Exploring Self-Service: CX Today Expert Round Table

When done well, self-service speeds up issue resolution, drives engagement, and raises customer satisfaction, conversions, and revenue.

Indeed, it is much more than call deflection. Self-service empowers customers with easy access to answers and advice, deepening relationships with the business.

However, it is not always done well. Dead-ends within self-service portals, knowledge base gaps, and cumbersome chatbots are just a handful of the many terrible practices that plague the space.

Fortunately, our expert panelists have experience navigating the tricky terrain. In this edition of the CX Today roundtable series, they highlight how self-service is evolving and reveal the most exciting innovations enhancing the technology.

This month, our panelists include:

• Michele Carlson, Senior Product Marketing Manager at NICE, and Jonathan Wax, VICE President of NICE Nexidia EMEA.
• Jay Gupta, Director of Product Marketing at Talkdesk
• Jennifer Sewell, Director of Product Marketing at Ada
• Neil Titcomb, Managing Director UK&I at Odigo
• Vincent Tachet, Group CIO at Webhelp
• Tom Bailey, VP International at Khoros

Below, they share specialist insights while answering a whole host of questions that cover several critical talking points within the self-service arena.

How Has the Self-Service Landscape Progressed In the Past Five Years?

Carlson: In the digital-first age of on-demand services, customers increasingly expect "instant gratification". Customers prefer brands that can provide 24/7 support and frictionless, effortless service. The current generation of self-service solutions focuses on achieving these aims, not the simple cost reduction of earlier generation self-service options.

As customer service transitions from multichannel to omnichannel, customers want to interact with companies on their channels of choice - chat, email, SMS, and social media - not just by phone.

Organizations must seamlessly blend digital channels and voice to allow customers to move effortlessly between them - with access to their entire relationship history.

Indeed, self-service is eclipsing voice as the preferred first point of service, marking a sea change in the role of these applications.

Gupta: The self-service landscape is evolving at a quickening pace. Indeed, Talkdesk research recently revealed that 60 percent of organizations have applied AI to their customer self-service.

The rise of natural language processing (NLP) driven by digital voice assistants, like Siri and Alexa, has also helped the contact center move beyond traditional chatbots to AI-powered virtual agents.

Increasingly innovative AI techniques are further expanding the capabilities of these virtual agents. For example, with just a few words from a user, they can detect sentiment and intent, determining if they should try to resolve the query or route the contact to human support.

Such use cases have positioned AI-powered virtual agents as one of the most transformative contact center tools, and they’re fast becoming a preferred choice of younger generations.

Sewell: Self-service innovations in the D2C space, which rose in prominence due to the pandemic, have opened people’s eyes to the possibility of quicker, more personalized service.

Yet, the B2B space still trails behind. Ever-evolving buyer expectations are putting pressure on B2B sellers to revaluate how they go to market — from their target customers to the channels they offer support.

After all, the post-pandemic B2B customer wants minimal human intervention when evaluating, first experiencing value, or purchasing a product/service. The end consumer is looking for fewer face-to-face, transactional experiences.

Whether it sells directly or indirectly, online or offline, every B2B business is on the path to becoming a digital business. And like all digital businesses, sellers must compete with a customer experience set by leading consumer brands and emerging B2B marketplaces.

New forms of digital customer engagement — like SMS, marketplaces, voice, and social channels - are transforming B2B businesses, empowering them to rethink how to build a more agile platform that moves with customers and meets them where they are.

Self-service used to be a differentiator; today, it is becoming table stakes, particularly in the age of product-led growth (PLG).

Titcomb: The Covid-19 lockdowns exaggerated many CX problems of those who have not invested properly, causing customers to wait longer for responses.

Self-service has helped, but so far, many are only testing the water, investing in pockets of innovation.

Indeed, the technology has the potential to eradicate the menu-based response system currently used, enabling customer issues to be resolved without speaking to agents. This successfully employs a deflection strategy, saving brands money as AI does the job an agent would.

Nevertheless, today's customers are still queuing and going through menus in a very impersonal way. Such was the case 10-15 years ago, and the same inefficiencies in the unstructured and unsophisticated self-service process lie bare for all to see.

Of course, the industry has made some progress, thanks - in part - to natural language processing (NLP). Today, NLP is more real-time, intuitive, and accurate. It allows processes to act on what people are saying to create an intelligent way of directing customers.

Tachet: Initially, self-service comprised of consumers visiting a website and being directed to a list of frequently asked questions (FAQs) that they didn’t want to read, which made finding the correct answer a challenge.

Today, CX leaders see the most success in self-service through adopting customer-centered design. It is not enough to publish FAQs on a website and expect this to reduce contact center demand significantly. The most effective self-service combines both information and guidance for the customer with a powerful transactional capability, which can resolve an issue for the customer without the need for human support.

Additionally, the rapid evolution of AI in self-service is helping to understand the job customers wish to complete while integrating systems through APIs and process automation tools.

In doing so, customers receive better guidance, information, and support. They may also interact with back-office systems and CRM to execute a transaction on their behalf.

Bailey: Now more than ever, customers want authentic brand interactions, but on their own terms. As a result, the importance of communities is increasing, not only as a means for brands to empower customer independence but also as a tool for continuous improvement.

Indeed, online communities are an excellent way to deliver that self-service support. AI-driven chatbots within a community can also help guide users to the best forums and answer frequent questions.

Customers should feel empowered to find and source the information they need while knowing they can access further support if required.

Moreover, 75% of consumers valued interactions they had with peers in a brand’s online community - as per a Forrester study commissioned by Khoros.

As a result, today’s communities seem to go beyond building brand and customer rapport - they are about fostering conversation and creating lasting brand champions.

In Your Opinion, What Has Been the Most Exciting Recent Innovation in the Self-Service Space?

Wax: Artificial Intelligence! The widespread implementation of AI is transforming self-service.

First off, AI in self-service enables businesses to use data to drive more effective self-service, a primary consumer demand.

[caption id="attachment_45309" align="alignright" width="100"] Jonathan Wax[/caption]

According to NICE’s 2022 Digital-First Customer Experience Report, 81 percent of consumers are demanding more effective self-service channels from businesses. Moreover, 34 percent of consumers request that brands offer smarter self-service capabilities.

AI is the answer - leveling up self-service to meet customers’ expectations by leveraging real-time interaction data to hyper-personalize every self-service experience.

Gupta: Intent detection enables self-service tools to automatically classify written or spoken text based on what the user wants to achieve.

For instance, a virtual agent could detect if a user wants to check their shipping status. Following the identification of this intent, it could then automate the delivery of the correct answer.

Sentiment detection can also determine a customer’s overall emotional state during an interaction, rating it as positive, negative, neutral, or mixed. Such a technique gives contact center leaders insight into what topics cause frustration, highlighting opportunities for improvement.

These game-changing capabilities enable contact center agents to be free of time-consuming and repetitive tasks, so they can focus on complex queries that require problem-solving and human judgment.

Sewell: Many associate self-service with self-checkout kiosks at stores and airports, self-order QR codes at restaurants, and IoT-enabled smart fridges in malls. In other words, D2C.

While these innovations recently gained traction, the pandemic played a critical role in the accelerated demand for automated, online self-service.

No-code/low-code platforms make it so non-technical CX teams can build and maintain workflows leading to more meaningful experiences. After all, they understand customers the best.

NLU and AI technologies also empower brands to recognize and translate common speech patterns quicker, leading to more personalized and timely bot-driven experiences.

The API or application economy has made it easier than ever to play with these applications. Indeed, there is an API for just about anything, allowing many businesses to easily plug into another tool and offer customized experiences without straying away from what they do best.

Titcomb:  Natural language technologies incorporate AI to assess and understand the human word. Automation technologies then act on this understanding, routing customers automatically without using menus or automatic virtual queuing processes.

The technology has the potential to eradicate the menu-based response system currently used, even passing contacts through to bots and enabling specific customer issues to be resolved without speaking to an agent.

Such a deflection strategy saves brands on costs, as the AI does the job an agent would do. But for customers, this isn’t a one–size–fits–all program. And while it is beneficial to those who loathed the process of queuing, if self-service isn’t put into place correctly, it can cause a strain on the relationship between businesses and customers.

Tachet: An increasing number of companies are deploying bots successfully across numerous convenient customer engagement channels, such as mobile applications and messaging platforms.

Done well, they provide access to 24/7 customer support via a mobile device, reflecting the modern, always-on, digitally connected world.

Today, AI capabilities within mobile devices and bots are highly sophisticated. When designed well, they can facilitate more positive experiences.

There is also the emergence of conversational applications combining the best visual features of well-designed mobile apps and websites with the natural language processing (NLP) capability of chatbots. These combine to deliver a user experience with engaging rich media and content.

Although hidden to consumers, AI can also offer reliable transformer models that, combined with NLP, significantly improve CX.

Bailey: The growth of personalization tactics, alongside intelligent technology like AI and machine learning (ML), are incredibly exciting innovations.

After all, today's customers value interactive experiences when engaging with a brand, and the most successful are those that excel at delivering personalized interactions across all channels.

Automation capabilities like AI and ML help power comprehensive analyses and unveil how customers feel while helping prompt feedback to combat friction at the source.

In addition, many brands have enjoyed success in leveraging asynchronous messaging to promote communication flexibility with customers.

These advanced capabilities enable brands to gather insights and data to inform how to personalize interactions or flag areas of improvement. The future of self-service should start and end with your customers’ best interests top of mind.

How Can CX Teams Monitor and Enhance the Performance of Self-Service Applications?

Wax: Effective self-service begins before consumers reach out, and the capabilities to deliver proactive experiences already exist.

These same capabilities are also critical in the ongoing maintenance of the self-service applications.

Today, AI-enabled, proactive self-service capabilities predict points of friction on the web and across mobile journeys. Once identified, these solutions provide contextual guidance without human assistance for accelerated self-service success on digital channels.

One such example includes contextual ‘nudges’ via pop-ups with timely and relevant data on the page to help when customers struggle. This accelerates online conversions and resolutions, driving e-commerce conversions and reducing support costs.