Self Service
Self service enables customers to complete a service or sales enquiry without the need for live assistance. The mutual advantage this has for both customer and brand is that the customer is removed from the live assistance queue and can access services outside normal call centre opening hours.
Public domain information such as store location, opening times, etc can be freely provided. However information that is commercially sensitive for either brand or customer has to be securely protected from all bar those with access rights. Therefore identification and verification is a necessary pre condition for providing self service solutions of sensitive data.
Self service lives or dies on the simple measure of whether or not it works in the way the customer wants to interact. If not, then another irritated customer will be joining the queue for live assistance.
The journey to complete a self service request is seldom as linear or straight forward as those in existence today. For instance, synchronising visual access to information that interacts with two-way voice prompts for seat bookings, online shopping etc provides the kind of sophisticated convenience customers are actually looking for.
This shows it is important to recognise that effective self service has to meet both logistical and emotional expectations of the customer. Which means brands must be able to evolve tailored self service routines based on a choice of communication media and ability to access self service via any connected device.
This requires considerable communication fluency behind the scenes and demands that technical designs for call centre and online environments share common communication, data and workflow platforms that can be readily interfaced through the facilitation of open standards.
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Datapoint provides the following technologies and services for Self Service.