Is Britain really ready for Self-Service?

There’s always been an ongoing debate about how willing consumers are to embrace the self-service culture. It’s often assumed that our own distinctive national character makes self-service and speech-enabled solutions less appropriate for the UK market, yet as individuals we all seem quite happy to take the leap. So what do organisations have to do to get their customers on board?
Just because your organisation has invested in the latest and greatest speech or self-service application doesn’t mean it’s going to be a success. If customers are happy with their existing, non self-service options, there have to be strong reasons to drive change and encourage self-service adoption. Ideally the service offered should be better – or at least as good – as existing alternatives, and customers need to be encouraged to use the new system.

To encourage take-up, it’s important that any self-service addresses some of the key issues that customers are likely to have:

• Does the system do what I want it to do?
  
• Is the service going to benefit me?
  
• Is it easy to use? Do I think it’s easy to use?
  
• Is it appropriate for the task?
  
• Am I confident that what’s meant to happen will?

Together these questions help to explain why some self-service approaches work and others don’t. Take the Self-Service check-in kiosks at major airports – they help customers speed through the tedious check-in procedure, giving them more time to relax. A recent JD Power survey of some 10,000 US airline customers earlier this year found that customers who checked in for their flight online or at kiosks had a higher customer satisfaction level than passengers using traditional processes. As a self-service application, it’s clearly working for airlines – indeed BA earlier this year abolished check-in desks for all passengers travelling within Britain, converting old check-in desks to fast bag drops.

While self-service check-in has worked, other technologies - such as Cash Deposit at ATMs - has failed to ignite the public’s imagination. Cash depositing has failed to meet two of the key guidelines; it’s not appropriate for the task because it doesn’t give clear feedback on what’s happening; and users simply aren’t confident of the outcome.

To date, the most successful self-service applications have been those – such as self-scanning at Tesco and BA’s kiosk check-in – that have improved service by giving benefits to customers while improving process flows for organisations. Two examples – the airline self-service check-in and self-scanning of goods at supermarkets – show how it’s also important to support new self-service initiatives with live chat services and access to real agents and personnel. While these programmes have worked well, both have required considerable marketing and support investment, both in terms of campaigns to introduce the services to customers, and in point-of-service support for customers starting to use the service.

The fact that over a million customers a week are now happily self-scanning their supermarket purchases shows that, as a country, we’re quite happy to embrace self-service solutions – providing that the organisations operating the service take the time to follow the key guidelines listed above.

That’s why – from our own project experience – we’re finding that more and more organisations are now moving beyond initial speech trials to actually incorporate speech-based applications into some of their core customer service processes. Rather than simply just implement the technology, however, the organisations who are getting it right are the ones who are addressing the key customer service questions such – such as ‘who are our customers’, ‘why are they calling us’, and ‘what’s the most appropriate way to handle this call?’