Voice self-service has been an integral part of contact center initiatives for years. Although the reason for using self-service options varies from use case to use case, the majority of us — customers, employees, and enterprise leaders alike — agree it's a convenient service channel. While the demand for automated service options is seen across all age groups, they’re particularly popular among younger generations. In fact, Gartner reports an astonishing 38% of Gen Z and millennials are likely to give up on a service issue rather than engage with a human representative. Recognizing this trend, customer service leaders are prioritizing implementing self-service for the contact center, ranking the capability among their top three priority areas. In this blog, we’ll guide you through the current state of voice self-service, its impact on employee and customer experiences, and why any forward-thinking contact center leader should optimize for it.
Overview: What is voice self-service?
Voice self-service is the automated process of either answering an incoming call without live agent intervention, or — when the answer cannot be automated — seamlessly connecting the caller to the appropriately skilled representative. The solutions can vary from simple text-to-speech interactions to more advanced Conversational AI offerings based on Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Large Language Models (LLM) to quickly identify a caller's intent and intelligently respond in a human-like fashion. Self-service is best utilized to help offset spikes in call volumes, facilitate call deflection to common requests, and/or improve wait times — all while assisting more customers or employees with the same amount or fewer agents to keep operational costs to a minimum. Common use cases include but are not limited to:
- Password reset requests
- Automated status updates or incident/ticket/case creation
- System outage updates
- Order status inquiries or changes
- Product returns or billing inquiries
- New employee onboarding automation
- Benefits enrollment or changes
- Connecting a caller with the right agent
The benefits of self-service
In recent years, call volumes have continued to grow, pushing many enterprise contact centers to their capacity limits. Per a recent McKinsey survey, 61% of care leaders report call volumes have increased since the pandemic, and 58% believe they will continue to do so. An increased number of contacts per customer and a growing customer base are reported as key reasons. To meet growing call volumes, enterprise leaders are faced with three options — increase workloads for agents, hire additional agents, or invest in self-service initiatives. As a result, it’s no wonder forward-looking leaders are opting for self-service strategies to improve the customer experience, create a better work environment for agents, and improve operations without increasing costs.
How self-service impacts customers or employees
When customers or employees need support, they need it immediately. As Forrester explains, “Your customers just want an accurate, relevant, and complete answer to their question upon first contact so they can get back to what they were doing before the issue arose.” 73% of customers report having their time valued by an organization as the most important aspect of good customer service, meaning keeping wait times to a minimum is a must. With the majority of consumers selecting the phone as their preferred channel for service requests, voice self-service has become more important than ever. When integrated with a system of record, such as ServiceNow or SAP, it can incorporate historical or real-time data to deliver catered experiences and outcomes — all without live agent intervention.
Imagine a scenario where a customer or employee contacts a service center for a simple status update. Guided by either the conventional "press 1, press 2" method or perhaps a more engaging Conversational AI designed to mimic human interaction, self-service not only liberates a caller from enduring long waits in queue for an available agent but also ensures that individuals with intricate or urgent concerns receive prompt attention without being held up by simpler queries. By expediting the handling of routine requests, wait times are reduced for instances necessitating live agent intervention. The ripple effect of serving more customers or employees in less time, with fewer live agents involved, often manifests in augmented revenues and/or cost efficiencies. In some cases, the impact can be significant, with a decrease in call hold times of up to 82% and abandonment rates of 81%.
How self-service improves agent productivity
Self-service is not only a powerful tool to improve the customer and employee experience, but it also plays a pivotal role in optimizing agent productivity and performance. Research by Statista highlights that repetitive requests, such as seeking product information or reporting service issues, were among the most common support requests in 2023. With common requests deflected to self-service, agents can focus their time on complex issues, leading to more requests being solved in less time. This helps improve contact center efficiency while also driving more creativity and variety in an agent’s daily work.
Simply put, with voice self-service, you can offload repetitive inquiries to agents, giving them time back to focus on more intricate and engaging tasks. In addition to improving the quality of the work assignments, eliminating mundane tasks decreases the total workload and creates a less stressful working environment. With less stress and more fun tasks at hand come happier agents — which research from the University of Oxford confirms also increases agent productivity by 13%.
Additional benefits of voice self-service for enterprise leaders
While self-service increases agent performance and improves customer experiences, it has the added benefit of driving down operational costs. With the help of self-service, an organization can solve the same or more requests with the same amount or fewer live agents. The math is simple — when assisting more customers with fewer agents, costs will naturally decrease. As mentioned in one study by Gartner, Conversational AI is predicted to reduce labor costs by $80 billion by 2026. In addition to the potential need for fewer agents, those remaining will be tasked with more engaging and creative work (as discussed in the section above) which is likely to drive lower employee turnover rates and eliminate the associated costs of hiring replacements. As per a previous blog, retaining agents is far less expensive than replacing them — saving between $10,000 - $15,000 dollars per agent.
Different self-service tools and strategies
There are several different self-service solutions and methods available, some more advanced than others. In this section, we’ll cover some of the most common aspects — what they mean and how they work.
1. Text-to-speech (TTS) and speech-to-text (STT)
Text-to-speech (TTS) converts written text into words and can be used to provide responses or information to a caller. Speech-to-text (STT), on the other hand, converts spoken words into text. TTS and STT are commonly used for simple conversational requests where spoken responses are provided based on available data from a system of record(s).
2. Conversational AI
Conversational AI is developed with Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) to understand and process complete spoken sentences, decipher a caller’s needs, and enable human-like interactions powered by synthetic voice technology. Conversational AI makes it possible to simplify complex, multi-stage IVR workflows into more natural-sounding conversational streams.
3. Multi-language avatar voices
Multi-language avatar voices enable human-like voice experiences across a multitude of languages and dialects. These voices can automatically adjust to preferences, geography, etc., to ensure every customer or employee receives a personalized experience.
4. SMS Engagements
To complement voice self-service, SMS can be leveraged to streamline the experience and outcomes — such as sending information on a newly created support ticket, password reset links, suggested knowledge articles, or providing future status updates for an open ticket. In many cases, this eliminates the need for a live agent to follow up and/or reduces the number of customer callbacks.
5. Large Language Models (LLM)
Large Language Models (LLM) is a component of Conversational AI that helps create human-like interactions. LLMs are trained on vast amounts of data to understand and handle more complex queries and deliver tailored responses.
6. Integration to a system of record
To optimize self-service experiences, voice and IVR workflows should be integrated with the systems hosting any and all relevant customer data (i.e., CRM, CX platforms, etc.) to enable intelligent experiences and resolutions based on relevant historical inputs (i.e., case history, prior customer support exchanges, customer status, etc.).
Potential limitations of self-service
Self-service tremendously impacts the service experience by simplifying work for agents and providing 24/7 automated support for customers or employees. With drastic improvements to the technology in recent years, including the evolution of AI, it is continuing to increase in popularity. While this automated and personalized service channel undoubtedly can benefit any business, there are a few considerations to keep in mind:
- Self-service doesn’t know how to answer questions outside its programmed workflows and training. For example, it doesn’t have the same ability to make an educated exception to resolve an issue as might a live agent today.
- How much data should self-service have access to? With AI comes a new, common concern around the amount of data AI needs to access to efficiently support self-service requirements. Sharing private data with yet another platform can imply increased security risks. Additionally, how can one ensure AI is leveraging the data for the right tasks — providing answers and insights — and not for the personal gain of the vendor providing it?
- While self-service can assist with more simple and common requests, human interaction is still needed for the most complex ones. In other words, live agents are still a crucial part of the success of any CX and EX initiative.
- Due to high CPU and utilization rates, self-service/AI can potentially drive additional costs for an organization.
Conclusion
With a growing demand for self-service among customers and employees, the solution has become a top priority among enterprise leaders. Thanks to self-service, organizations across the globe are experiencing improved call deflection, enhanced employee and customer experiences, and significant cost savings. To explore more about self-service, visit our website or schedule a personalized consultation where our experts will help you create a plan to reach our business goals and metrics.
