What’s the latest in the self service realm? On February 15, 2011, the Technology Services Industry Association released a landmark report titled “The Current State of Unassisted Support.” The underlying lesson? Companies are not investing enough in self service to make it effective; you get what you pay for.

Underfunded: Investing in Satisfaction

Consider the following graph showing the cost per interaction for each channel plotted against customer satisfaction:

Deeply interesting stuff, yes? As you can see, the amount of money spent correlates very highly with customer satisfaction. Field service tops in satisfaction, but the interaction cost is nearly 4 times the next most expensive channel. Phone had a fairly high score but was second most expensive. Interestingly, self-service had the most drastically low spending for any of the channels, at only 6 cents its 650 times less than the next least expensive Web Chat channel. Note that, when reading the labels from right to left, they move in roughly a least-to-most interaction direction. You can imagine a frustrated customer moving through each channel from the right to the left as he/she attempts to get a problem solved. The sooner it’s resolved, the lower the total costs.

By investing more in self service solutions, businesses might be able to improve customer satisfaction to levels more in line with the other channels. Budgeting only $0.06 to help a customer for each interaction looks tiny relative to the other methods of interaction.

Looking at this data another way:

• Field service costs about $172 per point of customer satisfaction
• Phone costs about $37 per point of customer satisfaction
• Web chat costs about $10 per point of customer satisfaction
• Email costs about $19 per point of customer satisfaction
• Self-service costs about $0.02 per point of customer satisfaction

Of course, there’s flaws in breaking down the data that way. That cost model assumes a linear relationship when its likely that costs aren’t constant at each level of customer service. The law of diminishing returns makes each additional dollar invested less effective in increasing customer satisfaction. In addition, each channel has its own style of usage that doesn’t really facilitate an apples-to-apples comparison. There are other limitations to this kind of analysis, but I still find this exercise productive. It would be reasonable to experiment with funding self service at similar levels as say Web Chat, which overall seems the most cost effective.

Could satisfaction levels with self service be raised to levels similar to Web Chat if spending was increased to $10 per interaction? Only an experiment could provide this data, but it seems a worthwhile path for exploration.

Customers often turn to self service tools, only to be unable to find an answer or resolution to their problem. They then turn to more expensive channels, defeating the purpose of the self service tools. Why aren’t self service tools working? Companies don’t seem to be keeping pace with customers by investing in improvements to make the self service channel more useful. The TSIA notes a 9% decline in successful visits to self service from 2003 to 2011. The researchers also found that companies frequently complained that their knowledge platform was outdated, lacked analytics, and generally made it difficult to curate/manage content.

Where to Put the Money

So where exactly should companies and contact centers put the extra investment? The CSIA has a few suggestions:

• Better search
• Self service tailored to each kind of customer (expertise level, demographic, etc)
• Analytics to better understand what info customers are looking for
• Multimedia (would you rather read 15 pages of instructions or watch a 15 minute video?)
• Mobile support
• Service at the interaction point (ex. a printer breaks and instead of simply showing an error code, it plays a video showing you what to do to fix it)
• Proactive support that lets systems monitor themselves and automatically call for support, allowing problems to be resolved without any intervention needed from customers

Where would you invest money to improve self service? What can and can’t self service do? At what point does satisfaction become constrained by the channel itself instead of by budget? Share your thoughts in the comments below.