Mobile-device users don’t just want anytime, anywhere access; they want anytime, anywhere support. Mobile self-service is a solution that’s gaining speed and traction. But these developments aren’t just affecting the users: Organizations are also looking for ways to leverage self-service to improve existing processes, like service request management. Self-service matters.
In today’s competitive market, organizations are under pressure to provide visibility into the costs and benefits of existing and planned technology expenditures. And so, when adopting new technologies, it is imperative that organizations migrate to solutions that reduce the overall total cost of ownership (TCO). What is essential for reducing TCO? Technologies that save time, reduce costs, reduce errors, and improve user satisfaction.
For these reasons, it’s worth considering technologies that have self-provisioning features, which have the power to reduce TCO. Let’s take a look at one area where significant advances have been made in self-provisioning: service request management.
Many of today’s service request management solutions are automated, empowering authorized users to fulfill their own requests. So how does this provide value? Self-provisioned requests trigger a variety of automated processes that reduce time and eliminate errors. The lack of automation leads to increased costs, security issues, and provisioning errors; automating request fulfillment eliminates hours of staff time that was previously spent manually responding to requests.
In addition to reducing TCO, other benefits include:
- Enabling process owners to have full control over managing their processes
- Reducing support costs
- Facilitating compliance with governance audit and reporting requirements
- Empowering users with fast-response access to critical business services
- Improving user satisfaction through greater transparency and better management
In summary, self-provisioning features in service request management solutions enable requests to be fulfilled more efficiently, more rapidly, and at a lower cost.
Gideon Hollander, Jacada
Despite the explosive growth in mobile technology and usage, companies have been slow to adapt their customer service processes to the mobile generation. One way organizations can harness the mobile evolution to offer a better customer service experience is by embracing mobile self-service.
When seeking an opportunity to break down customer care silos and provide a seamless connection between your self-service and customer care departments, organizations see a number of benefits in mobile self-service, including:
- Providing sophisticated self-service capabilities directly from a mobile application
- Lowering inbound call volume
- Starting the conversation in context, shortening the call initiation process
- Leveraging device capabilities for an enriched service experience
- Enabling faster resolution through optional agent desktop automation
- Giving customers the ability to schedule callbacks at their convenience
- Increasing customer satisfaction by not having them repeat information and actions
With mobile self-service, customers enter into a self-service session through an app that allows them to work directly with the system to solve their problems, without the aggravation and limitations of audio/voice IVR systems. Ideally, this app supports data entry, which enables sophisticated self-service capabilities like searching knowledge bases and retrieving/updating customer information in line-of-business applications. In short, mobile users now have access to everything they need without connecting to an agent.
For calls that do require agent assistance, however, the goal is to provide a seamless transition to the voice channel from the self-service channel. Creating this seamless transition requires connecting the mobile session with the agent session. This begins by giving customers information about current hold times and offering the option of scheduling a callback. Once the call has been connected to an agent, all of the steps taken by the customer, as well as any data entered, are visible to the agent, meaning the customer won’t have to provide the same information again. Even better, the underlying systems can be prepopulated with customer information, further reducing handle times.
The new mobile self-service channel provides organizations with an unprecedented opportunity to improve the self-service experience, reduce inbound call volume, and capture one of the largest-growing demographics: mobile customers.