The emerging customer expectations and the drive for efficiency have brought change to the insurance industry. Such an industry transformation is being achieved by the development of self-service capabilities, enabling policyholders to manage their accounts, retrieve information, and solve the most common problems on their own. This article delves into the growth in the power of self-service in insurance and how ServiceNow FSO is enabling insurers to deliver seamless, empowering experiences for customers, thus greater satisfaction and reduced operational cost in an increasingly agile and responsive insurance landscape.
What is Self-Service?
Self-service allows users to access resources and find solutions independently. These modern service systems are intelligent and autonomous, offering high-quality guidance and support without needing human assistance.
What Are the Advantages of Self-Service?
- Service Agility
Self-service platforms offer service agility of unmatched levels. Customers can quickly find solutions to their problems without waiting in long queues or relying on business hours. Therefore, the result is overall customer satisfaction, as businesses can effectively solve problems in real time, which greatly helps in overall service efficiency.
- Enhanced Customer Retention
The most significant advantage of self-service is that it enhances customer retention. If a customer can receive a solution for an issue independently and easily, the support journey becomes much smoother and hassle-free for them. In turn, this increases customer loyalty and makes them continue to do business with the brand, even as the customer base grows.
- Scalability
Self-service systems are very scalable. Whenever the business grows, the amount of support requests also goes up. The self-service system can handle such growth without adding extra support people to keep costs at bay while managing growing demands. This kind of scalability ensures that service quality is maintained even as business sizes increase.
- 24/7 Availability
Another major advantage is the availability of 24/7 service. Unlike traditional support, which ties a customer down to office hours; self-service portals, FAQs, and interactive chatbots are free to access at any time. This round-the-clock access means that customers can resolve their issues as and when the need arises, improving ease of use and increasing loyalty to the brand in general.
- Improved Customer Satisfaction
Ultimately, self-service leads to customer satisfaction: empowered customers in turn feel in control of their experience through fast and easy-to-use solutions. This convenience, aside from the quick resolution of problems, contributes toward a positive perception of the brand, encourages repeat business, and converts satisfied customers into advocates.
How to Define Your Self-Service Strategy?
- Track Customer Support Interactions
To make a strong self-service strategy, you first need to know your users. It begins with tracking every single customer support interaction that you have today. It will allow you to know the most frequently asked questions or problems faced by users, thus building a foundation for the kind of system you want to create for them.
- Analyze Recurring Issues
Look at the everyday tickets your customer service team is receiving. By reviewing this type of interaction, you’ll have a clearer sense of what areas are ripe for self-service. To understand even more of your customers’ more common pain points, keep an eye out on what they commonly search for on Google and your website.
- Provide Clear Solutions
Once you have a list of common issues, you need to provide solutions. Engage your best support people and ask them to review the most frequently asked questions and create simple, concise answers. This creates easy, followable guidance that could be videos or screenshots for the user to resolve on their own without contacting human support.
- Explore Various Self-Service Channels
There are various approaches you can adopt in providing these self-service solutions. These include a knowledge base, the use of chatbots, a service catalog, or even an online community where users share problems and team up to work out how to solve them.
- Establish a Self-Service Portal
Finally, a self-service portal is to be established wherein the users are navigated through these resources and given the liberty to interact with the software to find answers. This portal will be the central access point from where your clients easily and promptly find answers to their questions.
How to Create a Self-Service Portal?
- Link to Your Portal Everywhere
Help your users find the self-service portal. Use a call to action (CTA) throughout your website to point the users toward the portal. You can even include links within your product, app, or customer communications so that your users know where to go when they require help.
- Educate Customer Service Agents
To ease agent concerns about the portal diminishing their value, remind them that self-service frees them up to handle more complex and engaging tasks. In fact, agents can recommend the portal for simple, recurring questions, with themselves available to address more personalized customer inquiries that only they can solve.
- Optimize Your FAQs
The FAQs section in your portal is very important and part of what should be integral to that portal’s performance. Your FAQs should be stated clearly and understandably, and you should complement that information with relevant links. Integrating search functionality into your FAQs will give users an easier way to find answers.
- Include Multimedia Elements
You can add multimedia to the self-service portal for a better user experience. There are various ways a person can learn and so include video, images, screenshots, diagrams, or flowcharts so that information would be transmitted in different media formats. This makes the portal more engaging and helps users absorb information more easily.
- Prioritize Mobile Optimization
Finally, make your portal mobile-friendly. Many pieces of information are accessed through smartphones and tablets nowadays, so having ensured that your portal is optimized for mobile use increases the accessibility factor. A seamless mobile experience encourages users to rely on the portal whenever they need assistance, whether they’re at a desk or on the go.
How ServiceNow Empowers Customers Through Self-Service
ServiceNow Customer Service Management (CSM) gives today’s customers the freedom they want: access to personalized self-service, anytime, anywhere, without waiting for human agents.
CSM’s self-service tools, such as Service Portal and Engagement Messenger, provide central access to the management of cases and profiles and even more advanced access. Customers also have an avenue to interact with instant support from AI-enabled chatbots. It streamlines how answers to commonly asked questions are achieved.
All these are made possible without forcing too much interaction, ensuring that the customers find timely solutions to their problems. Virtual agents armed with natural language understanding and predictive intelligence further make support smoother as they offer personalized guidance.
The platform further boasts crowdsourcing and rich knowledge management features to enable customers to see information from different perspectives.
In summary, CSM offers a seamless and efficient self-service experience, ushering in a new standard towards customer empowerment.
Conclusion
The insurance business is becoming dynamic as self-service allows a policyholder to control their accounts and troubleshoot problems without depending on others. This is where ServiceNow comes in—empowering insurers to execute seamless, personalized experiences that heighten customer satisfaction and reduce costs. Modern insurance companies can use tools like AI-enabled chatbots and intuitive self-service portals to offer agile, efficient service satisfying the requirements of the new-world customers.
At Xceltrait, we aim to revolutionize insurers’ customer service management. We combine connected back-end processes with easier front-end processes to deliver outcomes for your customers quickly—even sometimes before they know the problem exists. Let’s help get your service operation off to a great start or build upon what you have done so far. Contact us today for our team to assist in the building of an efficient self-service platform that can best serve your customers in the most seamless and proactive ways possible.