Winning Strategies for Web Self-Service

Web self-service increases in importance as companies seek to reduce costs while maintaining and growing their customer bases. At the same time, and equally important, consumers look to the Web as the resource of choice for researching and answering all their questions, support and otherwise. Google and other Web-wide information sources have benefited most dramatically from this developing consumer dynamic, but do not underestimate its potential impact on consumers' expectations for your site. To ensure your Web self-service initiative satisfies both corporate objectives and consumer expectations, we lay out here four best practices for implementing Web self-service on your customer-facing websites.

1. Involve your customers from the start. Do not assume that you know what will work best for your customers. If you intend to create a self-service experience that meets your customers' needs—one that will encourage them to utilize your website over other channels—bring them into the design process from the start. Build the self-service channel through the lens of its targeted users. Interview your customers to understand their objectives for each visit, the challenges they face in finding the information they need and their priorities and preferences for accessing that information in a self-directed way. Throughout the design phase, solicit feedback from your customers. Be prepared to make modifications throughout each phase of the project.

2. Create a personalized online dialogue with your customers. One key to user adoption of self-service via the Web channel is to design the interaction process with more than deflection in mind; strive to provide each customer with an extraordinary customer experience. Guide them to information that not only meets their current needs, but anticipates and delivers the appropriate information for subsequent or related needs. Exceed their expectations for the self-service experience and they will be much more likely to return in the future. Think of Web self-service as a virtual concierge to your customer. Design an experience to engage the customer, and personalize the subsequent interaction to the needs of each unique customer. Some tips:

• Integrate self-service throughout your website. Make it easy for your customer to enter into a self-service dialogue. Rather than having entry points only in one location, self-service should be easily accessible from any page of your company's website. This can be done via embedded links or search options. The more visible access to self-service is on your home page, the better. Your home page is an ideal place to proactively greet your customer and engage them in a dialogue.
• Personalize the Web environment. Bring the customer into an area of your website that provides them information relevant to their interests and needs—use filtering based on their account information or profile, if possible.
• Engage customers to determine and understand their needs. People like to be understood. Reset customer expectations for the self-service interaction by offering an intelligent search interface through which they can communicate their needs using natural language, and educate them how to use the system to their maximum benefit. Leverage the search interface to foster an online dialogue with your customers, understand their wants and needs, and drive an experience that will keep them coming back.
• Respond specifically to the customer's need. Comprehend each customer request and deliver exact answers, rather than forcing customers to browse through search results for the information they need. For example, if the customer enters "Did I pay my bill last month" as their search query, answer their question by providing them information about their bill balance and payment history.
• If at first the customer does not succeed, guide the customer to the answer. Clarify the customer's purpose for the visit by using decision trees to step the customer through a diagnostic or qualification process, guiding them to the content they need.
• Go beyond search results to deliver a complete response experience. Provide the customer with the ability to refine or expand into topics of interest via personalized dynamic links and sub-categories of related information. Offer the customer links to related content, tools or Web applications dynamically created from context of their interaction, and an understanding of the customer's intentions for the interaction. If a customer asks, "Which vehicles get the best mpg?," dynamically generate a table of fuel-efficient vehicles and present a fuel-savings calculator for the customer to model potential cost savings. Make it easier for customers to take the next step.
• Be consistent across channels. Offer customers an escalation path when they are unable to resolve their problems or satisfy their information needs. But do not force them to begin again. Capture the details of the customer's self-service session, so that when he or she escalates to assisted support via email, chat or phone, the service agent can pick up where the customer left off. Integrate self-service capabilities with agent CRM systems to ensure a consistent customer experience across channels.

3. Direct your customers to the self-service channel. Do not expect your customers to know that the self-service option exists as a vehicle for them to address their needs. Develop a strategy for generating awareness throughout your company. Tell your customers about the self-service channel and encourage them to use it. Some tips:

• Promote. Be creative in promoting your self-service capabilities. Broadcast details on your home page. Highlight the self-service channel in your direct marketing campaigns and customer communications, including invoices and bills. Include links to the self-service site in all email responses to customers. Promote the self-service website in place of hold music while customers wait to speak with an agent.
• Educate. Whenever customers utilize an alternate channel to solve a problem or to find information, use that as an opportunity to educate them about their self-service options. Train agents to be self-service advocates. Close a successful call with a plug to use the company's Web self-service capabilities for future needs. Include information about the self-service channel with product documentation.

Repeated communication may be necessary for your customers to truly understand and internalize what they can accomplish through the web self-service channel. To maximize user adoption, invest in regular promotion of the web self-service capabilities, and programs to educate consumers on how to use it.

4. Continuously improve your customers' experience: Implementing self-service offerings is not a static process. Maintaining, and improving, customer experience is a continual process; it requires a series of iterative steps.

• Analysis. Analytics are the best way to monitor user acceptance and self-service effectiveness. Use analytics to track usage, understand your customers' information needs, measure the effectiveness of your current content and identify unused content or content gaps. This information will help you identify where content needs to be created or optimized, how to better personalize the response experience and where other modifications can be made to better meet your customers' needs.
• Surveys. Survey your customers to ensure you are not making incorrect assumptions about what the metrics mean. Without surveys, it can be difficult to definitively determine if the self-service experience is satisfying customer needs. A customer who views content and then leaves the site may have left because his need was met, or because he was too frustrated by the experience to continue. One effective technique to measure success (and call or email deflection) is to present customers with two brief surveys—one upon initiating a self-service session to determine the user's objective for the visit, and one upon exit to determine if the self-service interaction allowed the customer to achieve that objective.