Kathy Harris

I’m just starting to update some work on productivity I did a few years ago. One of my key findings in the original is that if you make your customers more productive, they will actually take work away from your organization. This is a simple concept with powerful implications – to make your organization more productive, make your customers more productive.

Think about it - each of us is a customer in some way and we all would like to better manage our interactions with providers, for example, we’d like to make our schedules. In the absence of self-service, customers have to fit into someone else’s schedule – we conduct our business during their hours of operation, wait our turn on the phone, wait for them to call us back, wait in a queue at stores or offices, and so on. 

Improving your customer’s productivity can be very lucrative — the ease with which customers can perform tasks (for themselves and for you) will build or solidify their relationship with you. The potential benefits to you and your company are diverse.

• When customers are competent in self-service, they will pose fewer questions and will require less use of high cost agent-assisted services.
• As customers’ competency increases, they are more inclined to try new functions or more-complex products and services.
• As customers feel more in control, they learn to trust the quality of their information and the applications they use. This improves satisfaction and perhaps, a willingness to take one even more self-service.
• Finally, loyalty may increase as customers are able to choose their own time and place for interaction and resolve their own questions or problems.  

Even if you accept these rules and behaviors, customer productivity is not a slam-dunk and simply pushing work to customers will not guarantee success. Specifically, self-service design must adhere to key principles: self-services requires an elegant user interface (intuitive, appealing look, feel and navigation); broad access to rich information, media and functionality; powerful personalization, communication and collaboration; the ability to suggest innovations, improvements or changes; feedback on ideas or suggestions; and involvement in continual improvement.