7 Best Call Center Practices for Implementing Self Service
Since the demands of customers are growing exponentially, it has become vital for call centers to adopt transformational tools to serve their needs. Customers want contact center agents to be available 24×7 to solve their problems quickly and efficiently. This sounds challenging, right? But not if you have implemented best practices of customer self-service for maintaining a healthy clientele. Self-service technology, a kind of life support, is helping many contact centers to get in touch with their customers instantly. As a result, customers do not have to wait in long queues for getting their replies.
Read this blog further to know the best practices for implementing self-service in your call center.
What is Customer Self-Service and What Are its Benefits?
Customer self-service as an automatic support system is there to lighten the workload of call center agents. It allows customers to find solutions to their queries before actually getting connected with a human agent. IVR technology, chatbots, help center blog forums, and FAQs are some prominent tools that act as self-service tools in modern call centers. A typical self-service tool contains the issues that are commonly faced by customers. Such inquiries are easy to be managed through chatbots or AI-powered agent assistants.
Using self-service can decrease the call volume as customers might get a resolution while accessing the automatic system before getting connected to a live agent. Scripted menu options will lead the customers to desired places where they will be heard personally. Besides, self-service tools can lead to high agent satisfaction as the work of agents is streamlined. Likewise, it can handle simpler interactions like scheduling an appointment or knowing the status of the order. Removing such tasks from the agent’s shoulders makes them available to focus on more complex issues that require close attention.
Today, call centers apply a mix of agent-assisted tools and self-service options to implement a customer-centric design and operational discipline to support a good customer experience.
Call Center Best Practices for Implementing Self-Service
After you have identified the self-service tools, now you have to determine the best practices for working on the right ways to meet your customer requirements.
Let’s look at these practices in detail:
-
Provide Self-Service on Multiple Channels
Your call center must satisfy the urgency of customers by providing visibility into all channels. Maintaining cohesion between chatbots, FAQ page, and a live agent is highly essential, making the problem resolved fast. Also, your agents can track customer interactions more effectively across channels that make communication relevant and personalized.
-
Identify Common Customer Issues
In general, customers have numerous queries which might be commonly faced by customers on a daily basis. Identify those queries and decide the interaction point for each question you have identified. For example, customers usually have return policy-related questions which you can mention in FAQ for saving their time and agents’ time as well.
-
Review Support Tickets
Planning a self-service strategy can include reviewing the support tickets as it can provide you with customer insights. You can get the information through routine notes taken by agents, tracking the details of short inquiries, or getting inspiration from competitors’ social media accounts. This daily practice can help you get valuable insights into customer problems so that you can plan your FAQs and video tutorials accordingly.
-
Make it Easy to Find
In a call center, customers will easily switch to another channel if they cannot find answers to their questions. Make your self-service content visible by including a support section on your website or in a navigation banner so that customers will land directly on your self-service page.
-
Seamless Transition from Self-Service to Live Agent
Sometimes, customers get frustrated in going through IVR options because they want to explain their issue to a live agent. Allowing a seamless transition to a live agent when needed is the part of best practice that you need to implement for a self-service strategy.
-
Provide Options
Keeping customer preferences in mind, call center professionals must keep the option of easy availability of customer service agents. Also, include as many options in the self-service content so as to cover all the possible issues of customers.
-
Measure Success
After that you have successfully implemented your self-service strategy, you should now measure the strategy. You have to analyze whether your strategy is meeting the goals by comparing revenues, profits, and satisfaction scores. This will indicate the success or failure of your self-service content. If the goals are failed to meet, then you can modify the strategy and plan the content as per need.
Conclusion
Self-service technology is not emerging as the tool to replace humans, but to simplify the workload of agents. Call centers need to apply this strategy by recognizing the common issues so that agents don’t have to deal with repetitive or mundane tasks. Thus, it is a worthy investment made by high-volume call centers which can bring time savings and improved productivity.
Since the demands of customers are growing exponentially, it has become vital for call centers to adopt transformational tools to serve their needs. Customers want contact center agents to be available 24×7 to solve their problems quickly and efficiently. This sounds challenging, right? But not if you have implemented best practices of customer self-service for maintaining a healthy clientele. Self-service technology, a kind of life support, is helping many contact centers to get in touch with their customers instantly. As a result, customers do not have to wait in long queues for getting their replies.
Read this blog further to know the best practices for implementing self-service in your call center.
What is Customer Self-Service and What Are its Benefits?
Customer self-service as an automatic support system is there to lighten the workload of call center agents. It allows customers to find solutions to their queries before actually getting connected with a human agent. IVR technology, chatbots, help center blog forums, and FAQs are some prominent tools that act as self-service tools in modern call centers. A typical self-service tool contains the issues that are commonly faced by customers. Such inquiries are easy to be managed through chatbots or AI-powered agent assistants.
Using self-service can decrease the call volume as customers might get a resolution while accessing the automatic system before getting connected to a live agent. Scripted menu options will lead the customers to desired places where they will be heard personally. Besides, self-service tools can lead to high agent satisfaction as the work of agents is streamlined. Likewise, it can handle simpler interactions like scheduling an appointment or knowing the status of the order. Removing such tasks from the agent’s shoulders makes them available to focus on more complex issues that require close attention.
Today, call centers apply a mix of agent-assisted tools and self-service options to implement a customer-centric design and operational discipline to support a good customer experience.
Call Center Best Practices for Implementing Self-Service
After you have identified the self-service tools, now you have to determine the best practices for working on the right ways to meet your customer requirements.
Let’s look at these practices in detail:
-
Provide Self-Service on Multiple Channels
Your call center must satisfy the urgency of customers by providing visibility into all channels. Maintaining cohesion between chatbots, FAQ page, and a live agent is highly essential, making the problem resolved fast. Also, your agents can track customer interactions more effectively across channels that make communication relevant and personalized.
-
Identify Common Customer Issues
In general, customers have numerous queries which might be commonly faced by customers on a daily basis. Identify those queries and decide the interaction point for each question you have identified. For example, customers usually have return policy-related questions which you can mention in FAQ for saving their time and agents’ time as well.
-
Review Support Tickets
Planning a self-service strategy can include reviewing the support tickets as it can provide you with customer insights. You can get the information through routine notes taken by agents, tracking the details of short inquiries, or getting inspiration from competitors’ social media accounts. This daily practice can help you get valuable insights into customer problems so that you can plan your FAQs and video tutorials accordingly.
-
Make it Easy to Find
In a call center, customers will easily switch to another channel if they cannot find answers to their questions. Make your self-service content visible by including a support section on your website or in a navigation banner so that customers will land directly on your self-service page.
-
Seamless Transition from Self-Service to Live Agent
Sometimes, customers get frustrated in going through IVR options because they want to explain their issue to a live agent. Allowing a seamless transition to a live agent when needed is the part of best practice that you need to implement for a self-service strategy.
-
Provide Options
Keeping customer preferences in mind, call center professionals must keep the option of easy availability of customer service agents. Also, include as many options in the self-service content so as to cover all the possible issues of customers.
-
Measure Success
After that you have successfully implemented your self-service strategy, you should now measure the strategy. You have to analyze whether your strategy is meeting the goals by comparing revenues, profits, and satisfaction scores. This will indicate the success or failure of your self-service content. If the goals are failed to meet, then you can modify the strategy and plan the content as per need.
Conclusion
Self-service technology is not emerging as the tool to replace humans, but to simplify the workload of agents. Call centers need to apply this strategy by recognizing the common issues so that agents don’t have to deal with repetitive or mundane tasks. Thus, it is a worthy investment made by high-volume call centers which can bring time savings and improved productivity.
