Self-service is more popular than ever before with 81% of customers attempting to self-solve before reaching out to a live representative according to the CEB. With a cost of pennies per transaction instead of hundreds or even thousands of dollars per assisted case, it’s no wonder why more and more companies are investing in this channel. But focusing purely on self-service is a huge mistake because the more successful that initiative is, the more complicated your assisted channel will become.
“1/3 of customers would rather clean the toilet than call customer service.” – 2015 Aspect CX survey
For all the considerable investments vendors have made in self-service, customers report only a 45% success rate according to the latest benchmark from the Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA). Most vendors make their customer leave the product, login to a support website, and then type in a generic query before becoming frustrated with irrelevant results. A much better method is to keep your customer in the product, pass proper context about who they are and what they are doing to your search engine, and return a list of highly relevant results. And that’s exactly what my client Adobe is now doing.
“The role of customer service is to mitigate disloyalty by reducing customer effort.” – The Effortless Experience
It’s been 3 years since the publishing of “The Effortless Experience,” a book chock-full of research confirming what customers have long found obvious but that too many vendors failed to understand: the path of least resistance is best. Why, then, do so many support organizations continue to make things so difficult on their customer? More importantly, how can your support organization actually deliver a low-effort experience?
What exactly is deflection, and how do we measure it? This is one of the most frequently asked questions I receive from clients.
There is overwhelming evidence that customers want to resolve their own issues via self-service, and doing so is far cheaper for the vendor than assisted service. This is one instance where customer satisfaction aligns perfectly with cost efficiency, meaning everyone from the CFO to the Chief Customer Officer to your actual customer loves case deflection. If done correctly, that is.
But to measure something, you must first define it. So, let’s look at what constitutes a good deflection event and how success is measured.