4 things we learned from All Access: Customer Self-Service 2023
Find out how our All Access event delegates are using self-service, which channels are the most popular and what customers think about the state of self-service in CX
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In March 2023, CX Network hosted All Access: Customer Self-Service 2023, a two-day event featuring sessions from Adidas, Beauty Pie and Ring Central among others. During the event CX Network asked delegates about the trends they are seeing in self-service within their own organizations.
In this article, we round up our key findings on self-service, including the most popular tools offered by organizations and the channels customers prefer.
Customers want digital channels when resolving issues
When given a choice between phone calls, physical store visits and digital channels, 64 percent of delegates said their customers engage via digital channels to resolve issues “sometimes”.
Fewer than 20 percent reported this happening all the time and 17 percent said it does not happen “at all”.
The popularity of digital channels is growing as the next generation of customers begins to emerge. In fact, as CX Network has covered, customers today demand to be served where they are, which means that brands need to modernize their channels to ensure they are reaching all customer segments effectively.
RELATED CONTENT: Personalize CX with data-driven self-service
FAQs are the most popular self-service tool
To establish which self-service capabilities are the most widely implemented, CX Network asked delegates about the self-service tools their organization offers its customers.
When given a choice between chatbots and virtual assistants, blogs, knowledge bases, callback requests, IVRs, FAQs, video support, portals and online forums, 72 percent said they offer FAQs, while only 14 percent offered virtual assistants or chatbots.
Self-service portals also proved popular, with 43 percent reporting their organizations offers one.
Here are the results in full:
More than half of all self-service enquiries still end up in live service
We asked our event delegates how often a self-service enquiry ends up in live service. More than half said this occurs 51-90 percent of the time, with 25 percent reporting it happened 11-30 percent of the time. Of our respondents, 12.5 percent appear to have robust and functional self-service channels that see 10 percent or fewer enquiries enter live service.
This is backed up by Gartner's research, which found that while the majority of customers will attempt to resolve their own queries in self-service, only nine percent succeed. This signals a massive disconnect between expectation and delivery and also highlights how this key element of CX requires improvement.
On the positive side, no delegated reported enquiries ending in live service 90-100 percent of the time.
Most CX practitioners do not gather self-service behavior data
Self-service channels hold data on how they have been leveraged by a customer. With the right policies in place, this behavior and sentiment data can be leveraged by decision-makers in the contact center, marketing, sales and commerce functions to refine the overall customer experience.
For example, self-service data can reveal insights on the customer’s journey, the obstacles customers face when purchasing products and common questions asked during the ordering process. Through purchase data, it can even show how loyal a customer is by presenting insights on previous buying patterns, for example frequency and value.
RELATED CONTENT: Five tips to create an effective self-service portal
According to our poll, the majority of companies (78 percent) are not doing this, reinforcing a wider trend – only the most advanced companies are mining self-service data. According to the CX Executive’s Agenda by Aberdeen Strategy and Research, 22 percent of businesses are finding ways to leverage this data to achieve their CX targets.
Further analysis by Aberdeen found that companies leveraging AI, machine learning and automation with their self-service data average 38 percent greater year-on-year increase in customer satisfaction rates and 79 percent decrease in service costs, as well as other benefits.
You can catch up with All Access: Customer Self-Service 2023 through CX Replay, here.
