Are Customers Ready for Self-Service?

Are customers ready for self-service?

Imagine, as a student, you are in the middle of writing an assignment that is due the next day. Right when you are wondering whether you can be any more stressed, your desktop screen incurs an issue. The screen goes blank. You call your institution’s help desk. The customer support agent on the other end asks you to explain the issue in detail. After a while, he realizes that you need to be connected to a Subject Matter Expert. After 2 minutes, you are talking to another person who has requested you to reiterate the issue. You repeat what you told the first agent exasperatedly and wish you could solve it on your own!

Well, you wouldn’t be alone. In a survey conducted by Nuance, 67% of the respondents preferred to resolve their issues on their own. Yet another survey by Coleman Parks revealed that 40% of the customers tried to solve their issues themselves before contacting a call center for help. An article in Harvard Business Review claims, “Across industries, fully 81% of all customers attempt to take care of matters themselves before reaching out to a live representative.”

After all, who would want to wait in a queue or repeat the same problem thrice when you can solve it on your own?

We are living in an age where customer expectations are increasingly growing. They expect immediate resolution of their problems. Customers, today, have no patience for repeating their issues to different agents before they get solved. Whatever the reason may be, the customer service industry is rapidly moving towards self-service.

What does it mean for organizations and institutions?

70% of the customers expect a company’s website to include a self-service application.

Providing self-service tools is a great option to equip your customers with the right knowledge to fix their problems. It also offers organizations a great opportunity to reduce their spending significantly. For example, an educational organization’s help desk gets 100 calls in a day. Out of 100, 50 are for Tier 1 support including password resets. If this institution updates information about how to solve these issues in a knowledge base, the number of interactions and costs would be reduced by half as the end-users will be able to resolve these issues themselves.

Hundreds of your different customers have asked you the same questions at different times. Your support agents have given the same answers. What if you published these answers in a knowledge base that your customers could surf and find answers to their questions from? It would help them find quick answers and save your agents’ valuable time, don’t you think? If you’ve outsourced your help desk, it could reduce your help desk costs drastically.

BlackBeltHelp Lexicon, a self-help product, is one such repository of information that an educational institution’s students and faculty can use to solve their Tier 1 level technical issues themselves, cutting down the institution’s help desk costs and reducing the resolution time. From enabling an organization’s help desk agents to find the right answers faster to student self-service, Lexicon works like Google’s search engine to provide its end users with a platform to solve their technical problems.

To know more about Lexicon and how you can cut your help desk costs, drop us an email at sales@blackbelthelp.com or call 8442552358.