to support and complement the new dealership experience and meet the needs of car buyers in the “new normal”.
Costello says: “We went from pushing customers into forecourts to pushing them into digital, so we thought let’s try the hybrid approach. We revamped our website, we made it so you can do a strictly, online-only, no human touchpoint purchase if you like, or a deliver to the driveway transaction. If you want to start your paperwork online and finish it up at the dealership, no problem. If you want to pop in and out of the journey in various places, that is great, we can meet you where you are.”
Self-service plays a huge role throughout the new, hybrid journey, while giving customers the option to request live support at any point.
Costello says: “[In automotive] it is about giving customers the opportunity to self-serve up until the point where they say they want a human interaction. It may be an email, it may be a chatbot, or social media interaction, or it may be an old-fashioned phone call. Whatever it is, at some point, we found the majority of people want to at least know somebody is there if they have a question.” Where to start when building self-service capabilities
“It is about giving customers the opportunity to self-serve up until the point where they say they want a human interaction.”
Kim Costello, Chief marketing officer at Pendragon
Where to start when building self-service capabilities
Leverage purpose-built AI
To effectively incorporate data in self-service, business leaders should utilize AI to learn from customer interaction data. Further, with purpose-built AI, they gain value from key CX patterns aligned with success. AI makes it scalable to learn customer intents from every interaction, how the top-performing agents resolve those intents and how best to prioritize task automation to build self-service and align with the reality of customer needs.
Realize value of CX data
AI is crucial in self-service, but not all AI is created equal. To gain the insights required for ROI, CX leaders must ensure AI solutions learn from their own customer interactions.
Focus on automation opportunities
Businesses stand to gain the most from automating as much as possible. In self-service, this means automating intent identification, the data to build intents, the optimal task flow and even moving data automatically into intelligent virtual assistants (IVAs).
Conclusion
Self-service has progressed from a means by which to reduce costly interactions to a driver of overall customer satisfaction. It incorporates an increasingly sophisticated toolbox that can assist customers and agents. The advancement of self-service, however, does not simply lie in the introduction of more channels, but the analysis of the data gathered by existing options.
While most business are slowly moving in this direction, they are not moving fast enough and the fact that only nine percent of self-service requests are solved there, indicates a wider issue.
Yet there is a cohort of organizations that excel in this area. Research suggests they represent around a quarter of all businesses and their advantage is clear – they understand the data that will drive better customer experiences and are utilizing it to its full effect.
Intuitively, customers now recognize there is a gap emerging between those that are good at this and those that are great, and they are voting with their feet accordingly as data from Aberdeen confirms. As the report has stated, companies leveraging self-service data through the use of AI, machine learning and automation see an average 38 percent greater year-on-year increase in customer satisfaction rates and 79 percent decrease in service costs.
The emergence of expectation transfer, however, means that customers now want their best experiences to be replicated by all other customer-facing businesses.
For the three quarters that are not utilizing self-service data to its full advantage, the evidence suggests this will drive up operational costs while having a negative impact on customer satisfaction. It is a bad mix at the best of times, but as a global cost of living crisis takes hold and some countries face potential recessions, the need to get ahead only grows.
There is one more challenge, identified in this report, that businesses on both sides must address: that of data privacy and trust. The need to build these into the customer’s experience is paramount and for governance should be incorporated in KPIs.
To provide a leading digital customer experience, NICE has three recommendations: increase self-service engagement by upgrading digital channels such as chatbots; harness data from live interactions to improve self-service channels; and optimize the channels frequently to continually enhance the overall self-service proposition.
Key takeaways
- Better self-service powers better CX
Increase self-service engagement by upgrading digital channels, including chatbots, to resolve more complex issues and satisfy customers’ needs.
- Harness data from live interactions to improve self-service channels
Discover new insights from human assisted interactions and replace guesswork with an agile, data-driven, digital customer experience strategy.
- Enhance self-service continuously
Respond quickly to customers’ evolving needs and optimize your self-service channels with a continuous feedback loop.