Business needs contact centers and customer service centers to offer a variety of services throughout the customer journey. Here in Dubai and all around the UAE the B2C sector is very competitive. The customer demands are also very high and the market trends are also changing rapidly. This demand businesses to offer a great customer experience through their contact centers and customer support. However, managing customer support offices is not as that easy, it requires a lot of efforts and resources, on top of that the turnover rate in customer support and call centers is fairly high, which keep creating problems.
The modern customer contact centers are not limited to call centers or customer service centers only, in fact a lot of self-service channels are added to maximize the customer satisfaction. The performance of a traditional customer contact center pretty much depends on the performance and training of the service agents. That is not all, it also depends on the right technology and platform. There are a lot of moving parts that can impact the customer experience. That is why businesses have started focusing on the self-service channels to maximize the performance of their contact centers.
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What is a Self-service Channel?
The self-service channel is a medium or interaction type where the customer doesn’t require to interact with a human staff for solving their problem or accessing information. The self-service channels are gaining more popularity due to their ease of access and convenient. On top of that the self-service channels empower the customers and make them able to solve their problems by themselves. Here in Dubai and all around the UAE most of the population is well versed with technology. That is why an average consumer prefer to solve their problem by themselves via any digital channel.
Mostly the customers prefer to go through the website to acquire information, they are also willing to interact with chatbots and virtual assistants to acquire information quickly. That is why businesses started offering such self-service channels to enable customers to access to the services and information whenever they want. The interactive self-service kiosks surely took this to the next level. As they proven to be more successful than any other channel to enhance customer experience and to increase sales.
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What are Common Self-service Channels?
According to several studies and researches around 70% of the customers used a self-service channel at any point during their customer journey. It is not that they have to use it, but in most of the industries the customers themselves are willing to use a self-service channel instead of visiting a customer care center or reaching out to a contact centers. Most of the time for the simpler queries the customer prefer to seek a self-service channel and for more sophisticated matters they would want to reach out to a human contact.
However, thanks to the advancements in the modern technologies, now a days’ businesses can even offer much more complex and important services via self-service channels. Here are a few most important self-service channels:
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Interactive Self-service Kiosks
If you are living in Dubai or anywhere else in the UAE you must have seen those bright flashing screens everywhere. Whether it is a mobile top up machine or a payment kiosk at bus station or at a restaurant, the interactive kiosks have become a regular aspect of almost every business belongs to service industry. Businesses deploy interactive self-service kiosks for several reasons. The biggest advantage of the interactive self-service kiosk is that it offer customers a freedom to access to the information and services whenever they want.
These self-service kiosks operates 24/7 non-stop. The self-service kiosk industry gained rapid adaptation and huge growth in international market, which is why many manufacturers started focusing on interactive self-service technologies. This trend resulted in some remarkable technological advancements. The modern interactive self-service kiosks are not just limited to a touch screen or a thermal printer anymore.
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There are tons of hardware devices that can be integrated in interactive self-service kiosks, such as POS, cash acceptors, various types of printers, QR Code reader, Biometrics Scanners, Cameras, Passport and Emirate ID Scanners, etc. and much more. All these different types of hardware peripherals significantly improved the capabilities of an interactive self-service kiosk. On top of that the software development technologies and platforms have also shown a huge improvement along with possibilities to integrate machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) based platforms.
All these features have helped businesses raising up the customer experience with the self-service channels. A self-service which feels like a full-service is a modern trend that is attracting customers. These interactive self-service kiosks are a very capable tool, which can easily be customized if needed and when needed. Businesses can provide very intuitive, customer-friendly and multi-lingual user interfaces (UIs) which enhance customer experience and raise their satisfaction level.
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The interactive self-service kiosk comes with a powerful software which enable businesses to offer a variety of enhancements in the customer interaction. Customers love a personalized experience, a self-service kiosk software enable businesses to personalize the customer experience by offering them the information and services they would like the most and also allowing them to access the wider knowledge base and broader spectrum of services. The digital services drive automation in the businesses and help them maximize their operational efficiency and productivity.
The automation and digitalization also enable businesses to collect valuable business intelligence data. This data help them acquire a deeper insight to the customer personas and help them understand their needs, expectations and desire. The business intelligence data also help businesses evaluate their current strategies and help them identify the areas of improvement. This knowledge can greatly improve the efficiency, performance and profitability of a business.
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Chatbots and IVRs
The Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and smart software development platforms enabled businesses to offer exceptional self-service experience with their Chatbots and conversational IVRs (Interactive Voice Responses). The modern chatbots and IVRs interact with your customers with more intelligence and offer a closer to human like interaction. Although setting them up is a big challenge and require intensive research to build their knowledge base, but they are a great option to offer an excellent self-service experience to your customers with 24/7 availability.
The modern day chatbots can also offer a proactive support through digital channels, such as websites and mobile apps. They can popup messages with new features, helpful content and even instruction at each stage of the customer journey. The modern speech recognition technologies enables IVRs to understand various languages, and with the integration of AI and ML the IVRs and Chatbots have become increasingly successful. Which not only offers a better customer experience but also help businesses in reducing the cost of the contact centers.
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Knowledge Base
A well-crafted knowledge base management platform and omnichannel service approach can significantly improve the effectiveness of the knowledge base. The content is a key, a quality content that is simple and easy-to-understand with ability to search through the knowledge base using advance smart search features can significantly reduce the resolution time and also help reducing the influx at the contact centers which is very helpful in improving the customer experience and quality of the services at the contact centers. The businesses can easily educate their customer by the knowledge base articles, FAQs, Forums, Blogs and easy-to-understand user manuals.
In the modern era of digital marketing the online knowledge base also help businesses attracting new customers and helping prospects in understanding your products and services and acquiring first-hand knowledge about the experience of the other customers. With an effective knowledge base businesses can significantly reduce the cost of their contact centers as most of the enquiries are just very simple, and easy, and if all those can be managed through the self-service then the flux of customer at contact centers will be reduced significantly.
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Customer Self-service Portals and Mobile Apps
Dedicated customer self-service portals and mobile apps are among the most effective self-service channels. The customer self-service portals allow customers to login to the portal through an online link, the business’s website, or even from the mobile apps. The purpose of dedicated customer portals is to manage and organize their interaction with the business. The customer portals provide all previous complaints, enquiries and interactions that a customer had with the business through these portals. The customer self-service portals are basically to improve customer experience and to make their interaction more useful with the business.
For example, if a complaint is filed through the email or an enquiry is raised through the email, there could be a lot of back and forth communication between the customer and the contact center agents. However, it would be difficult to track and access those communications in emails, WhatsApp or online chat. The customer self-service portals avoid this problem and organize everything in a single dashboard which allow customers to easily get updates and allow them to access any other previous session whenever they want. The same features and functionalities can be provided via mobile apps as well.
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Top 10 Customer Service Best Practices to Boost your Contact Center Results
A modern customer contact center should have to implement a mixed strategy with both human-assisted services and self-services as well. Implementing a best self-service requires a higher level of organization, management and discipline. Now that we have already discussed the self-service channels in details, let us see the 10 customer self-service best practices to power your contact center results and efficiency:
Customer Self-service Best Practice: 1. Don’t be too Aggressive with the Implementation
Most of the time businesses in Dubai and all around the UAE made a serious mistake which it they bite more than what they can chew. The implementation of self-service channels such as interactive self-service kiosks, chatbots, IVRs, knowledge base and others at once could cause a lot of problem. It is better to start implementing one channel at a time, then let it integrate into the internal eco-system, let employee understand how the system will benefit them and the business. Arrange training session for the employees to make them able to adopt to new changes. Then implement another channel and repeat the same with that. Implementing all self-service channels at once could cause a lot of confusion, and will create management issues.
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Customer Self-service Best Practice: 2. Select Right Type of Interaction for Customer Self-service
It is crucial to include right interaction in the self-service. Remember there would be no human assistance, so include only simple, smaller, none-emotional and easily doable interactions in self-service channels. Too complex and sophisticated services are not suitable for self-service as they will require a lot time and efforts from the customers and also from you in designing them. It is better to keep the complex and sophisticated tasks for the human assisted channels only. It is extremely crucial that the interactions and services that you are including in the self-service channels add value to customer experience rather frustrate them by overwhelming efforts and time required for the service.
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Customer Self-service Best Practice: 3. Communicate with All Stakeholders
It is crucial to maintain a continuous and regular communication with all stakeholders, strategy makers and relevant personal throughout the process of implementation and even afterwards. These are the people who will be helping you to design the self-service and select a proper channel for the service. It is important to closely monitor the impact of the implementation of the self-service channel and share the analytics, data and findings with all stakeholders.
It is important to communicate with the agents too who might feel threatened by the implementation of the new self-service channel and could feel that this might replace them later. Communicate agents about the changes they should expect in coming future, and provide them proper training and inspiration to let them adjust for the changes. This will help you improving the performance of your contact centers.
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Customer Self-service Best Practice: 4. Enable Access to Agents in Customer Self-service Channels
As the self-service interaction is purely digital and done through digital channels and offers a great customer experience and quicker access to the services and information which would be very tempting for a lot of your customers. However, some of them might feel stuck with it and will seek a way out midway to get in touch with a service agent. That is why it is important that you provide a visible way to back out and let your customers contact the service agents, either through the channel or from traditional contact channels such as email, phone call or live chat with the agents. So far this practice has proven to be the most effective in maximizing the customer satisfaction and happiness.
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Customer Self-service Best Practice: 5. Train Agents to Serve the Customers Diverted from the Self-service Channels
Studies have shown that on an average almost half of the customer attempt on self-service channels failed. There are several factor that contributes to that failure. Sometimes the channels or the service itself is very complex, sometimes the customer don’t have sufficient technical or digital proficiency. And this also varies from business to business and industry to industry. However, you should be ready to entertain the customers who failed on a self-service channel and are already frustrated to solve their problem. That obviously require additional training and right IT infrastructure that can provide complete context and relevant details to the serving agent. So, the agents can immediately take control of the situation and ensure a delighted customer experience.
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Customer Self-service Best Practice: 6. Educate Your Customers and Guide them Through the Self-service Process
The primary goal of implementing a self-service channel is to provide freedom, control and convenient to your customers, which can’t be achieved without ensuring maximum customer success. The self-service channels should be designed to make customer successful, this will also help you diverting the workload of your contact center and will definitely improve the performance. Each customer self-service channels should provide basic details and should be able to understand the customer’s problem before letting them into the actual process. The goal here to identify if the customer’s problem can be solved efficiently through the self-service channel or if they should be diverted to the contact center agent.
Furthermore the channel and its interfaces should also provide guidance and popups or additional information at each step of the process to guide them through the process. This will ensure maximum customer success.
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Customer Self-service Best Practice: 7. Closely Monitor and Measure the Performance of the Customer Self-service Channel
The great advantage of a digital system is its capabilities to collect statistical and analytical data. It is crucial for any customer self-service channel that it is monitored closely and the performance is tracked and analyzed regularly. The business analytical data collected from the customer self-service channel can be a valuable asset for the businesses. It help them continuously improve the channels and also provide them information that can help them setting up next customer self-service channel.
Furthermore the customer feedback can also be collected which can provide a deeper insight to their perspective. A customer self-service channel is not just a one-time task, it is a continuous growth strategy hence require a lot of attentions from the management and stakeholders.
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Customer Self-service Best Practice: 8. Invest Time and Efforts in Training AI based Systems
The AI or artificial intelligence is a relatively new technology that businesses very eager to implement. However, the fact is that the AI might not suit every situation and scenario. So, be careful while implementing AI based customer facing solutions. It is also important to understand that the AI itself is nothing without the proper data which often referred as training. The AI based interactions require proper training and a vast knowledge base, which enables AI to effectively solve customers’ problem. Else the customers could end up frustrated with illogical questions, or irrelevant answers by the AI. So, it is important to do adequate research before implementing AI at any customer self-service channel.
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Customer Self-service Best Practice: 9. Chose a Flexible and Scalable Customer Self-Service Solution
The present market landscape is very vibrant and dynamic with more frequent changes in trends, market standards and benchmarks, and customer behavior. This require businesses to choose an IT solution which can evolve and grow as the business needs grow and evolve down the road. It requires a lot of efforts to finally reach to the optimum levels of efficiency from a customer self-service channel. It could be devastated if after reaching to that point you have to change the system just because of such limitations. A customized solution is always a best choice for such situations, because it is easier and convenient to scale in future and it can be customized and upgraded easily with less effort and expense.
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Customer Self-service Best Practice: 10. Only go for Integrated Customer Self-service Channels
The customer self-service channels must have to be integrated with other internal systems and with the central information center or database of the organization. The customer self-service channel might have to access information from various other system and internal processes. All those databases and processes could have been managed by several different enterprise software and tools. Which is why it is crucial to make sure that the customer self-service channel you are designing should be able to integrate with all existing systems and databases. Only a highly integrated customer self-service channel can promise success and long term stability.
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Conclusion
The traditional contact centers are expensive, difficult to manage and slowly their outcomes are declining. This is due to the market trends and customer behavior. As the integration of technology is becoming deeper and deeper day by day, the customers need a more direct, flexible and technologically advance experience from their favorite brands. In fact the digital experience plays a crucial role in customer satisfaction and loyalty. That is why businesses have started investing in customer self-service channels, which not only provide customer a much rich digital experience but also help businesses overcoming many problems they are facing at their contact centers.
In this blog we have discussed the customer self-service channels and a strategy to establish a future proof customer experience management solution via self-service channels. If you follow the 10 customer self-service best practices highlighted in this blog, it will not only help you improving customer experience and satisfaction but it will also help you effectively managing your traditional customer contact centers.
RSI Concepts is a leading customized software and solution provider in Dubai, UAE. If you want to learn more about the subject of if you want us to build a tailor-made customer self-service solution for you. Please feel free to contact us through our Contact Us page or leave a comment in the comment box below and we will get in touch with you soon.
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