Offer Agent-Quality Self-Service:
Create Loyalty, Engagement and Support Efficiency

Enticing Customers to Self-Service
There’s no secret technique for getting customers to use self-service.  Most customers want to help themselves—they’d far rather get the answer quickly and easily online.  If too many customers are calling or opening cases, the prescription isn’t just to manipulate them or market to them—the first thing to do is to make sure that they’re getting the help they need from the web site.  If customers can’t accomplish their tasks online, it doesn’t matter how well support organizations promote self-help:  customers will end up back on the phone sooner or later, and they’ll be reluctant to try the web next time.

Industry figures show customers are unsuccessful with self-help 50 percent of the time or more.  What barriers get in the way of success?  Why can’t self-help be as effective as agent assistance for most issues?

Virtual Agents Miss The Point
One theory is that self-service should more closely emulate human interactions—perhaps with a virtual chat interface and a smiling picture.  But these virtual representatives or “chatterbots” aren’t the solution—while they often demo well, the complexity of carrying on an automated chat makes them hard to maintain and difficult for users to engage with.  For all but the most common issues, automated agents become easily confused and don’t live up to the seeming intelligence their clever personas advertise.

Making it Easy For Customers
What’s far more important is that self-service makes it easy for customers to achieve their goals in the fewest possible steps.  For example, think of the most broadly adopted self-service technology: automated teller machines.  ATMs look and act nothing like bank tellers, but they handle a few teller transactions simply and quickly, 24/7.  Although they were broadly deployed just three decades ago, it’s almost impossible to imagine life without ATMs now.

Self-service in technical support should work the same way.  Customers will generally pick self-service over an agent when:

• It’s clear what transactions are handled and what steps the user needs to take.
• The site is organized around users’ needs, not internal silos.
• Search is designed to respond to user words and perceptions, not internal technical jargon.
• Search results give users the option to drill down further using a manageable number of follow-on choices.
• Answers and information are relevant to the users’ needs, timely, up-to-date, understandable, and useful.

Timely, useful information is a result of effective knowledge management practices—see Consona’s Knowledge-Driven Support solution.  But the technology infrastructure for self-service must enable ATM-like transparency, even in complex problem domains.  To quote an engineering maxim, “the simple things should be simple…and the complex things should be possible.”

Agent-Quality Self-Service and Consona
The bottom line:  customers will use self-service if it helps them accomplish their tasks more quickly and easily than talking with an agent.  With compelling content, great search that guides them through the process of finding the information they need, and a customer-in support portal, that’s just what service and support organizations can deliver with Consona Self-Service.

Key Features

Adaptive guided search

An easy way for customers to get the answers they need, without requiring them to use specialized jargon or complex search strings.

Personalized microsites and knowledge pagelets

A customer-centric portal arranged around specific needs, tasks, and objectives.

Knowledge Driven Support

A tool suite that enables Knowledge-Centered Support for efficient, timely publication and maintenance of knowledge that’s easy for customers to find and use.