Contact Center Self-Service – a lifeline you need to grab in 2022

Contact Center Self-Service; it’s time to save yourself

It’s no secret that The Great Resignation is affecting all industries across North America, and maybe even the world. As contact center leaders, we are not shielded from The Great Resignation. Contact Center agents are going across the street for a nickel, and at a rapid pace. Staffing issues in contact centers is effecting important KPI’s such as SLA’s, CSAT, and NPS. Contact center self-service is your lifeline and you need to grab it in 2022, if you have not already.

This post will cover important questions around self-service in the contact center such as:

• Should we implement self service? And for what use cases?
• Is self-service worth the money and effort?
• What are the risks?
• Which vendor should we choose to help us?

Should we implement contact center self-service?

First, to answer if we should, we need to put ourselves in our customer’s shoes. Do our customers want to self-serve? We can determine this by examining several factors such as demographic data, the reason your customer is calling, and historical CSAT scores.

According to Salesforce State of the Connected Customer, 65% of customers prefer self-service for simple matters.

And if your goal is to alleviate staffing issues by deflecting simple calls, then the answer to our question is a resounding “yes, we should implement self-service.”

Is contact center self-service worth it?

To recap, we already learned the customers prefer self-service for simple matters. And we can also deduce that if we deflect simple matters away from agents, we can realize staffing benefits. But we can also reduce agent burn-out by empowering agents to focus on more complex and mentally rich activities. If customer service agents are empowered and challenged, in a healthy way, we can hypothesize that agent turnover could decrease.

What are the risks?

The greatest risk in implementing self-service is not implementing it at all. By ignoring self-service options, companies are at risk of being left behind. The Salesforce State of Service report states that High Performers are 81% more likely than underperformers to incentivize agents to upsell. And Salesforce State of the Connected Customer found that 80% of customers believe the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services

Here is the good news, implementing self-service is easier than it has ever been in the past. And as we have discussed, it’s well worth it. Now, the big question.

What software should we use?

Lastly, once you have found the strategies and use-cases, it’s time to find the best contact center technology for self-service. There are many to choose from – but we advise looking at your phones first, then your system of record.

If you’re looking to find the best contact center technology for self-service  – please reach out to the team at Tech Stack Advising. We can work with you and your team to identify self-service strategies and use-cases, then pair you with the right vendors to help you accomplish your goals. Easily.