1. What is "Customer Self-Service"?
2. Why is Customer Self-Service in high demand?
3. Pat's solutions to implement a Customer Self-Service strategy
In Customer Service, a Self-Service service allows customers to access resources independently.
Nowadays and based on customer expectations, Customer Self-Service is among the most efficient solutions that a company can strategically adopt: in fact, it means providing customers with a quick way to their requests, allowing them to find the answers to your doubts in an exhaustive and immediate way.
According to recent statistics, approximately 75% of respondents believe that fast response time is among the most important attributes of Customer Experience (CX).
Self-Service is the supplementary solution to traditional customer assistance, which brings with it a double benefit: on the one hand, the service operators will not be involved and therefore will save time; on the other hand, customers will be able to receive assistance at any time and in full autonomy.
In the digital era, new technologies have made Customer Self-Service increasingly central, so much so that, according to Gartner, "by 2030 one billion requests for assistance will be collected automatically by bots".
What is "Customer Self-Service?
Self-Service allows you to provide online support to customers (or internal company users) without requiring any interaction with a support agent.
Self-Service is no longer a "nice to have". It is a necessity to ensure a totally positive Customer Experience. In fact, it has become so important that customers now expect a company's website to include a Self-Service application.
In fact, the customer in today's digital era is informed, active and tech savvy. He is aware and has expectations even in his own experience as a customer. At the same time, he is less willing to wait for customer service personnel and service agents to be available. He wants reliable solutions, fast.
In other words, he wants to rely on Self-Service.
Historically, as customers have become accustomed to shopping and communicating online, customer self-service has grown alongside emerging digital technologies.
Today, Self-Service options are available in nearly every industry, increasing customer satisfaction and allowing them to participate more actively in their Customer Journey.
The most common types of Customer Self-Service for customers include FAQs, Knowledge Base, Online Communities and Discussion Forum, Help Web Portals, Social Media, Chatbots, and Voicebots.
These Self-Service channels join the traditional ones, which remain the telephone channel (even with IVR) and email.
Why is Customer Self-Service in high demand?
The digital era has also revolutionized the way support is provided - long gone are the days when a phone call was the only option to reach a support team.
In fact, consumers looking for support now prefer Customer Self-Service to human contact.
When a customer experiences a problem with a certain product or service, they don't want to pick up the phone, wait for an answer, and explain the need. Prefer to expedite resolution by answering online, reading an article in the FAQ, or viewing a video demonstration available in the Knowledge Base.
It is for this type of online behavior that companies are increasingly implementing self-service solutions.
What are the benefits of Customer Self-Service? We can summarize them in four main points:
• Better Customer Experience: the offer of Self-Service channels makes it possible to provide the method that the customer seeks for assistance, i.e. autonomously before contacting an operator;
• Cost reduction: with Self-Service channels, service operators are relieved of some activities, consequently lowering Customer Care costs for a company;
• Greater availability of assistance: Self-Service is active 24 hours a day, without limits and in multilingual;
• Optimization of customer service: operators, freed from repetitive and low-value activities, can instead focus and spend more time on high-value activities.
What is Pat's solutions to implement a Customer Self-Service strategy
Pat's software solutions have been the reference technologies for years in the Customer Service area and for multi-channel interaction.
Providing customers with a real-time assistance service, regardless of their geographical location and communication channel, is one of the prerogatives of Pat's design experience, through various solutions, such as HDA and CX Studio.
The improvement of customer service and the efficiency of interactions with users are, to date, the basis for the success of a company. For this, Pat's solutions can:
• Manage conversations across multiple channels;
• Integrate a Knowledge Base for autonomous resolution of the problems encountered;
• Use Artificial Intelligence;
• Add new channels such as Chatbot, hybrid chat, human chat and Voicebot;
• Organize reports by creating tickets from various sources (telephone, web portal, email, social networks, chats, etc);
• View dedicated dashboards and reports.
Pat's most advanced solutions for Customer Self-service are:
1. The Customer Portal web portal
Customer Portal, the portal for users or customers, made available as a Self-Service channel of Pat's HDA platform, is a central hub capable of providing a single access point for company information.
In the Customer Portal, users can connect to find answers, share knowledge and access the available services: a single platform from which they can access all the company's Self-Service functions, accessible 24 hours a day and independently.
Specifically Customer Portal:
- provides users with various sections from which to identify solutions to their requests and access the Self-Service options, thus becoming the single point of access to information.
- can include the Service Catalog, a catalog which simply offers the possibility of requesting solutions directly from the competent departments.
- it also has advanced Knowledge Base search and customization functions to help users quickly find the required resources.
2. The AI interaction framework
To allow customers to independently obtain answers to their questions and solutions to their problems means implementing Artificial Intelligence software.
Among the most common technologies also made available by Pat, there are conversational Chatbots, i.e. virtual assistants that provide answers via chat and guide the user through simple and fast paths to reach the solution.
Pat's Chatbot is an Artificial Intelligence software capable of communicating with the customer in writing. It can do this, for example, simply by searching the FAQs or the guides and tutorials stored in memory.
Or, if you want to provide an even more complete and satisfying service, Conversational Artificial Intelligence systems generate answers through Machine Learning algorithms. Pat's framework employs Natural Language Processing to analyze the question, understand it and develop the best answer in the shortest possible time.