Only 14% of customer service and support issues are fully resolved in self-service – even for issues that customers describe as “very simple”, only 36% resolve fully in self-service.
While many organizations have made considerable investments in self-service capabilities, a Gartner survey of 5,728 customers conducted in December 2023 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,” said 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 realize the value of their self-service investments.”
Customers Frustrated by Ineffective Self-Service Solutions
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 said 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,” said Keller. “Self-service can offer substantial benefits for organizations 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 organizations’ self-service investments,” said Keller. “Organizations need to capture, diagnose and predict customer intent in self-service, and match them with the best-fit solution.”
