Self-Service and Why Contact Centres Should Offer It

In this video Colin Mann at Enghouse Interactive defines self-service and explains why contact centres should offer it.

What Is Self-Service and Why Should Contact Centres Offer It?

According to Gartner, self-service involves customer-initiated interactions through varied channels. So, for example, knowledge bases, help desks, and chatbots.

Essentially what you’re doing is you’re empowering the customers, or the prospects, who are trying to engage with you, with the ability to find the answers themselves. And to do that easily, and conveniently, without going through the hassle of a long phone call with a support agent.

That’s essentially what you’re trying to do. So a lot of those kind of more transactional enquiries, you’re automating, and enabling them to find their own answers. There’s a lot of reasons why you might want to do that.

It’s going to help you with First Contact Resolution, and the speed of answering enquiries, and that then increases satisfaction.

It’s going to help staff satisfaction as well, and that’s an important point to make, because what it’s going to enable your agents to do is then focus on the more complex enquiries rather than the kind of everyday run-of-the-mill enquiries.

So they’re going to enjoy more interesting, more varied, more challenging work, which is more stimulating for them intellectually.

You can also then analyse interactions, so of course digital self-service creates an audit trail that you can then analyse, and you can identify problems, and you can identify areas that you can continuously improve.

Cost savings are part of it as well. You can achieve cost savings through digital self-service, but I would say it’s important to say that companies should look at this through the lens of continuous improvement.

It’s not always about taking costs out, it’s about how you do better, and how you support the customers better, and this leads to greater efficiency.

Thanks to Colin Mann at Enghouse Interactive for contributing to this video.

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