How To Achieve Customer Self-Service Success

Johnny Rosa
September 28, 2021

The pandemic changed how we all operate our daily lives. In 2021 and beyond, digital technology is creating new opportunities, customers are becoming more engaged, and customer service leaders are trying new and innovative ideas to keep pace with a rapidly changing contact center landscape.

“The best customer service experiences are “76% more likely to include self-service than ignore it,” but “less than 30% of companies offer self-service solutions.”

According toZendesk,the best customer service experiences are “76% more likely to include self-service than ignore it,” but “less than 30% of companies offer self-service solutions.” How can contact centers looking to adapt quickly avoid being overwhelmed while trying to bridge the gap between the technology they use now and the technology they want to deploy?

Step 1: Context Is King

The first step is to put context on your digital customer service and self-service automation journey. Not every interaction is right for self-service. At Zappix, we’ve spent years building cutting edge customer service automation and working with customer service leaders to determine the best use cases to deploy them (and which use cases aren’t best). Every industry has a few common, repetitive call types that beg to be automated.

ThePareto Principlestates that for many outcomes, roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes (the “vital few”). It’s often referred to as the “80/20 Rule.” This applies to customer self-service as well. Through our work we’ve identified a“vital few” use casesthat account for the majority of calls to contact centers in different verticals. By starting with these vital few use cases, our customers can jump headlong into automating the interactions that will create the fastest ROI while holding off on less productive use cases for the second wave of innovation.

Step 2: Evolution vs Revolution

This multi-phase approach to self-service has been critical to our customers’ success transforming their contact centers. The broad demand for automation doesn’t mean everything needs to be automated at the same time. We recommend plotting use cases on ourUse Case Selection Matrixto identify which should be automated immediately, which can be automated in later phases, and which should be left to human agents with expert skills and human empathy.

“The broad demand for automation doesn’t mean everything needs to be automated at the same time.”

A wide range of self-service solutions are available to businesses, but balancing cutting edge capabilities and bottom lines means the best choice for most companies are quick-to-deploy solutions like Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Visual IVR that make a phased, evolutionary approach easy. Avoid trying to boil the ocean with automated solutions. Deploy the technology that’s advanced enough for your customers and target the call types that are most important to them. Most businesses don’t need IBM Watson leveraging Machine Learning to answer every single call with an automated AI just yet.

Step 3: Evaluate and Grow

Successful customer self-service won’t be a one-and-done procedure. The process will necessitate multiple iterations as technology continues to change, customers continue to change their expectations, and companies learn how to best integrate automation into their workflows. It’s important for customer service leaders to continually evaluate the performance of whatever self-service solutions they’ve deployed and adjust them accordingly.

We encourage ourVisual IVRcustomers to check which options callers choose more frequently and move them to the top of their visual menus. When user journeys seem to slow down in the same place, we work with our customers to identify the key choke point and make the experience smoother and more intuitive. This cycle of continual development starts with platforms that are flexible enough to change over time. That’s one of the reasons we’ve made sure changes to Zappix experiences happen in record time. Problems can be identified, solutions can be tested, and callers and companies can enjoy the benefits of the new improvements as fast as possible.

Digital Self-Service: Evolution vs. Revolution

Interested in what use cases are begging to be automated in your industry? Want to try plotting your own calls on our Use Case Selection Matrix? At Zappix our mission is to help more businesses create the best experiences possible for their customers.

Download the “Digital Self-Service: Evolution vs. Revolution” e-book to get access to some of the tools mentioned in this article and set yourself up for Self-Service Success: