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Measuring Self-Service Success (2027)
The goal of a service organization is to improve customer success and productivity with our products and services. To do this successfully, we must understand the customer's activity and experience.
Historically, service organizations began by focusing on on managing the cost of incoming calls and emails, but the scope of customer engagement has expanded way beyond these types of assisted interactions. Especially in environments where Knowledge-Centered Service (KCS®) is practiced, we must look at the value created for the organization in the context of the entirety of customer demand - not just engagement through assisted channels.
Successful delivery of knowledge through self-service and communities has provided business-wide benefits, leading to industry changes in customer engagement strategies and the introduction of a wide array of new tools and technology for content creation, delivery, and measurement.
Understanding Demand
The Customer Demand Model is one of the foundational ideas that identifies the value of knowledge sharing. As Consortium Members gained more visibility into the activity of their customers, it became clear that:
- The volume of questions asked or issues raised in self-service is ten times the demand coming into assisted channels.
- In communities and social media spaces, the demand is thirty times what we see in assisted channels.
- Assisted channels serve less that 3% of the total demand from our customers.
This means we have a huge opportunity to improve customer success and productivity with our products and services. If we leverage what we are learning in the assisted model by publishing that knowledge to other, more easily-accessible channels, we can reduce time and level of effort spent on finding answers to known issues, while making sure our Knowledge Workers are available in the assisted channel to work on new issues.
Greg Oxton describes the Customer Demand Model in this 10 minute video.
Definition of Self-Service
Self-service is the mechanism by which anyone can solve an issue or answer a question without a 1:1 assisted interaction. Historically, the most common form of self-service has been a digital experience offering information such as frequently asked questions and a searchable knowledge base. However, many of the Consortium members are investing in integrating self-service into the user interface for the product, application, or service. This moves the self-service experience from a distinct and separate event to an integrated experience within the product. Additionally, technology vendors are investing in automation that will detect and repair issues or programmatically assist with the resolution of issues. AI also plays a role here, synthesizing answers on-demand or proactively for requestors out of organizational knowledge. Regardless of the approach, self-service success is dependent on knowledge.
For our purposes, self-service interactions are defined as: Information that improves customer success and productivity with our products and services (instructional, troubleshooting, recommendations) where user intent is about solving an issue as opposed to purchase, design, or value-added services.
See Glossary of Terms for more definitions used in this project.
Audience
This work was developed with two audiences in mind:
- The introduction, background and context, executive overview, and assumptions and limitations sections are intended to provide context for practitioners and leadership around why this is important.
- The remainder is guidance for folks who develop and manage the organization’s measurement model.
The Service Engagement Measures Template enables us to articulate the value of an effective customer engagement model beyond the mindset of only focusing on cost-savings or preferences for a single number to measure success. The spreadsheet is designed to be used for an organization to benchmark against itself.
- Glossary of Terms
- Definitions relevant to self-service measures and in the context of customer support.
- Project Acknowledgements
- History and participants.