Five customer service channels and their impact on EX
As the pandemic pushed businesses online overnight, companies quickly scaled automation and self-service technology like chatbots and knowledge based FAQs to deflect and resolve employee support issues. However, IT teams have a big opportunity to go beyond resolving tech requests and make it a delightful exchange that deepens relationships across the business. Companies are also rethinking employee service as a branding opportunity, using bot deflection for even the simplest conversations and exceeding delight with a human touch.
In this world of ‘anywhere operations’, employees will continue using disparate customer service channels such as email, phone, and chat to reach their IT teams. Despite disparate channels, employees want a consistent service experience irrespective of the channel(s) they choose for engagement. However, some customer support channels fare better than others in employees’ service experience.
Pros and cons of the top customer service channels:
1. Email
Email continues to reign as the preferred channel of choice. According to the FBR 2022, 66% of end-users prefer to raise IT tickets and/or contact IT support via email. Email support is favorable due to its ease of use, convenience, and familiarity with end-users and service desk agents.
Pros:
- Agents can work on multiple conversations at the same time.
- End users who don’t have time to talk on the phone or walk up to the front desk can communicate via email and check their emails whenever convenient.
Cons:
- Unlike chatbots or self-service portals, email takes longer for issues to be resolved as email is a delayed medium of communication.
- Email is not suitable for all support needs. Some technical issues require a lot of back and forth communication which won’t be suitable via email.
2. Chat
Chat adoption is minimal despite it providing the best IT support experience. Service desks enabling chat as a customer service channel for end-users can provide faster responses (4.82 hours), take the least time to resolve queries (9.15 hours), resolve issues in the first interaction (91%), and on average, keep up their resolution SLA and first response SLA percent. When IT tickets are raised via chat, all seven service desk KPIs see a significant improvement, thereby increasing overall customer satisfaction.
Pros:
- Chatbots are available 24*7 regardless of day or night. This way, your end users can get instant responses to their queries without waiting for an agent to write back to them.
- Enabling chatbots results in quicker responses, faster resolution, and assign times. First contact resolution (FCR) improves by at least 4.29% when chatbots are enabled across all organization sizes.
Cons:
- Chatbots offer limited functionality that prevents end-users from getting the resolution in the first interaction.
- Because of their limited functionality, customers can get frustrated when the conversations run in circles due to the limited database.
3. Self-service portals
A need for optimized self-service portals is evident from figures in the FBR 2022. Although 28% of all service desk tickets are raised via self-serve portals, end-users experience a longer wait time (25+ hours on average) to resolve their issues. The FCR is also recorded below the benchmark at 66%. This calls for an effective and optimized portal for end-users that builds familiarity, convenience, and automation into the service request processes.
Pros:
- You can provide information and services in the self-service portal where users from different teams can help themselves anytime, anywhere.
- You can also reduce agent workload by enabling users to look up solutions from the knowledge base, items from the service catalog, and even tickets they’ve raised in the past.
Cons:
- If not done well, self-service portals can lead to poor performance and end-user frustration.
- Similar to email and chat, self-service portals may not be suitable for all end-user queries. Some issues will require human intervention.
4. Phone
Despite being traditional support, the FBR 2022 findings reveal phone as one of the top three customer service channels. This stems from the fact that telephone conversations have a human element attached to the support experience, making it easier for the agent and the end-user to communicate better.
Pros:
- Agents can better communicate with the end-users as they can easily assess an end user’s emotions.
- Even complex problems can be solved quickly over interaction with the agent instead of writing a lengthy email or talking to a bot.
Cons:
- Does not support 24*7 availability unless organizations have global customer service support.
- Not all demographics prefer phones, as the younger demographic prefers to chat, email, and channels of customer service to reach IT support.
5. Walkup
Whether IT agents like it or not, people will walk up to the IT front desk and ask you questions instead of raising a ticket on the self-service portal or reading up a solutions article from the knowledge base to resolve the issue themselves. One way to improve your service desk experience is to empower end-users to raise tickets on their own. This way, you let your employees help themselves by raising tickets directly from the support portal, allowing them to easily track the ticket progress.
Pros:
- Human interaction is at its finest via walkup as it gives both the end-user and the agent better clarity over the issue at hand.
- Little to no wait time as an agent would be readily available to take up an end user’s query.
Cons:
- Walkups put a strain on the agent workload when recurring issues take place.
- It does not support 24*7 availability and only operates during business hours.
Final thoughts
In a world where the ‘anywhere operations’ model is slowly becoming a norm, where businesses can be accessed and enabled anywhere — where customers, employers, and partners operate, the onus then lies on IT to continue implementing various technologies to improve existing systems. Strong, reliable, and uninterrupted IT services and practices enable organizations to stay competitive and help the world become digitally resilient to future large-scale disruptions.
To offer a better way for agents to collaborate with end-users, customer-centric service desks should act as a platform to automate tasks or processes to create efficiency and a seamless service experience. If you’d like to read more about popular customer service channels, check out the Freshservice Benchmark Report here.
