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ACD Software: Self Service Evolves to Improve Customer Experience

By Amanda Ciccatelli, TMCnet Web Editor

The latest inContact 'On The Line’ episode featured inContact CMO Mariann McDonagh who discussed the evolution of self service and how it can promote positive customer experiences.

McDonagh divulges some information from a recent study, done in conjunction with ICMI that surveyed the self-service atmosphere with inContact clients and elaborates on the positive and negative implications of the results. Last year, Gartner (News - Alert) predicted that "by 2012, consumers will be willing to perform all possible customer service functions themselves."

Self Service is something that every contact center operator wants. They want to be able to push as many calls into self service, allowing as many customers to take care of themselves as possible.

“We talk to people about self service initiatives all day every day. Self service grew up as a way to deflect calls from the contact center. So, it was really sort of a service avoidance strategy as opposed to something else,” said McDonagh.

Now, self service acts as a service enhancement strategy. There is a whole generation that is growing up in this technology era.  A lot of kids would rather get online, they would rather use social media, and they would rather text to take care of any questions or issues they have about products or services.

“Their expectation of a service experience is going to be a virtual one, 100 percent,” McDonagh added. “It is going to be very unlikely that they will be willing to stay on the line with customer service and wait for queue for an extended period of time.”

The question is what does this really mean for contact centers and what are they doing today, what are they considering and what are they going to need to be doing tomorrow? To find out these answers, inContact did a survey with ICMI around the topic of self service and the results showed that there are pros and cons to self service.

“The good news is (we surveyed 400 contact centers in North America) 75 percent of contact centers are doing IVR self service. So, ¾ of them have a self service initiative. The bad news, however, is less than 25 percent of them are actually measuring the effectiveness of those self service channels,” explained McDonagh.

The 25 percent of contact centers have what McDonagh calls a “field of a dreams” approach to self service: they think if they build it, people will follow.  This is not an effective strategy for self service as self service needs to be continually tuned and tweaked in a process where you try a strategy, you measure it, you get customer feedback and then you continuously improve it.

“It has to really feel to customers like its responsive to their needs and always evolving,” she said.

To learn more about tuning your self service strategies to make them work better for customers, follow inContact’s blog.