In a recent study on self-service in businesses, Metrigy, a research firm focused on customer experience and contact centers, found that a full 100% had plans for integrating self-service. Forty-three percent were implementing self-service right now, another 36% had plans to implement it in 2023 and beyond, and the other 21% were evaluating options. Companies have caught on to the urgency in enabling self-service for their success. So the next question is: what are the essential elements for outstanding self-service in today’s digital world?
Five Components of Self-Service
The first component is the content management system. These are the applications that link the centralized content to applications which agents and bots can use and interact with. They are also critical for updating and editing the content as needed in the knowledge base.
The second component is virtual assistants. These are bots that do triage during self-service interactions, helping customers to get the resolution they want as fast as possible, and escalating the issue to a live agent when needed.
The third component is customer journey applications. They insert guidance to customers as their customer journey progresses, such as through a pop-up chatbot or explanatory comment.
The fourth component is search engine optimization (SEO). This enables quick, accurate answers to queries performed by customers in search engines. The querants can directly access your curated knowledge without even needing to go through one of your designated digital channels.
Lastly, there is the core feature, and the one that communicates with the entire system—the self-service knowledge base. This is the central repository of content about your products and services that is used to inform your agents and self-service applications. The positioning of the knowledge base is what makes it so important—it works together with all of the other components of self-service, and agents.
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But the incredible thing about both agents and self-service applications using a central knowledge base is that self-service learns from its interactions. It becomes smarter, learning how to better handle more customer intents and questions, including learning from the best human agents so that self-service applications can perform like them.
It does this with the power of AI. Beth Schultz from Metrigy says, “Any company that’s really serious about transforming with self-service really needs to start thinking about how best to deploy AI. More than 92% of companies say AI is somewhat if not extremely important to them.” In short, if AI is given more data, it can automate more. AI learns from all the customer interactions that are fed into it, and then it can learn which customer intents can be automated and then handled in self-service. Customers get the self-service functionality they crave, while human agents are reserved for special cases that require their best skills—their empathy and understanding of complexity.
If the knowledge base is the core of self-service, AI is the smart engine that deploys its content throughout the self-service ecosystem, makes the systems run efficiently, and keeps the knowledge base up to date.
Enlighten XO for Outstanding Self-Service
Uniquely using data from historical voice and chat interactions, Enlighten XO improves self-service from day one. Enlighten XO is an AI-powered solution that analyzes omnichannel conversational data, and immediately identifies customer intents and corresponding automation opportunities. The result: self-service applications handle more customer traffic, customers realize faster resolutions, and businesses provide better CX.
Beth Schultz of Metrigy made the key recommendation that automation is the key to self-service ease. Enlighten XO seamlessly does just that. The solution’s AI is purpose-built to gather data, learning from every interaction, to ensure self-service channels reflect the latest customer needs and business processes. Enlighten XO automates knowing what to build using historical conversational data to understand customer intents, to prioritize the top self-service opportunities, to optimize agent tasks, and design the ideal conversational flows. Then, Enlighten XO automates self-service coding with AutoFlow to pull data into SmartAssist, eliminating tedious coding. Then, to manage ongoing changes to business needs and processes, Enlighten XO continues to learn from the latest customer interactions.
Digital channels don’t sleep, and customers want 24/7 access to answers, Enlighten XO automates intelligence to put your bots in touch with reality.
Interested in hearing more about how Enlighten XO can make your CX soar? Check out the NICE Talk with Beth Schultz, VP of Research & Principal Analyst of Metrigy and me to hear all the details!