Self-Service Strategy

The Customer Experience

Two key concepts that are fundamental to the Consortium’s work are the Value Erosion and Value Add Models. These models address the dynamics of maximizing customer value realization from our products and services and provide additional context around our efforts to measure channel success.

To summarize: value erosion happens when a customer encounters an issue. We want to minimize value erosion by facilitating customer success in finding a resolution as early in their pursuit of a resolution as possible. Customer service and support has focused on the value erosion model for years, but we have an opportunity to look at how we add value. Can we increase the customer’s capability, reduce their effort, and create a pleasant experience without them experiencing an issue? These can be important components of a successful self-service interaction.

Discoverability

It doesn't matter how much content we have available to requestors for self-service - if it is not in their context, they are not likely to be able to find it. This re-enforces the need for capture in the workflow.  As we discussed in the Capture practice, it is very difficult to re-create the user's perception of the issue if we are not users, and if we know the answer.  Creating articles in the requestor's context requires that we capture their context or experience when they first express it. The second factor for both findability and readability is structure. KCS proposes a simple structure for knowledge articles which helps search engines and AI tools be more effective and improves the users experience.  The last key element in discoverability is rich environment statements. The environment statements in the article helps the precision and confidence that we have the correct article for our issue.   

Availability

How many articles are visible externally, and how fast?  The primary enabler of success with self-service is volume and speed.  The goal is to get as much as we know into the self-service channel as fast as we can.  For requestors to be successful with self-service, articles have to be making it to a Validated state (depending on the business rules) with audience set to External. In the early phases of the KCS adoption, this is driven by reuse.  Articles that are reused internally are moved externally quickly. In the Optimize and Innovate phase, we want to be validating and moving externally as much as we can in the moment.  The model of reuse driving validation and external visibility should be a temporary state, because we know from member experience that reuse rates in a digital self-service experience are different from reuse rates in an assisted model.  It turns out that requestors will use a good self-service model 10 times more often than they will call us.  An issue that one requestor raised but has never been reused internally might be used externally a lot; other requestors would use the information, but would not bother to contact us for an answer.  Our goal is to get most of what we know into the self-service model as quickly as we can.

When do we turn on and promote self-service? If our KCS articles are complementary to content we already have in the self-service channel, then an incremental approach might work.  If we are building a new self-service knowledge base, when do we have enough content in the knowledge base to ensure a 40-50% success rate? One key indicator of sufficient volume in the knowledge base is when the reuse rate of articles intersects with the create rate for a given domain. Plotting the team's create rate against the reuse rate over time gives us a sense of how often people or machines find something useful in the knowledge base (reuse) versus how often they are creating new articles. When the lines cross it means that they are re-using as often as they are creating, or 50% of the time they are linking to an existing article.  It is now time to enable and promote the self-service model.

The point at which the create activity equals the reuse activity indicates there is sufficient content in the knowledge base to enable external requestors to find something useful 50% of the time.

Three caveats: first, the linking quality for the domain needs to be at 90% or above and the linking rate has to be in the 60-80% range.  This means the internal users are using the knowledge base (creating, re-using, and improving articles) in the problem-solving process a high percentage of the time.  Second, articles must be making it to External visibility/audience. And third, the content has to be in the requestors' context which reinforces the finadability factor. 

Access

Designing access to self-service to be obvious and low effort is another key to engaging the audience in self-service. Making the self-service mechanism easy to find for the requestors is not trivial.  As mentioned earlier, integrating access to self-service knowledge into the user interface for the product is ideal but typically requires a sizable investment. If you are using a digital self-service experience it is important to make it easy to find by the audience you intend to serve. 

Navigation

Research has shown that "no dead ends" is the number one factor for users in deciding if they would use self-service again. "No dead ends" means once the requestor has started the problem-solving process in the self-service channel, they don't have to stop and start over if they don't find something helpful.  An example of "no dead ends" in the self-service interface is the click-to-submit (create an incident) or click-to-chat functionality. If the self-service model isn't helpful, there is a graceful transition to the assisted model. Because the self-service activities of the requestor are captured and made available to the responder, the requestor doesn't feel like they are starting over.  An in-depth research project at Microsoft found that even when customers were unsuccessful with self-service, they were far more willing to go back to try it again if there were no dead ends.

Another key factor in requestors willingness to use self-service is the availability of multiple ways to find things.  People use different methods of finding information based on a number of factors.  Options for finding articles include:

• A list of product specific, frequently asked questions or "top ten" articles
• An index or table of contents
• Basic or keyword search
• Advanced search
• AI-powered tools such as generative answers

The other design criteria is understanding the audience's intent in using self-service.  What are the top three to five reasons people use the self-service mechanism?  

Marketing

The "build it and they will come" model doesn't work for self-service.  Once we have taken care of the first four success criteria: volume and speed, findability, and access/navigation, we have to think about how to get requestors to use self-service. Trying to change our requestors' behavior is not trivial.  Engaging a marketing specialist is recommended.  Get advice from those who understand messaging and communications and build a marketing plan.

In addition to a marketing plan, below are some tactics that have been successfully used to encourage their customers to use self-service. We offer these as observations, not recommendations; these tactics must be evaluated based on the business and customer engagement model.

• Recorded message promoting self-service (when requestors call for support)
• Extended hold times - make self-service the path of least resistance and best results
• Turn off the phones - make self-service the only path. Requestors can only open an incident via the digital experience (we must have high confidence that the requestors' self-service experience will be positive)
• Co-browsing - as a responder solves issues, the requestor can see the responder's desktop and watch them search (teaching them to use the self-service tools) 
  When sending a requestor a resolution, send them the link to the article in the online knowledge base (promotes exposure)
• Provide citations with generated answers. Visible references to information available in the knowledge base lead the requestor to further exploration.

Requestor use of and success with self-service becomes two critical measures to assess the success and health of KCS in the Optimize and Innovate phase. If the articles are not making it to the self-service model or if customers are not using self-service, the KCS implementation will stall.

For some examples of good support digital experiences see the Association of Support Professionals (ASP) list of Ten Best Web Support Sites. The ASP conducts an annual assessment of support sites and the criteria they use is available on their web site.  It is a great collection of attributes to use in designing your self-service support mechanism.