Implementing Web Self-Service Merely to Reduce Call Volume Can Have Negative Consequences

Companies have implemented web self-service with a myopic focus on call avoidance and deflection, without paying attention to usability, ease of information retrieval, content performance management and customer experience. These issues continue to dog web self-service implementations, according to a 2006 Supportindustry.com survey of contact center, help desk and customer service managers and executives, sponsored by eGain Communications.

The biggest impediment to web self-service adoption is the fact that customers prefer to speak with a live phone agent. The aforementioned issues with web self-service are perhaps driving this preference. While phone channel preference ranked as the top impediment to web self-service adoption with 54% of respondents citing it as an issue, content maintenance ranked second at 37% and difficulty in accessing content ranked third at 36%.

Customers who encounter problems with a self-service session typically escalate their issues to an assisted interaction channel such as email, chat or phone. About half of respondents surveyed (47%) said less than 10% of their self-service sessions are escalated to assisted service, while 30% say between 10% and 25% of these sessions are escalated. At the high end of the scale, 4% are seeing more than 75% of self-service sessions result in escalation. While these escalation figures may seem acceptable, they do not capture customer abandonment of the web site due to bad self-service, which could lead to lost sales and reduced customer satisfaction.

Savvy companies realize that bad self-service is worse than no self-service. They are getting past “me too” customer self-service by delivering exceptional customer self-service experience through innovations such as chatbot self-service and flexible information access methods including guided help. They are reducing the cost of knowledgebase maintenance by leveraging automation for adaptive content management in the form of ongoing content performance monitoring, triggers, alerts and workflows that sustain content relevance and performance.

More information can be found at http://www.supportindustry.com/.