Web Self Hunting... I mean Service.

I was on a webinar the other day by a company that promotes and builds web self service solutions for customer service. They have all the technology and all the tools and all the "expertise" to help companies deploy web self service.

As they were talking and showing and talking and showing, I started to think about what they were saying and what vendors are pushing to companies in this space. Web self service to some means emailing the company with a problem. For others it means putting up FAQs so people can find answers. For some it means putting in a search mechanism that gives a number of possibilities to answer your question. And for still others, web self service means communities and forums that are moderated by customers and the company.

But is that really what self service should be? Should we really be putting so much of the burden on the customer to find what they are looking for?

My sense is that web self service is going to start changing drastically over the next few years and it will go from a collection of people and information that we force our customers to parse through themselves, into an experience that is much more about being guided to where the answers are.

Just from my personal experience, just like others my age and younger, my first stop is either Google or the company website to figure out how I can solve a problem or answer a question. If the question is complex, I typically call the call center right away because I know it requires more human intervention. The trend that I seem to see on websites, especially large consumer company websites, is to just throw up every and all the information that they can and hope that the customer doesn't call them because the answer is there somewhere in that mess of info.

Maybe it is just me, but I guess I would expect more from a company. I know it is called "Self Service", but I just don't think that is enough anymore. It is great that Knowledge Management companies and web self service companies are starting to help corporations organize the information a bit better, but even that falls short. My sense is that customers are soon, if not already, throwing their arms up in surrender to the mass of information that exists help solve their problem.

My sense is that very soon, companies are going to invest time in finding ways to guide web self service customers more and help them find relevant information much more quickly. Customers are going to start expecting that if you want my business and want to keep my business, then step up and help me find the answer and don't force me to hunt down the answer on my own.

People, old and young alike, don't want to hunt. They just want the answer.