The Inherent Problem With Self-Service
Over the past 10 years, most large organizations have made significant investments in time and money to deploy self-service capabilities. Whole new categories of service automation technologies such as IVR, speech recognition, knowledgebases, natural language search and click-to-chat have found their way into our nomenclature. These innovations have yielded some results, but mass customer adoption has a long way to go to meet executives’ expectations.
Self-Service is Used by Early Adopters
Recently, an executive of a major North American financial services company complained that most of its customers had never used its online banking. While it had invested millions of dollars to ensure it had the most sophisticated set of online banking services possible, it still needed to find ways to drive usage. It had done a great job of driving usage among one segment—early adopters—who tend to be the most tech-savvy and capable. However, it needed to drive usage among the rest of the population, the ones that call the most often or come into the branch to do routine transactions and need help each time. The overall ROI on such self-service projects is much lower than originally anticipated. In discussions with large organizations across industries such as banking, telecommunications, consumer products and computer hardware, we’ve heard similar stories about the challenge of driving the masses to self-service.
The economic benefits of driving self-service are well understood: fewer calls to live agents allow them to handle more complex customer issues, reducing overall support costs. But simply rolling out more self-service technologies or capabilities can actually have a detrimental effect on self-service usage. If a customer has a difficult time using self-service on your site they are less likely to think of using it in the future, meaning you’ll actually drive them back to live agents, or worse, drive them to do business with a competitor. Conversely, a positive experience with self-service translates into a higher likelihood of converting customers who are both loyal and cost less to serve.
Most organizations believe that if they roll out self-service capabilities, customers are bound to use them. The research and learning over the past few years suggests otherwise. According to the Service and Support Professional’s Organization, customers attempting Web self-service are successful only 44% of the time (realize, this is 44% of those who even tried). A Harris Interactive poll found that a whopping 89% had difficulty with Web self-service. When the vast majority of customers do not understand how to use the myriad of self-service capabilities, organizations have a serious problem. Contrary to popular belief, most customers will not bother to figure out how to use your self-service options. Most require someone to show them how before they can do it on their own—we can see this when studying adoption of self-service solutions like airport check-in kiosks. Customers look for the fastest way to get from point A to point B. In the real world, that usually means asking someone for directions, or asking a salesperson for help. Unfortunately, on the Web we leave customers to figure things out on their own.
Seven Good Reasons to use Virtual Agents
- Foster trust with users
- Drive adoption of services
- Communicate complex information
- Improve transaction rates
- Up-sell / cross-sell more effectively
- Increase customer satisfaction
- Reduce customer churn
A Better Approach: Assisted Self-Service
There is no shortage of self-service technologies. As good as all of these solutions are, a large segment of your customer base needs help finding and using your self-service options. Using a guide or “virtual agent” can have dramatic results in adoption and usage among customers. Virtual agents capture the attention of customers and engage them to provide more meaningful and satisfactory customer experiences. They help customers navigate through self-serve options more easily and provide high-quality marketing messaging through the online registration and form-filling processes. Our experience and industry research confirms that virtual agents not only drive up usage of existing self-service technologies, but also dramatically improve the closure rate of sales transactions, the completion rates of registrations and can even increase revenue per transaction. Large organizations use assisted self-service to improve existing online activities because it appeals to the segment of their customers who typically need help—that is, the vast majority of them.
CodeBaby works with world-class companies to create and sustain superior customer experiences for assisted self-service and assisted marketing through the use of its Virtual Agents. To learn more please visit
www.codebaby.com.