Question

How likely do you think it is that self-service will become the dominant mode of customer problem resolution in the near or distant future? Support your answer with facts and examples from the text.

Answer 1

Consumers expect businesses to continue to improve their service level. We want answers to their questions and prompt, convenient, and effective solutions to their problems. Consumers have a strong aversion to multiple contacts with a company or more than once sharing the same information.

The days are long gone when answering an e-mail within 24 hours was all right. In four hours, some 39 percent of modern consumers expect a response. Users of Twitter and Facebook have even less patience: in less than four hours, 55% of social media users want an answer. The only long-term solution to fulfill customer expectations is self-service. 70% of customers are already expecting a self-service solution to manage business issues and complaints. Nonetheless, this does not eliminate the need for a personal solution: when self-service falls short, personal contact is an absolute necessity as a safety net.

It is useful to consider every single step in the customer relationship when planning out a self-service strategy. Self-service affects both the pre-purchase process and the transaction as such and any issues that may arise after the purchase.

Pre-sales: customers are making their own buying inquiries. Quite often, 70% of the decision has already been made before a customer contacts a company; 27% prefer to ask business questions over the phone; while 56% opt for self-service.

Sales: e-commerce's exponential growth shows that more and more consumers want to remain in control of the buying process.

Through intelligent data use, the self-service economy will cement itself. In each step of that relationship, information will improve the quality of the customer relationship. Consumers are generally open-minded when it comes to allowing businesses access to their data as long as it is for their own good.

The underlying motivation for businesses was often a desire for profitability when the self-service concept first began to take hold. It seemed only appropriate to have the company conduct those activities in their desire to create a super-efficient organization.

Today, the idea of self-service can go much further. Based on a win - win principle, self-service has the greatest impact. The primary goal should always be an improved customer relationship. The organization's benefits are both productivity and higher profits. Customers of today are not only prepared for self-service; they actually prefer to use it over other support types!

But a self-service portal for consumers only works when you make it easy to use. To achieve this, by using images and videos, your customer service knowledge base and FAQs must be easily accessible, up-to-date and visual. It is important to coordinate the self-service portal. Organization comes from tagging pages to return the most accurate answers to the search results pages. And finally, all content must be designed for laptop, tablet and mobile users within the self-service platform.