Three Customer Experience Benefits That Will Make You Rethink Your Customer Self-Service Strategy
In today’s market, the customer reigns supreme: their spending habits dictate business profitability. To keep consumers happy, brands must listen to the opinions of existing customers, as well as better understand prospective ones. When it comes to support issues in this digital age, convenience and ease supersede all other needs. More than ever, customers want self-service – people want autonomy, and technology can make that happen.
Customer self-service can mean many things. For some, it involves simply building and managing a robust website and perhaps implementing Search functionality. But customer self-service also refers to automated systems that customers dial or message into, allowing companies to forgo live agents in favor of AI Bots capable of handling service requests in the same way a human would. Ideally, customers would be met with AI-based solutions the moment they opened a live chat or picked up the phone. This is where companies can really see operational savings. As effective self-service solutions are offered to customers, they use them, which allows call center managers to better manage their workforce and focus them on high value, human only responsibilities.
This type of customer-facing automation can actually offer better service in many cases, too. Integrated with your other call center systems, virtual agents generally provide faster, more efficient service than human agents. Here’s a few other ways that customer self-service solutions can impact the customer experience.
Trim your decision tree.
Consider all the potential reasons a customer may reach out to your company. Compound that with the fact that conventional customer service must be designed using Visio diagrams. The result? An incredibly complex decision tree. With an advanced customer self-service solution, you can trim the tree and offer a greeting like, “How may I help you today?” This better equips the customer to direct the conversation, reducing effort as customers are able to avoid the standard options menu and get right down to business.
Know your customer before they contact you.
Not only that – let your customer know that you know who they are. Implement a system capable of recognizing customers, whether by caller ID, account name, or other identifiers. By recalling information from previous engagements and automatically integrating them with the present conversation, customers will feel more appreciated and valued by your brand. Present-day automation will be able to do so seamlessly, and customers will appreciate not having to repeat details about themselves each time they dial into your contact center.
Keep it consistent.
Smart phones have changed how consumers engage with their favorite brands. People can now effortlessly toggle between messaging apps, websites, and social media – all while on the phone. Yet not all service channels perform at the same level of proficiency, and channels are not always outfitted for seamless information transfer. With AI-based customer self-service, keep conversations consistent and effective in all channels. As an increasing number of companies implement AI self-service, this level of consistency could be a differentiator for you.
