In the last year, most things have moved remote and online as far as customer service is concerned. Agents working from home will be the norm from now on, and the customers would want to get in touch with an agent only when necessary.
The contact centers have discovered that moving their agents to work from home hasn’t affected their productivity, and they continue to provide world-class service to their customers.
Customers still demand accessible, high-quality support, but the liking towards speaking with a live agent has come down considerably in the last few quarters.
With face-to-face interactions coming down, most organizations have migrated to multi-channel and omnichannel operations. They are looking at migrating 60% of their customer service to be handled by intelligent apps and automated bots that would be offered as self-service.
The self-service world
What do you need to do to make the self-service world up and running?
You need to get the technology in place and integrate it with your enterprise systems, which would help solve your customer issues.
The most important thing is agents’ ability to access your enterprise systems from a remote location – cloud access or VPN access. Once this is done, look at having automated IVR, chatbots with natural language processing, web self-service, FAQs, asynchronous messaging, SMS service lines, among others.
An example
I use a broadband connection at home. Whenever I have Internet connectivity issues, I was initially calling their customer service and registering a complaint. Once I register the complaint, I get an SMS with a complaint number. Then a support engineer calls me up to understand the issue. After a point in time, they provided me with an app to easily register my complaint.
Once the pandemic set in, they migrated the entire support part of the app into an intelligent application. There is no need for you to speak to anyone as all possible combinations are available in the chatbot itself.
Though it is only a rule-based engine, you do not have to talk to anyone, as every possible combination is captured as a part of the chatbot. They have all the options like:
- Internet not working at all
- Internet access is slow
- I am not able to access a few sites
- Whenever there is a power shutdown, and upon resumption, my Internet doesn’t work
- Router configuration
- A few others
You provide every information needed for the support engineer to address your issue within a minute and with just a few clicks. You get your ticket number with the approximate resolution times.
I can’t be happier.
This is a straightforward example that I have quoted. This is only the tip of the iceberg on what is possible with self-service. Imagine building intelligence to your self-service, and you would be laughing your way to the bank with happy, satisfied, and loyal customers.
