chapter 8
the rise of self-service
a boon to your customers—but only if you do it right
employees aren’t the only ones with an expanded inclination toward autonomy. Today’s customers also have an increasing desire for—and expectation of—autonomy, in the form of self-service options. This is a very powerful trend among today’s customers, with some customers wanting to do business with you wholly in a self-service environment and even more now growing accustomed to augmenting human service providers with self-service … as I myself did not long ago with my smartphone when shopping at the local music store.
awarding myself the mobile prize
One Saturday morning, I found myself trekking to the guitar store uptown because I needed strings for a “Baby Taylor.” (A Baby Taylor is a reduced-sized version of a standard acoustic guitar.) The clerk, who was knowledgeable in an approximate sort of way, told me he thought medium-gauge, full-length guitar strings would work well: just cut off the excess length as needed to make them fit the “baby.” I had a hunch that his answer might be incomplete, and I vaguely wondered why the clerk didn’t look in his system for Taylor’s “manufacturer’s stringing recommendation” before advising me. I didn’t wonder for long, though, before turning the issue over to my iPhone. With just a few thumb strokes—“What kind of strings should I use on my Baby Taylor?”—I found an official, enthusiastically detailed description of which strings to use and why the decision matters:
[Here at Taylor,] we install light-gauge Elixir NANOWEB strings (.012 on high E) on Baby Taylors. We recommend you stick with lights when you replace them … our ever-vigilant repair guys, who are the ultimate judges of what works and doesn’t work on our guitars … [say that] using anything but light-gauge strings puts too much … “pull” on a Baby, [and] the intonation and one’s ability to keep them in tune become problematic.1
Thus, by using self-service to address my situation as a customer, a very particular situation (probably only one out of hundreds of guitars that come into that store each year is a Baby Taylor), I found the precise answer that potentially saved my guitar from never sounding quite right. In many service situations, it’s inevitable that the customer knows key information himself, feels he knows it himself, or has more time to invest in addressing his own situation than the human service provider does. This is one of the appeals of modern self-service.
Apple Stores have recognized this race-to-the-gadgets phenomenon and addressed it by putting specially programmed iPad stations (dubbed “Smart Signs”) beside its products so customers will stay and gadgetsource their questions in an Apple-centered system rather than have the customers leave the Apple system or the physical premises, either of which could lead to customers getting distracted from the Apple gospel. On these iPad Smart Signs you can, for example, explore features and compare a variety of models of laptops, or figure out how much a new phone will really cost you, based on your personal carrier and rate plan. And when you’re ready for human help, you can page an employee directly from the iPad.
Royal Carribean Cruises has responded somewhat similarly, even though, unlike the case at Apple, its passengers assuredly cannot leave without significant watery consequences. The latest Royal Caribbean ship, Allure of the Seas, is built with touch-screen kiosks on every deck acting as self-service concierges, offering “what to do right now” and “room finder” information.2
In a business-to-business context as well, self-service can make itself valuable by incorporating details that only the customer knows, or knows best. In the follow-up to a keynote speech I gave to The Payroll Group, an independent trade association, I was struck recently by the extent to which these payroll service providers have moved to a model where clients themselves, through remote software, enter and verify small details like the precise spellings of their employees’ names, leading to reduced errors.
Companies today have a choice:
Embrace the modern inclination to self-service
Ignore it
Chafe at it
Get overly aggressive and force it down the throats of all their customers
The name of the game is to embrace self-service as a way to provide anticipatory service. Happily, self-service is likely to be anticipatory by its nature, due to its ability to accept unique, customized input from the customers themselves, and smart self-service design can further enhance this. Truly great self-service is anticipatory in that it helps suggest choices and behaviors in an intelligent manner: IBM’s technology in dressing rooms that suggests complementary ties based on the sportswear you’re trying on; airport kiosk messaging that protects you with a warning to take both of your documents—receipt and boarding pass—based on the experience of previous passengers who were stranded at the gate lacking what they needed to board; suggestions from online merchants for additional items to add to your order, based on what you really would benefit from—suggestions that are crowdsourced or expertly curated, but in any event not based on an online equivalent of racking up fees.
principles of successful self-service
Self-service follows specific, predictable rules.
1. Customers need a choice of channels. A choice means they choose, and you respect their decisions. Customers shouldn’t be calling you on the phone only to have you tell them, “You should go to the website.” (Incredibly, this happens all the time.) There’s a reason they called you on the phone, so talk to them! (Note that this isn’t mutually exclusive with the possibility that the call may be because your website is broken/limited/poorly designed, thus necessitating a “stupid-stuff” call the customer didn’t want to make. See Chapter 10.)
For example, there’s a hotel chain that continuously—and I mean, continuously—urges me to use automated kiosk check-in. They send me emails at spaced intervals every time I’m about to visit one of their properties, urging me to use their new machines. I ignore the emails, arrive at the hotel, go to the front desk, and am told, “You know, you didn’t have to come up here. You could have used the kiosk.” But I want to be checked in by a human. It’s a central part of the hospitality experience for me. And the choice should be mine.
2. Self-service needs to have escape hatches. Here are a couple of examples:
Automated confirmation letters need to come from, or at least prominently feature, a reply-to address. When huge companies send confirmations that end with “Please do not reply,” it’s a kiss-off. When smaller companies do this, they just look ridiculous. Either way, it can lead customers to desperation. The asymmetry defies our human desire for reciprocity: The company is sending you a letter, but prohibiting you from writing back!
When you end your FAQs and similar self-help postings with “Did this answer your question?” contemplate what should happen if the customer’s response is “No, it didn’t answer my question.” First, consider what this customer response means: The customer has tried to do your company’s work for you—honestly tried—and failed, which means you have failed. Here’s what should follow: An “I’m so sorry; we obviously have room for improvement. Click here and a live human being will assist you.” Or “If you would like a phone call from a human, please enter your number here. When we call, our humans will have a complete record of your query/issue and its failed resolution, and we will make it right.”
3. Don’t make your customers think about your organizational chart. Customers don’t care about the structure of your company; they don’t want to learn how your company is organized. This is a really, really big one. Think of a master self-service merchandiser like Amazon.com. Yeah, it still has some hierarchical menus on its site, but as the site has evolved, those menus have diminished in importance to the point that they’re nearly unnoticeable. What has replaced them?
An incredibly effective “Customers who viewed this item also viewed” field, with images and names of the most popular items that have been considered for purchase by other customers Amazon.com thinks are similar to you.
A big honkin’ search field that works well to find just about anything you need, using the terms in which you think. (And if you don’t find what you’re looking for using the terms you entered, there’s a “give feedback about your search” button at the bottom of the search.)
Absolutely zero use of Amazon.com’s internal terminology, nor any need to think in terms of “returns departments,” “credits,” “technical support,” “account services,” etc. Amazon.com is a unique company with its own internal jargon, yet none of that leaks into what the customer encounters; everything is in normal English.
4. Usability is a science that needs to be respected. Reinventing the wheel as far as usability is self-defeating: Usability is a well-tested science, yet people keep trying to wing it. For example, why do people hate—truly love to hate—IVRs (telephone interactive voice response)? In part, because so many companies ignore or try end runs around the rules of usability for such systems. For example, most humans can’t retain in memory more than thirty seconds of information at a time, so an IVR with more than thirty seconds of options or information is just going to confuse customers. There are similar hard-and-fast rules about how many menu items a customer can remember, yet some companies mangle their application of this rule by loading up each option with suboptions: “For Office A, Office B, or Office C, press 1.” That one single suboption actually demands that the customer remember four things: three departments and the menu number.5 In addition to the limits of human memory, there are conventions to adhere to in order to keep your customers comfortable: For example, “0” on a telephone menu should take you to a human, and the search bar on a web page should be exactly where customers expect it: right at the top of the page.
5. Customers need to be able to shift lanes. No matter what channel your customer enters through—your website, a phone line, email, etc.—it should be a seamless and cohesive process. It shouldn’t feel like an entirely different experience in each area, and it shouldn’t make customers start from scratch if they’ve already shared information with your company through another channel.
6. Self-service can’t be set and then forgotten. It’s an endless work in progress. It’s not like those ads you see in the back of entrepreneurial magazines that promise an easy living owning vending machines: Set them up, ignore them, come back once in a while to check on them like a trap you set in the woods, and see all the money you’ve caught. Modern self-service isn’t like that. It has to be monitored and reviewed regularly. Specifically, every time you set up a process, you need to set up a monitoring plan for it.
For example, at my company, Oasis, I set up an automated, instant confirmation greeting for people who have requested our catalog online. This greeting goes out, via auto-response email, to welcome prospective customers and invite them to start making use of the links on our website right away, without having to wait the few days it takes for the physical catalog to slither its way to them via the U.S. mail. To be friendly, I include all the names of our client advisers, since at this point a particular adviser hasn’t been assigned. The problem? Well, even though we have low staff turnover, occasionally people leave or change positions. So, if this letter stays static, eventually someone is going to get a letter with names of former client advisers. Other information and links in the letter may change eventually as well. So I set up a process that ensures I myself receive the confirmation letter at regular intervals so I can review it. Simple solution.
If you don’t set up procedures like this, you end up looking like the hotel whose setup I was asked to review not long ago. In each hotel room there was a laminated card that read, “Two steps to get online! Find the internet cable that’s in the desk drawer, and open up your browser!” Unfortunately, there not only was no cable in the drawer, there was no Ethernet jack anywhere in the room. The service had apparently been changed to Wi-Fi, which would’ve been fine if only the documentation had come along for the ride.
7. Your staff needs to have used—recently—your self-service channels. Otherwise they won’t ever recommend, understand the issues with, or be able to converse intelligently with a customer about using them.
8. Ugly upsells through self-service are a brand killer. The way Amazon.com handles upselling is ideal: “Frequently bought with” messaging gently tells you what customers who are similar to you also purchased (and lost sales are avoided by “customers who viewed this product ended up buying _________” in case the first product page you land on doesn’t prove a perfect fit). Harder sells are especially hazardous in self-service, as there’s no human tone of voice. If you do want to try a more direct upsell, I would suggest some kind of tongue-in-cheek humor to tone it down: Recognize the obviously awkward nature of the electronic relationship and use a humorous acknowledgment of this to modulate it.
Self-service isn’t just the wave of the future; it’s the reality of the present. Embrace it—your customers already have.
“and your point is?”
The name of the game is using self-service to provide anticipatory service.
Great self-service is anticipatory because it helps suggest choices and behaviors in an intelligent manner to customers, often via details volunteered by the customer herself.
Customers need a choice of channels. A choice means they choose, and you respect, their decisions.
Self-service needs to come with escape hatches. For example, automated confirmation letters need to come from, or at least prominently feature, an address you can reply to. When you add “Did this answer your question?” in FAQs and similar self-help postings, think through what should happen if the customer’s response is “No!”
Everything should be organized and described from a customer’s perspective. Customers don’t care about the structure of your business; they don’t want to have to understand how it’s organized.
When developing self-help tools and processes, remember that usability is a science.
Customers need to be able to shift channels no matter how they initially enter your company (via email, online, in-store, etc.), without it being jarring.
Remember that customers may use different channels in different ways. If handled appropriately and planned for, this doesn’t have to be a negative for your brand.
Self-service can’t be set and then forgotten. It’s an endless work in progress, and processes are required to regularly monitor it.
Your staff members need to have used your self-service channels; otherwise they won’t be able to converse intelligently with a customer about using them.
Ugly upsells through self-service are a brand killer; subtlety is key.