DialOnce

How to measure the effectiveness of self-care ?

Updated on 11/04/2024
Evaluating the effectiveness of selfcare: methods and insights by DialOnce

What is self-care?

The era when contacting a company by phone was necessary to perform an action - such as tracking a file, modifying an account, asking questions, and others - is over. According to a study by Forrester, 77% of consumers expect a company to save them time and are inclined to find a solution to their problem autonomously, rather than dealing with customer service. Nowadays, customers can perform some actions themselves from various entry points: mobile apps, FAQs, customer portals, IVR systems, chatbots, and many others. Providing an optimal customer experience while reducing processing costs is the goal of self-care tools.

According to the online magazine Relationclientmag.fr, between 30% and 40% of costs can be reduced through self-care. The key is to know how to calculate the self-care rate...

Is the self-care rate a simple formula ?

Definition of the self-care rate: Number of management actions carried out via a self-care solution versus the total number of management actions. To measure the performance of these solutions, the main KPI to follow is the self-care rate or transfer rate to self-care.

A high self-care rate is a good indicator of the efficiency of your customer service. This means that your operators save time on low-value requests and can focus on the most complex queries. However, excessive use of these practices, while synonymous with savings for the company, can lead to a gradual deterioration of the customer experience: if the customer space has not been designed with a customer-centric approach, it can quickly become difficult to use and therefore frustrating.

According to Harvard Business Review, reducing customer effort has the most significant impact on loyalty.

The complementarity of channels

To address a customer issue, there are often multiple channels available. It is sometimes difficult for a customer to identify the right one, which may lead them to use several channels (increasing interactions, loss of information) or to resort to the historical channel, which is the telephone. The omnichannel orchestrator DialOnce aims to consolidate all channels. Thus, we are able to personalize the customer journey to provide them with the right solutions while minimizing customer effort.

5 key steps of the omnichannel orchestrator :

  1. Identification of contextual elements : Origin of the journey, profile, prioritization, device, schedule, waiting time per channel.
  2. Qualification of the need
  3. Routing to the most effective solution
  4. Self-care: FAQ, customer portal, mobile app...

  5. Contact channels: Form, chat, call back, telephone...

Which KPIs to use for its calculation ?

3 KPIs essential for identifying selfcare improvement levers:

  1. Rate of sessions that consulted a selfcare solution compared to the total number of sessions offering a selfcare pathway.

  2. Rate of sessions that performed a selfcare action without human interaction compared to the total number of sessions offering a selfcare pathway.

  3. Rate of sessions that performed a selfcare action and then had human contact (call, back office processing, chat) compared to the total number of sessions offering a selfcare pathway.

This represents a simple formula for better understanding customer journeys and analyzing the performance of Visual IVR pathways. It is important to measure selfcare on pathways where the service is offered rather than across all pathways.

The goal is, of course, to achieve "selfcare action without human contact," but to accomplish this, it is necessary to measure the effectiveness of solutions, hence the importance of the other KPIs mentioned above.