According to research firm Gartner, 65 percent of self-service interactions currently escalate beyond the Web to an agent. In other words, a customer has come to your website and is unable to complete his or her transaction, and thus needs to call your organization for help.
Assuming this statistic is accurate, I’m dumbfounded. The whole purpose of self-service applications is, well, to allow one to serve oneself…without the need for human intervention.
Amazon, of course, has this down to a science. In all my years of using Amazon (and it must be easily over a decade now) I’ve never once had to pick up the phone to call them. And I’ve probably only contacted them twice in all that time via email. It simply works.
Are your self-service pages working? Are you sure? Do you keep track of metrics to measure their effectiveness (e.g., tracking all incoming calls and marking those that involved someone trying to do something on your website)?
If it’s a self-service page, only the website and the customer should be involved. How do you rate?
Insightful question, Wes! In the association market, I’m seeing more and more organizations recognize the member experience limitations of the AMS. I met with an organization earlier this week and the Director of Member Services said, “A membership database will always be a membership database. Our members are ready for more.” Associations are turning to member-engagement platforms (or customer solutions built by web design agencies) that sit on top of their AMS and utilize their member data to provide a more rich, interactive and social member experience. Associations recognize the benefits of bringing together their self-service functions with online community software, blogs, forums, listservs, event management, wikis, file libraries, and other collaboration tools. They are able to both raise the level of member engagement and bring down costs by driving members to serve themselves online.
Josh, thanks for the comment.
Was doing some research and ran across this post — crucial topic when we’re all becoming increasingly reliant on the Web. Simply having the back-end technology — the AMS — can be a tease for association executives who often spend very large sums on the database and related applications, and then skimp on the information architecture and interactive design of their websites. Then there’s the flip side, whereby an association and their Web design team is hamstrung the limited functionality of the AMS vendor’s API… Bottom line, association executives don’t skimp on the Web strategy — know thy site visitor and business!