Maximizing self-service to prevent digital leakage.

Have you ever tried to pay your phone bill online or through your carrier’s app and had such a bad experience that you called them for assistance but ended up waiting in the call center queue?

This scenario is exactly what keeps telco executives up at night. Whether on desktop, mobile, native app, or at a kiosk, the telco industry is hyper-focused on driving digital engagement with self-service. Regardless if you’re a telco or not, the reality is that maximizing digital self-service is a core strategy for digital containment.

In today’s economy, how do you cut costs and do more with less when you’ve got leaner teams and shrinking resources? How do you know if the digital initiatives you’re focusing on will impact the customer’s overall experience?

A few insights from the telecom industry can help those trying to address today’s market challenges and reduce customer churn through self-service.

Digital leakage defined.

Telcos are at the forefront of improving digital customer engagement, whether it’s through a self-serve channel, chat support, or a contact center.

Digital leakage is the impact of customers moving from a digital platform to a contact center or in-person engagement for a task they could complete online. Given today’s economic uncertainty, digital leakage is even more critical than normal. We see telcos prioritize improving self-service capabilities for two reasons.

The first is to provide a better online customer experience: Customers can quickly and easily visit a website or app to pay bills, purchase a new plan, open a new account, or manage an existing one without the help of customer support.

But there’s another benefit: If customers can complete those simple tasks online, your team is freed up to focus on more complex queries, providing a higher level of service to customers whose needs can’t be met through self-service channels. When you think about it that way, giving customers the ability to act themselves is critical.

The question we often hear is, how do we maximize digital self-service so customers don’t fall through the cracks?

How a large telco operator discovered the cause of digital leakage along their customer flow.

To maximize self-service, you must first find and fix the causes of digital leakage along the customer flow.

During a critical product launch, the digital team at a major telco was alerted by Quantum Metric to a drop in conversion within the checkout funnel. Meanwhile, the call center volume was rising, with customers reporting cart issues. Because this was a peak revenue period for the telco, resources and a timely resolution were critical.

Using session replay, the team could immediately reproduce the issue and draw the link between related technical details, which helped identify the root cause and enabled the team to uncover a database issue. They were also able to size the issue through opportunity analysis and realized the problem was directly correlated to a 3.8% conversion rate drop, with an annualized opportunity value over $850K.

Armed with all the necessary details to size and fix the problem, the team was able to prioritize and resolve the issue within a week.