How to provide digital self-service to your customers

Kris Walls

07.13.2022

With most, if not all, customers searching out the information they’re after on their own, businesses have to make sure they’re still guiding their customer’s experiences. A good place for business to start crafting digital self-service flows is at the intersection of high-volume, low-complexity interactions that have a high ROI return for businesses.

For example, let’s say your consultancy required customers to call in to confirm their appointments. That could lead to a high volume of calls going to your front desk, long wait times for customers, and a less-than-ideal customer experience. Using a self-serve experience, you could use digital CX tools to send customers a text with a link that they can tap in an instant to confirm their appointments. This flow saves your company time and money, while automating a routine task customers were formerly responsible for completing. That’s the power of self serve.

You could also take a look at the different types of interactions customers have available to engage with organizations and businesses. There are 8 major channels that all businesses should be focused on in 2022, and this is mainly because you never know how much larger this list will get in 2023 and beyond. Making sure your engagement channels are up to par will have you prepared to explore new channels as they open up. The current channels we’ve seen recently include:

Phone
Email
Face to face
Video chat
Live chat
Chatbot
Print (mailers, magazines, etc)
Social media

Banks, as an example, primarily use only 2 out of the 8 channels referenced above. They heavily rely on their call centers to field phone calls and emails for further interactions. That means they’re missing out on 75% of the opportunities where they could give customers a better experience. To put that stat in context, 86% of buyers state they’d pay more for excellent customer service and experience. So, now you know how much money you’re leaving on the table by overlooking channels, or opportunities to wow your customers.

How Airkit helps create digital self-service

Airkit has been helping our customer, First Fidelity Bank, navigate the post-pandemic world after several branches had to be shut down. This caused confusion to many of their clients on who they should contact and who their banker was. Their customer experience was primarily voice and they didn’t have the capability to give a true omnichannel experience and create easier methods of communication.

Once the Airkit and First Fidelty Bank partnership began, their team was able to digitize processes, realizing a 43% conversion rate increase and achieving 86% CSAT with online digital scheduling. Not only is this helping them innovate their communications but they are also building their velocity to build new experiences. They are now able to launch digital experiences in weeks rather than months, deploying five new experiences in a year rather than just one. This can make all the difference when your company is looking for growth while also providing the best possible experience for their customers. You’ll set yourself up to grab deals like this one:

“An opportunity came up through our digital scheduling app where a customer was able to find us through word of mouth, schedule an appointment with our banker, and execute a loan. Once we had that opportunity to build that relationship with this customer, we were able to bring their whole relationship over to us. And now it’s a multimillion-dollar relationship.”

Excited to see what their next experiences bring! You never know what opportunities might come through unexpected avenues. Adopting an omnichannel approach is like casting a wide net to capture and make the most of those opportunities. Using self-serve flows, you can rest easy knowing that you can welcome those new opportunities at any time, even outside of business hours. Using Airkit, you can make the most out of every moment. And not just with digital scheduling, there are many ways to provide digital self-service like account information updates, auto-pay opt-ins, and more as you’ll see in our examples below.

Examples of digital self-service apps built with Airkit

Airkit is all about helping you enable your customers to self-serve digitally. These are just a few examples of what Airkit can help you build to provide the best customer experience:

Self-Service for Life Insurance

Auto-pay setup: Let customers enter their personal information to find the policy that’s right for them and connect their bank accounts for future payments.
Change beneficiary: Give customers the power to verify their identity and select the beneficiary and trust information they’d like to alter, complete with signature submission.
Request fund withdrawals: Allow customers to enter their personal information and choose the amount of funds they’d like to withdraw.

Self-Service for Property & Casualty Insurance

Report an incident: After an incident, give your customers the ability to provide the information that matters like their policy number, the location of the incident, and what type of damage their vehicle incurred, including images.
Track claims status: Let customers track claims’ status with a click using self-serve web flows and asynchronous call scheduling.
Request roadside assistance: When a customer needs roadside help, time is of the essence. Give customers an easy way to enter in their personal information to validate their identity and input their location for pickup. They can also add images of their vehicle’s condition for additional context.

Self-service for Deliveries

Check order status: Customers want to find where their order is fast. Using self-serve WISMO tracking, customers can enter in their personal information or tracking number to find their order easily.
Schedule delivery: Don’t let shipments pass like ships in the night. Empower your customers to schedule deliveries at a time that works for them.

Self-service for Utilities account

Schedule service: When something breaks, customers want a fix ASAP. Self-serve scheduling helps service appointments move faster.
Start or stop services: For customers, that light switch might turn on and off, but the service powering that light isn’t as simple to turn on and off. When customers need to start or stop service, make it simple with self-serve flows.

There are plenty more Airkit experiences to discover! We have some of those digital experiences displayed in our Demo Center and many more to be built by our customers. Reach out to Airkit to learn more about building applications like these and getting a digital experience platform that boosts your productivity.