Only 14% of customer service and support issues are fully resolved using self-service, according to a new survey by Gartner – even for issues that customers describe as “very simple”, only 36% resolve fully in self-service.
While many organisations have made considerable investments in self-service capabilities, the Gartner survey of 5 728 customers revealed that resolution rates remain low.
“While 73% of customers use self-service at some point in their customer service journey, it’s concerning to see that so few fully resolve there,” says Eric Keller, senior director, Research in the Gartner Customer Service & Support practice. “It’s imperative that customer service and support leaders work to resolve the issues customers face in order to fully realise the value of their self-service investments.”
Customers feel a disconnect between the issues they want to solve and the capabilities that self-service can offer. Forty-five percent of customers who started in self-service say the company didn’t understand what they were trying to do. Furthermore, the most common reason for self-service failure was that in 43% of cases, customers couldn’t find content relevant to their issue.
“Customers feel frustrated by self-service journeys that feel too rigid to deal with the complexities of their service issues,” says Keller. “Self-service can offer substantial benefits for organisations and customers, but work is required to ensure that customers’ needs are understood and responded to.”
In order to improve self-service resolution, customer service and support leaders should:
* Scale and maintain self-service content by expanding content creation responsibilities to reps, enabling them to create knowledge as part of the issue resolution workflow rather than as a separate process.
* Invest in proactive delivery of self-service solutions by using customer account, interaction, and product usage data to predict customer needs.
* Simplify the resolution path on their website with a single digital concierge, such as a GenAI chatbot, positioned as the most prominent entry point to the customer journey.
* Assess and improve the performance of self-service content continuously – for example, by allowing both customers and reps to flag ineffective content and establishing ongoing processes for improving content quality.
“The realities of self-service journeys which have many potential paths to a solution – varying expectations for content and constantly evolving issue types – have limited the success of organisations’ self-service investments,” says Keller. “Organisations need to capture, diagnose, and predict customer intent in self-service – and match them with the best-fit solution.”