Omni-Channel Customer Engagement Article

When Apple (News - Alert) unveiled the first iPhone in 2007, I and many pundits knew that it would change the world. Few of us knew how it would change things, however. But now we’re starting to see the broad implications of mobile device usage, and one of the effects is on primacy of self-service when it comes to customer service.

We’re all getting used to conducting research and answering our own customer questions by visit Web sites and online forums, but smartphones have supercharged the process by enabling all of us to easily get answers.

Recent studies have shown that consumers now prefer self-service to calling businesses for answers. Forrester Research (News - Alert) has found that 70 percent of customers prefer to use a company’s Web site instead of making a phone call or sending an email, and Zendesk has found that more than half of all consumers say they would rather solve their own problems than rely on customer service.

While 67 percent of customers used self-service options in 2012, according to Forrester, that number has jumped to 76 percent in 2014.

If we can get resolve our own problem and find our own answers, generally we’d much rather go that route than call a phone number and talk with a live agent.

Businesses should be more than happy to oblige, because statistics on the company benefits of self-service also are clear and compelling. Gartner (News - Alert) research predicts that by 2016, at least 80 percent of organizations that fail to plan their self-service implementations will incur higher customer service costs and will not achieve the savings and benefits expected, and Accenture (News - Alert) has found that a typical utility can save between $1 million and $3 million by implementing self-service.

It is not surprising therefore, that 60 percent of organizations recently polled by Aberdeen (News - Alert) and the Service Council are looking to increase available self-service resources. If the B2B space is removed, this number jumps to roughly 70 percent.

The takeaway: mobile and the Internet in general is changing customer service and moving much of it to a self-service model where contact centers and human interaction are only a last resort.

Not only is this a clarion call for businesses that don’t have a good self-service system in place, it also suggests that the role of the contact center agent will change. Consumers are going to require more knowledgeable agents, since basic answers will flow through the self-service channels.

Right now there mostly still are only rudimentary self-service options from most companies, and agents are sometimes no better than company Web pages. But this will need to change as smartphones continue to propel consumers toward self-service and DIY customer service options.