Businesses are increasingly adopting self-service and self-help technologies in a bid to improve the customer experience, a report by Ivanti and the Service Desk Institute has revealed.
The companies questioned 25,000 service desk personnel about their changing attitudes towards self-service and self-help platforms, with 74% of them using self-service technology and 58% offering their customers the option to use self-hep services.
Businesses are giving customers the tools they need to solve their problems themselves because it provides a much better experience than talking through a problem with someone on the phone.
However, customer attitudes don't align with operator responses, exposing that 83% of end-users prefer to call the services desk to speak to someone rather than using the self-service option and 88% opting to talk to call the service desk rather than using a self-help feature.
The survey results revealed customers would rather have the 'personal touch' when seeking support rather than going through to an automated service.
"As industry trends change and new generations enter the enterprise IT user base the demand for Self-Help and Self-Service capabilities will undoubtedly increase," Ollie O'Donoghue, SDI Industry Analyst and author of the report, said.
"Both have an integral role to play in supporting the modern service desk, and organisations armed with the experience and knowledge of a vendor organisation, and supplied with the right tools, will undoubtedly overcome the obstacles facing them when implementing these tools."
However, businesses are still slow to adopt self-service and self-help technologies, with the main barriers being the time it takes to implement the technology to enable self-help and a lack of customer appetite for using the tech.
"The motivations that drive an organisation to improve self-service and self-help technology vary considerably. However this report has raised a very important point that the customer (and what they want) must be at the heart of any strategy," said Kevin J Smith, senior vice president at Ivanti.
