How to Increase Revenue With Customer Self-Service

Customer self-service is a new support channel that everyone is trying to get their hands on. That’s no surprise, as it can not only create happy customers but also help reduce costs and increase revenue.

Self-service is a form of customer support that allows customers to perform routine tasks without interacting with a call center agent. Needless to say, customers quickly embraced the idea.

There’s no doubt that customer self-service is shaping the future of call centers. In this article, we’ll discuss how you can increase your own call center’s revenue by leveraging the advantages of this new technology.

Reduced labor cost

As we all know, labor is the single biggest cost for any call center. Saving costs by reducing staff numbers, however, is a gamble that is not worth taking, as during peak times it may actually end up costing you more in terms of poor service. Luckily, customer self-service provides an ideal solution for reducing call center labor costs without risking the quality of your customer service.

The cost benefits of customer self-service are obvious: if your customers can solve their problems on their own, that will result in significantly reduced customer service call volumes, and so substantially reduce the amount of support needed. As such, a smaller team of call center agents will be able to take care of remaining customer calls.

In addition, customers who use self-service tools to help themselves also cost less for businesses to support, with self-service portals, mobile apps and FAQ pages being cheaper to operate than live agent assistance.

Customer self-service helps cross- and up-sell

Strange as it sounds, sales figures can also be greatly increased via customer self-service. In particular, self-service solutions empower companies with the opportunity to target customers with cross- and up-sell offers.

While it requires significant resources and time to train agents on cross- and up-selling techniques, in contrast, self-service platforms can keep a record of products or services purchased, and make offers based on customers’ purchase history.

For example, a telco provider’s self-service portal can provide the perfect opportunity to offer customers a targeted upgrade offer on their subscription.

Or, when customers revisit your webshop’s FAQ page, you can send them items suggestions based on their previous choices.

Happy customers spend more

In our fast-changing world, time is money, both for customers and companies. It’s hard to imagine now but, only a few years ago, the only option for resolving even the simplest tasks was for customers to call the relevant customer service team. These days, however, customers prefer to solve their problems themselves, rather than spending the time calling customer service lines and being put on hold. And again, by setting up a self-service portal, the most frequent issues and questions can be addressed online, without customers having to contact a live agent.

What’s more, customers are willing to pay for better customer experience. Therefore, while making the investment in customer self-service technology may seem costly, you will be able to win back (and more) these costs through adding premiums to your product prices. And, by providing them with information quickly and efficiently will definitely improve overall customer experience, and help turn new customers into returning customers. 

One thing is certain, acquiring a new customer is much more expensive than retaining an existing one. However, by stepping up your customer service and making customer experience simple and fast through self-service, it has been proven that customers will return to a business, time and time again. In fact, according to research conducted by the Aberdeen Group, self-service users retain 68% more of their customers year-on-year, compared to non-users. Convinced yet?

Sum up

Advanced technology solutions and ever-higher customer expectations are driving major changes in customer service. Amongst other things, call centers need to understand the importance of giving customers the ability to resolve their own issues. Make sure you also leverage customer self-service, because success is sure to follow.