Self-service in need of some self-help

self-service
659
Filed under - Archived Content

While self-service channels have become more prevalent in today’s contact centres, organisations aren’t measuring the cost-to-serve of these channels effectively yet, according to Dimension Data’s Contact Centre Benchmarking Report 2012.

Dimension Data surveyed 637 contact centres in 72 countries. They reported that few businesses have implemented systems to gauge their customers’ experience of non-agent, self-help channels. This contradicts emerging practices that link customer satisfaction scores directly to profitability, such as the tracking of share price performance against the ‘voice of the customer’ – a growing trend among forward-thinking organisations.

Andrew McNair, Dimension Data’s Head of Global Benchmarking, says, “The large-scale failure to apply management information systems across new channels and the subsequent absence of cost measurement activity on every channel outside of the telephone is staggering:

  • 27.9% of Internet
  • 19.4% of web chat
  • 9.9% of social media
  • 6.1% of smartphone application contact.  
  • Only 14.6% of participants have any plans to impose measurements.

This indicates a massive neglect by organisations.”

Developing global service standards and the proliferation of social media are facilitating highly visible viral messaging by consumers, who are quickly embracing new channels.  Innovative mobile devices and smartphones, wireless connectivity and social media enable the emerging channels.

Meanwhile, many companies are simply being caught up in a race to establish a presence on these channels, and standard controls are being disregarded and bypassed.

“Mobility is driving immediate access requirements like never before. The number of customer contacts is increasing across almost all contact channels, and a strong self-service capability is now an expected core offering from most organisations.  Never before have consumers had such a powerful say in determining how they interact with service providers,” explains McNair.

According to the report, of those companies using a self-service channels such as speech, SMS, web chat or social media, nearly half don’t collect any customer feedback at all.  Self-service provides significant opportunity to make or break customer satisfaction and help enable an effective customer management strategy.

“There’s a clear theme emerging around considerable neglect of interactive voice response (IVR) self-service systems – second only to web usage as the most offered self-help path.  Over half (50.6%) of contact centres don’t schedule any regular reviews of their IVR systems and nearly three-quarters (72.4%) are needlessly frustrating their customers by not passing information collected in the IVR through to agents,” explains McNair.

self-service-graph


Poor design and implementation is affecting self-service uptake levels. Even the internet falls short, as companies report a migration of only 16.1% of contact centre traffic to the web versus a target of 34.5%.  Overall, just 15.9% of organisations see their self-service solutions as being ahead of the competition, despite the fact that 89.8% acknowledge their importance to their customer base.  These results pose a real challenge for today’s contact centres, as traditional self-service channels become more universally accepted.

Andrew-McNair

Andrew McNair

“Although voice calls may no longer be the primary channel of choice, it’s the most common supporting channel for all self-service methods, and its availability is demanded by customers. To ensure customer satisfaction, uptake of emerging channels and agent efficiency, it’s vital that customers can transition from one channel to the next without hitting dead-ends,” says McNair.

Author: Jo Robinson

Published On: 14th Nov 2012 - Last modified: 22nd Mar 2017
Read more about - Archived Content

Follow Us on LinkedIn