Sometimes, the best experiences are the ones you drive yourself. Now today, it’s becoming a mix of do it yourself, do it together, and even do it with bots (AI). Is your business set up to allow customers to take control, share control and unleash AI? Are you equipped to deliver best-in-class self-service experiences?
Many organizations struggle with the fundamentals of self-service: document access, static FAQs, inadequate search, lack of status indicators and no data or insights on how it’s performing. Self-service dates back to Automated Teller Machines (ATMs), kiosks and travel services, historically pigeon-holed to transactions and customer support. However, fast-forward to today and with AI innovation and new generational expectations from Gen Z and beyond, self-service is new again – embedded everywhere and transforming experiences. DIY is a win-win for both customers and companies.
The new demands are to serve up easily findable and bite-sized information to employees and customers on the right channel and at critical moments. Taking the next steps includes the ability to quickly find accurate content and interact with contextually relevant processes and event-based triggers.
Effective self-service is the gateway to customer success. Modern customers expect brands to empower them to self-serve. In fact, 88% of customers expect brands to have an online self-service portal and 91% of customers prefer to self-serve! Self-service is no longer a nice-to-have – it’s table stakes for creating happy, loyal and satisfied employees and customers.
What is self-service?
Self-service is when you make it easy for customers to help themselves, freeing up your employees to concentrate on more complex, higher-value tasks. It gets even better when a shared self-service strategy between customers and employees, a Total Experience approach, can align the serving themselves with employee self-service efficiencies. It’s proactive engagement across a customer lifecycle, from acquisition to loyalty, with a profound impact on customer success. A Gartner survey found that 88% of customer journeys start with self-service and touch multiple channels. Modern customers expect brands to know them and let them complete basic activities on their own.
Self-service content and experiences in action
Leading brands provide easy access to personalized information and self-service tools that empower users to resolve their own issues. Solve for the three dimensions of self-service with:
- Secure access to documents and content: Give customers access to communication-driven content such as statements, invoices, policies, and supporting documents. It’s the cornerstone of self-service access. Access is the first step, and the ability to take action is the game-changer. Actionable self-service is critical.
- Account services (profile management): Enable customers to drive their own personalization and preferences, including setting up the right channel notifications in the right context.
- Process-based self-service: Tailor key customer journeys to drive value like onboarding, claims, enrollment, and additional upsales. These are key moments to put the customer in the driver’s seat, running the process from end-to-end.
What are the benefits of self-service?
Meeting your customers where they are is essential. It allows customers to engage with your business whenever they want and on their preferred channel. Self-service experiences often lead to faster problem resolution and save the organization money in customer service. Self-service also complements your customer support team by allowing users to complete the most basic tasks on their own, reserving human support for complex issues.
Reimagine how experiences can be self-service driven
The right tools can help you re-imagine experiences to empower employees and customers. OpenText Experience Cloud can help your organization:
- Maintain consistent information across channels with higher content reuse.
- Improve content discoverability.
- Minimize regulatory risk by ensuring content is always accurate and up to date.
- Reduce support costs and improve customer success metrics.
- Orchestrate and manage process and customer journeys
Learn more about how OpenTextTM can help you build self-service content and experiences at scale.
