In today’s customer-centric world, being merely productive isn’t sufficient. Besides evaluating your team’s performance, you need to also track your customers’ feelings about your product, services, and experiences.
Importance of Measuring Customer Experience
Though measuring customer experience is crucial for staying ahead of competition, choosing the right metrics from a range of available ones may be overwhelming. NPS (Net Promoter Score), CES (Customer Effort Score), CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score), churn rate, first contact resolution, average handle time and many more vie for their due spot.
Customer Self-Service – The Perfect Solution for Zero Contact Resolution
With the advent of AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP), customer self-service offers the ideal solution for great customer interactions, 24x7. Whether it is an extensive set of FAQs on your website or a Self-Assist deflection tool, your customers get answers to their queries and issues within seconds. Ultimately, the best support is no support for any company.
Here are some key points that elaborate on why self-service satisfies customers every time:
- Self-service is faster, hence ideal for today’s customer who faces a time
- It empowers customers to take charge of the way they use the service.
- As the customer learns what they want and how to access it, there is less room for error.
- It creates a more personal experience.
What’s more, customer self-service benefits also include fewer tickets and less load on your customer support representatives who can offer personalized services to those customers who need deeper help - earning you enhanced customer experience and extended loyalty. But with all these benefits, evaluating your self-service success could get tricky.
Customer Experience Measurement Framework to Measure Self Service Success
Statistics reveal that a mere 28% of consumers consider phone as their primary support channel out of the whopping 72% that are accessing your business website. In the absence of efficient self-service, these customers might engage in live chat, send you an e-mail, or worse – can bounce to your competitor’s website to avail better self-service. With the right customer experience metrics, you not only identify your strengths, but also recognize the opportunities to enhance your processes to offer better customer experience.
Knowledge base views
Monitoring knowledge base views gives you an insight into how frequently your customers attempt to self-serve to find answers on their own. The aim is to get rid of, or repurpose, articles with very low volumes (and require considerable time to keep updated). If your knowledge base gets thousands of hits in a month, target the articles with single- or double-digit hits. You might end up saving significant time that you used to invest in editing and updating these resources. AI-based tools like Self Assist and Agent Assist that work with KB’s can help companies understand how good their knowledge base is from both a customer and agent perspective.
AnswerIQ improves the quality of an organization’s support program by:
Increasing First Contact Resolution (FCR): Suggesting content for knowledge base articles to be used by agents to resolve tickets in a single interaction.
Improving the quality of the Knowledgebase and Macro library: AI can point to the most useful articles/macros, those used most often, those used least often, trends, and areas for improvement.
Identifying Content Gaps and Redundancies: AI will pinpoint where there is a noticeable gap in knowledge articles or macros. It will also help to eliminate duplicate or stale content within an organization’s library that causes agents to be confused.
- Pages viewed per session – Pages viewed per session tell you which information your customers required, and which articles need to be improved. If you see that your customers are visiting certain articles frequently, yet you are receiving a significant number of calls or emails about those topics, then you know for sure that these articles require a rework. Always pay special attention to those resources that get marginal views but help resolve your customers’ problems. Accordingly, reorganize your help center - putting frequently asked topics in the spotlight.
- Number of positive votes – You get to know about your most helpful articles by letting customers cast votes for them. Improve and republish your poorly performing articles. Track publishing dates to check for changes in metrics. Those that fail to acquire positive votes despite several revisions obviously lag in terms of being able to generate a good and helpful experience for the customer.
- Views to submitted tickets ratio - The ratio indicates how successful your self-service is and how many inbound tickets you can It shows whether your customers are prioritizing your self-service help instead of contacting your support team through other channels. You will want most of your customers to seek out self-service over talking to your agents - it can reduce your cost significantly.
- Bounce rates – Bounce rates help you understand whether your customers are reading your content or simply clicking off the page. Though you can reduce bounce rates by providing intuitive navigation and menus, user-friendly language, and table of contents, high bounce rates can also mean that your content is not relevant to your users or they don’t trust the content.
- New returning users – You can study the number of new vs. returning users to find the proportion of customers in search of self-service. The higher volume of returning users can imply that your consumers are unaware that your support center exists while a higher volume of new users with a few returning ones can indicate that they are not finding your self-service useful and turning to alternate support channels.
- Support funnel – Support funnel is the customers’ collective access to the knowledge base for self-assistance, customer support ticket assistance, issue resolution, and escalated support assistance and is an indicator of the ease of customer experience. CES (Customer Effort Score) at the point of self-service and after customer service is the indicator and you should aim for a CES 6 or higher.
Some Ways to Enhance Customer experience Through Self Service
You can improve customer experience not only with monitoring the metrics, as mentioned above, but also with these simple tips to sharpen your customer support self-service:
- Use a smart virtual agent like AI-based self service.
- Make self-service a core mobile app feature.
- Set up a strong knowledge base for your virtual agent.
- Provide efficient navigation, menus, and easy language.
- Mine customer queries for insights.
Self-service is vital for today’s businesses and great customer experience is a necessity for thriving in this ecosystem. Using the right metrics, your business can achieve this balance to surge ahead of the competition.
AnswerIQ leverages the most advanced NLP techniques, artificial intelligence, and sophisticated algorithms to design efficient self-service tools that offer the ideal customer experience. Sign up for an AIQ Demo to learn more about how to enhance the customer experience through self-service.
