Support Insider Zero Contact Resolution in Self-service Strategy

 

SUPPORT INSIDER

Could Zero Contact Resolution(ZCR) be the next game changer in customer support?

As customers demand faster responses and effortless resolutions, should you incorporate ZCRs in your customer service strategy for the upcoming year?

Read on to find out.

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Imagine there are no support tickets,

It's easy if you try.

No unresolved queues below us,

Above us, only CSATs rise.

John Lennon might not have sung these exact words, but I’m sure anyone in customer service can absolutely relate. Most customer service leaders would be ecstatic to see their ticket queues empty with customer satisfaction at record-high levels.

Wouldn’t it be great if customer service teams could anticipate and predict every customer query or issue so that customers could find answers to any queries they might have without having to get in touch with human agents at all? The state of nirvana, isn’t it?

Enter Zero Contact Resolution (ZCR) —a vision for the future of customer self-service— where customers have a variety of ways, including FAQ sections, community forums, chatbots, in-app prompts, video tutorials, and many more to resolve issues completely by themselves without reaching out to customer service agents. Makes life a whole lot easier for both customers and agents.

However, as simple as it sounds on paper, is ZCR achievable in customer service? 

Our short answer—No. 

Zero contact resolution in self-service strategy Zero contact resolution in self-service strategy

Zero contact resolution is the result of a well-oiled, intelligent self-service engine that relies on technologies and tools to satisfy innumerable customer queries without any human intervention.

And to be honest, how robust and smart are the self-service options today? Data from our research and customer service speed test reveals that companies still have a long way to go when it comes to implementing effective self-service options. 

51% of businesses are not confident that customers will find the right information when they search through their self-service repository, and 12.53% have no knowledge resources to support customers in the first place. Let’s dive deeper into the results, and you’ll know why the prospects of chasing ZCR and being successful are bleak.

Zero Contact Resolution: A mirage in customer self-service

We recently ran a customer service speed test, about the current state of self-service options in businesses today. We heard back from 400 respondents, 64% of whom belonged to a customer service function within their organization. 

They reported using the following self-service channels to help customers.

 

customer self service test customer self service test

 

Many of our survey respondents reported some combination of the above solutions, with FAQs and how-to guides being used by 15.53% of businesses and 13% relying solely on FAQs. Another 13.25% of respondents had a knowledge base with FAQs, how-to guides, and video resources together.

Respondents who use some form of knowledge resources showed a promising trend. 46% were confident that their customers would be able to navigate to their self-service portal within two clicks at any point of their journey, and 49% were confident that customers would be offered the right article based on their searches.

While it’s great that so many businesses feel that they’re providing the right resources in the event that their customers need to search for an answer, chatbots are becoming widely popular in easing the search for information and amping up the customer self-serve model. 

Training your AI-powered customer service chatbots to understand a user’s search intent and serve up the right information will reduce the dependency on service reps to a great extent. 

So how are companies faring when it comes to implementing chatbots in their customer self-service strategy?

55% of survey respondents said they did not use chatbots at all as part of their customer service strategy. Of the 44% who did use chatbots, a full 42% were not confident that their bots could resolve common low-level queries for customers.

These circumstances make it pretty challenging to achieve ZCR.

Worse still is the fact that 7.7% of respondents reported having no form of self-service or chatbots enabled, leaving the onus on customers to reach out whenever they have a problem. 

It seems that more than a few companies have been slow to acknowledge the rising importance—and helpfulness—of tools that enable self-service. 

chatbot in self-service strategy for ZCR chatbot in self-service strategy for ZCR

The threefold benefits of a solid customer self-service strategy

While ZCR doesn’t seem achievable right now, businesses today need to get over their reluctance to invest in robust and advanced self-service options. Empowering customers to solve their own problems doesn’t just create a better experience for the customer; it also benefits companies. 

If done right, the positive impact of a good self-service strategy is felt across resolution times, CSAT scores, and ticket volumes.

1. Lowered ticket volumes

We studied data from our customer base and found that, on average, companies that offered some form of self-service had 35% lower ticket volumes than those that didn’t. Reducing ticket volume eliminates much of your agents’ repetitive tasks and ultimately allows them to focus on larger, more complex issues.

2. Higher customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores

Our recent ‘Customer Service Benchmark Report 2022’, released after analyzing over 1.1 billion unique support interactions, reveals that businesses who had set up a self-service portal saw a 3.97% gain in CSAT scores compared to those who didn’t. When customers are happy and satisfied when they’re able to find the right answers to their questions in less number of steps.

3. Improved resolution times

The same benchmark report also found that on implementing a self-service portal, issue resolution within SLAs improved by 3.57%, and tickets resolved within the first agent response went up by 6.36%.

benefits of a self-service strategy benefits of a self-service strategy

Businesses like OneFile — a leading, UK-based Edtech company— bask in the success of a well-implemented self-service strategy. The online apprenticeship software provider set up their self-service portal on Freshdesk with over 200 articles, 20 videos, and recorded webinars. They also have a buzzing community forum where they’ve mined more than 300 ideas based on forum interactions in a year. 

Adam Fogo, head of the customer service department at OneFile, explains how their self-service strategy is pivotal in ticket deflection.

“The knowledge base articles and user guides in the support portal get around 7000 views per month. Even if only 10% of visitors find the answers that they were looking for, that's potentially 700 fewer tickets than we would otherwise have had to handle”, says Adam. Their ticket ratio has improved from 3.66 to 1.13 tickets per 100 logged-in users since the adoption of customer self-service. 

As you can see, both customers and businesses alike have an elevated service experience after executing self-service channels. 

It’s time to strengthen your customer self-service strategy

All said and done, unfortunately, the reality for the customer support function—at least for the next five years—is that human agents will continue to handle support tickets, while we continue to look for ways to minimize ticket volumes, rather than no-contact or zero contact resolutions.

However, you can start bridging the gap between reality and the dream of ZCRs by slowly and steadily ramping up self-service options to contain issue resolution within the customer self-serve model.

Ultimately, providing good self-service is a competitive advantage, and companies have to meet the evolving customer expectations of speedy resolutions with a solid self-service approach. Those who don’t may not be quite as helpful as they’d like to think they are.

If you enjoyed this article, we've got more coming your way. The Support Insider series is a collection of insights we've arrived at after analyzing over 107 million customer interactions and observing patterns that lead to greater customer satisfaction and efficient customer service.

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