Only 14% of Customer Service Issues Are Fully Resolved in Self-Service

Customers resolve only 14 percent of their service and support issues fully in self-service, and even for issues that customers describe as very simple, only 36 percent resolve fully in self-service, Gartner found in a new consumer study.

While many organizations have made considerable investments in self-service, Gartner’s survey indicates that resolution rates remain low.

“While 73 percent of customers use self-service at some point in their customer service journey, it’s concerning to see that so few fully resolve there,” says Eric Keller, senior director of research in the Gartner Customer Service & Support Practice. “It’s imperative that customer service and support leaders work to resolve the issues customers face in order to fully realize the value of their self-service investments.”

Customers feel a disconnect between the issues they want to solve and the capabilities that self-service can offer. Forty-five percent of customers who started in self-service said the company didn’t understand what they were trying to do. Furthermore, the most common reason for self-service failure was that in 43 percent of cases, customers couldn’t find content relevant to their issues.

“Customers feel frustrated by self-service journeys that feel too rigid to deal with the complexities of their service issues,” Keller says. “Self-service can offer substantial benefits for organizations and customers, but work is required to ensure that customers’ needs are understood and responded to.”

To improve self-service resolution, Gartner has the following recommendations for customer service and support leaders:

• Scale and maintain self-service content by expanding content creation responsibilities to reps, enabling them to create knowledge as part of the issue resolution workflow rather than as a separate process.
• Invest in proactive delivery of self-service solutions by using customer account, interaction, and product usage data to predict customer needs.
• Simplify the resolution path on their websites with a single digital concierge, such as a generative artificial intelligence chatbot, positioned as the most prominent entry point to the customer journey.
• Assess and improve the performance of self-service content continuously, allowing both customers and reps to flag ineffective content and establishing ongoing processes for improving content quality.

“The realities of self-service journeys—which have many potential paths to a solution, varying expectations for content, and constantly evolving issue types—have limited the success of organizations’ self-service investments,” said Keller. “Organizations need to capture, diagnose, and predict customer intent in self-service and match them with the best-fit solution.”