Reimagining Business Self-Service

This past week I had the pleasure of speaking at the Customer Contact Week conference in Orlando to share the how simple improvements to your digital self-service can drive significant results for your company and your customers.

Today I’ll cover the systematic steps taken to reimagine the business self-service experience.

RELATED DOCUMENTS: 

• CCW Orlando Presentation PDF

• Reimagining Business Support infographic

Where we started:

In 2023, the business transformation organization was delivering significant changes and updates to our internal and external user interfaces. Because of this, we began investigating how we could update the knowledge management (KM) articles and the support website to inform customers about the new capabilities that had been built.

The research quickly identified that the simple act of updating the website and KM articles would be an extremely difficult process. What we found was that the business support ecosystem was broken, barely used, and actively driving traffic into the Call Centers. These problems were predominantly driven by four factors:

1. The support website lacked organization and clear structure to effectively guide users.

2. The site featured links to customer servicing portals instead of support topics.

3. There was significant use of internal labels and company jargon rather than common customer language.

4. There was no comprehensive knowledge hub, support content was distributed.

Overall: This was a disjointed experience that was far from simple and streamlined.

The biggest eye opener was when I completed a customer journey map and identified that there were 13 different website domains and over 500 individual support website pages.

Note: the 500 pages does not include individual KM articles.

Because of this, 96% of visitors abandoned the support experience within 60 seconds. Additionally, there were zero actionable support options on the support home page, and over 40% of visitors went directly to our “Contact Us” page driving significant volume into the call and chat centers.

Fixing the problems:

My research also identified that while there were multiple teams that owned pieces of the support experience, no one owned the entire ecosystem. There was a gap of leadership and cohesive direction. We began this process by gathering a group of highly motivated individuals that wanted to improve the customer experience for self-service. We formed a new cross-functional group that took ownership of the customer self-service journey from start to finish, and began to start making changes.

KM Article Cleanup:

The first step in our journey was to clean up and revamp our KM article content. The three fundamental issues we needed to tackle were:

1. Articles could be hosted on 4 different knowledge management platforms across business support.

2. Much of our self-service content was hosted as pdf files, which meant they were out of brand compliance, and contained outdated content.

3. There wasn’t clear awareness within the company of which groups owned and produced new content.

These problems led to multiple variations of the same content being available online, and a huge volume of outdated and completely incorrect content being served to customers. We completed an analysis of our content and eliminated over 1,000 outdated KM articles and pdfs.

Our next step was to reach out to our Chat and Call Center teams to identify the top 10 reasons that customers were contacting the company. This provided the framework for the new articles that we produced. However, due to the size and complexity of AT&T Business, these weren’t simple to produce.

AT&T Business has four “Primary” customer login portals where you can manage your account. They also have multiple other secondary platforms. What this meant was that historically, we would have produced a different “How to login” article for each platform. The problem was, a customer needed to actually know which platform they were supposed to work in, before they could find an article telling them how to login.

To resolve this problem, we began creating platform agnostic content. This meant that the article would serve all platforms instead of a single one. This makes the articles longer, but a customer no longer needs to know how to navigate our systems, they only need to understand what their problem is before they get started.

The last step that we took was to map every piece of self-service content that we had to one of our contact drivers. This allowed us to tie our self-service analytics to our call center metrics.

Customer journey simplification:

Now that the KM articles were cleaned up, and we had valid content to point customers to, we were able to begin cleaning up the customer experience. Our first step was to eliminate 5 of the existing website domains. These were redirected to the new Support Home website that was built so that customers weren’t met with a dead-end, but they would no longer be updated, or house different information.

As we began the redesign of the new Support Home page, we focused on three fundamental principles to guide the customer.

Simplification: This new page will be the single hub for all unauthenticated support. It can no longer focus on any one or two platforms, but needs to be able to support all of our products and services.

MVP Topics: Our support home page originally had no actual support content on it. It effectively served as a link tree out to our individual portals or support sites. This left customers with a minimum of 5 clicks before they could possibly see a resolution to their issue. Our new design would be focused on the 80/20 rule, and would position articles addressing our top 6 call drivers at the top of the page.

Structured Navigation: Because of the complexity of AT&T Business, we couldn’t locate all of our support content on a single page. This would be so massive that it would essentially become unusable. We introduced structured drop downs that would help the customer navigate to the content they were looking for based on simple customer-centric descriptions.

Based on these simple principles we created the new Support Home page along with platform and product specific sub-pages, all within a single structured environment. It’s important to note, this was all 100% free of cost. While this was a major reshaping of our customer self-service, we were not provided development dollars to accomplish the redesign. As such, the pages were all built utilizing marketing’s existing widgets within Adobe Experience Manager. While the new widgets were not optimized for support, they still enabled us to create a significant step-change in the customer experience.

The results:

After one year we are able to look back and understand the impact that our improvements have made to the customer’s use of self-service, and the impact that has had on our call center volumes.

By consolidating our support experience to a single site, and simplifying the user journey:

• We have driven a 240% growth in year over year views on the support pages.

• Reduced the traffic going to the “Contact Us” page by 27%.

By highlighting our top call drivers on the support page:

• Those six articles account for 50% of all containment actions on the website.

• 60% of visitors use self-service. REMEMEBER: Prior to the redesign, there were zero self-service options on the page.

• Now, more then three times as many customers opt to use self-service vs. navigating to the “Contact Us” page.

We have also driven the highest CSAT score ever for the customer support pages, as well as a 127% growth in our video content views.

Refining the results:

As we analyzed the results of our work we identified a significant trend for our KM articles. When customers navigated to our support pages, they overwhelmingly opted to use the self-service content. However, our views of that same content from search engines and other pages within the att.com ecosystem were extremely low.

Upon investigating the underlying website structure, we identified that the KM articles weren’t being displayed to search engines because they were all hosted on angular JavaScript pages. This meant that search engines (including our own internal search) could not distinguish between the different articles, essentially making them invisible.

Changing the underlying site structure to accept dynamic tags from the server (SalesForce KM) allowed search engines to begin indexing our articles. This has lead to a 3,600% growth in views from organic search, and 2,200% growth in views of our KM articles overall.

Identifying the financial impact:

As I mentioned earlier, we had aligned all of our self-service content to one of the Call and Chat Center contact drivers. This allowed us to compare a growth in specific content with a corresponding reduction in related call volume.

During our redesign of the Support Home page, much of our work was focused on targeting the top 5 contact drivers in our centers. Because we had mapped our self-service content to the top call drivers, we were able to show a direct correlation between a reduction in call volume, and the growth in self-service use. Overall, we were able to drive $5 million out of our call center operations through our efforts to update the support experience.

In a future article: I will walk through how we are able to calculate a dollar value associate with self-service as a holistic view, along with project based calculation demonstrated above.

If you’d like to view the presentation from CCW Orlando you can download the PDF here.

If you’d like to read the infographic which covers the work described in this article visit here.