Both customers and service and support leaders have a demand for a greater degree of self-service. 49% of customers say they prefer to solve problems themselves instead of contacting service.
Research reveals that with the right solution in place, as many as 9 out of 10 support issues can be handled through self-care or digital channels. This is much more cost-effective for telcos, but it also meets the desire of customers to fix their own problems.
Additionally, it also frees up valuable call center resources to concentrate on the most difficult problems, fix novel problems, and support the most vulnerable customers.
Is today’s self-service enough?
Happy to make use of this trend, 51% of heads of service and support are already devoting more resources toward migrating contact volume to self-service in the face of economic headwinds. It's a win-win situation, with inexpensive self-service, high in demand from the customers themselves.
However, it turns out that a large part of customers abandon company self-service channels. 49% say it's because the information was either lacking or didn't meet their needs. Many customers are trying to fix their own problems by looking for answers online (31%). Often, these customers used multiple methods or channels to try to fix their problems.
This indicates that the self-service channels aren't good enough, and need to improve to meet customers' needs and expectations.
That said, assisted channels don't show any better results: 74% of B2C customers and 67% of B2B customers end their service journey in assisted channels. In this case, we need to enable staff to deliver value to customers in the assisted channels.
The big shift in customer service and support
In general, customer service and support is already making the shift from reactive to more proactive, and from assisted-service to more self-service. For the future, telcos need to take this one step further. The company must initiate a predictive and preventative service and support, preferably in app and in product so that the customer doesn't even need to search for support or contact customer service.
It is time to build a self-service dominant mindset. Self-service needs to be viewed as a product with proper funding and resource allocation. Every telco should appoint a self-service product manager to own the strategy, roadmap, investment and adoption plan. They also need to invest in foundational, self-service capabilities that power the search to resolution journey.
In addition, it is recommended to build a knowledge management program that serves as the foundation for both self- and assisted service. Volume will create cost savings so a portion of those savings can be reinvested into capabilities that can add additional value.
Subtonomy, the leading provider of telecom customer support solutions in the Nordics, can ease the process a great deal through solutions for CSPs including APIs, alarms framework and technical self-service in digital channels and IVR, etc.
Using Subtonomy’s API, CSPs can feed their conversational virtual agents, chatbots, self-service, apps and other digital channels with the same accurate, transparent and timely data their CSRs receive. The result is that up to 75% of all tech issues can be resolved without the customer having to call the contact center and a call reduction to contact center by 20%.