Customer Service
Are you sabotaging your self-service?
Looking to the future, it’s clear that organizations will need to increase their data capture of customer journeys if they hope to maximize the productivity of their self-service channels.
December 17, 2025 by Phil Smith — CEO, QPC Group
Self-service has long been the preferred method of access for customers and its now an expected option, with a third saying they'd stopped buying from businesses that didn't support channels such as chat or social media. In fact, it's such a popular option for dealing with inquiries that it's expected to overtake both phone and email by 2027, according to Gartner.
However, the way in which self-service is ineffectively managed means many businesses are self-sabotaging their self-service channels. Another recent survey found 68% of customers have abandoned the process due to frustration and 73% failed to complete a purchase. Moreover 84% had to re-enter information that the company should already have had, increasing customer effort. So it's small wonder that Forrester found expectations versus reality are widening in CX, leading to a decline in service delivery among 21% of the brands it regularly monitors for the second year in a row.
The problem today is that many businesses assume their self-service channels are performing well because they've got no real way of measuring friction. Customer experience is predominantly measured via metrics such as Customer Satisfaction (surveys or Net Promoter Scores which often only capture high level sentiment from a limited segment of customers and therefore under report on the effort involved because they fail to capture the entire customer journey. As a result, such surveys don't record problems such as siloed or disconnected system or process failures which result in customers having to repeat themselves, or only capture one instance of failure rather than the full amount of effort involved.
Wasted investment
Unaware of these issues, companies continue to invest in self-service. The Customer Experience Trends Report 2025 found 35% of companies intend to invest more in adding service over channels. But what they're not taking into account with this strategy is that more is not always better. This is because as the customer abandons one line of inquiry and starts another this can actually increase discontent and cost-to-serve. If that customer does resort to contacting a human, there's often no context available with regards to where the customer has come from, how many channels they've used or the nature of their inquiry. This is because most contact center platforms treat digital and assisted interactions as separate streams, so the customer's journey and the context becomes lost when they transition channels.
In real terms this often compounds the frustration experienced by the customer when the self-service channel failed. For example, if a person abandoned the process and put in a call to the call center, that agent may not be able to see each step of the process, where it was stopped and why, and in all likelihood will need to question the customer and start again from scratch. Or, if the interaction broke down while the customer was talking to a bot, not having visibility of the bot script path can again prevent the agent from resolving the query efficiently.
Having that visibility can also provide additional advantages, such as enabling the agent to personalize their response to better engage with the customer. Perhaps the customer was sent a one-time offer such as an upgrade and they followed the link but then decided to phone in. The agent could then see the offer and how far the customer had progressed, enabling them to respond proactively and secure the sale.
Smooth handover
It's this ease of handover that companies need to address if they want self-service to be more successful. Customers don't want to have to make the choice between a chatbot or a human but to feel both interactions are part of the same process. To achieve that, the business needs to capture the customer journey in its entirety, including negative outcomes such as abandoned or repeat contacts.
Typically, customer interaction data is fragmented across multiple channels and systems and not real-time. A customer's phone calls, emails, chat sessions, and self-service interactions often live in separate silos (for example, voice calls in an Avaya ACD, chats in a digital platform, etc.) and this fragmentation makes it difficult to consolidate information into a single actionable view, resulting in reporting gaps and inefficiencies.
By breaking down these silos it's possible to unveil real-time insights that were previously out of reach and such data can prove invaluable. It can be used to route customers to the appropriate agent and to equip that agent with the knowledge to pick-up and carry the ball. It can allow operational teams to identify self-service pinch points and address issues to drive up containment rates. And it can provide senior management with the 'under the hood' insights needed to determine if self-service is working and to further optimize these channels.
Analyzing the data
Unifying fragmented customer journeys then allows the business to scrutinize the effectiveness of its channels by analyzing the data and generating a Customer Effort Score. The CES is calculated based on every customer touch point so gives a true 'struggle score' based on both disparate digital and call journeys. This can be used to complement the metrics mentioned above, so while NPS might provide a snapshot of the customer sentiment or experience, CES will tell the business the where and why behind that outcome.
Looking to the future, it's clear that organizations will need to increase their data capture of customer journeys if they hope to maximize the productivity of their self-service channels and it's a picture liable to be further complicated by AI. The technology has not proven to be the panacea the sector expected and if organizations don't get on top of their self-service and unify their CX today, they could find AI simply complicates an already opaque process.
About Phil Smith
Phil Smith is founder and CEO of QPC Group, a provider of customer contact optimisation solutions, and sister company Mazaru, a customer service communications company. Under Phil's leadership, QPC Group has significantly expanded its global footprint, developing cutting-edge technologies that enhance customer service and operational efficiency for businesses worldwide. Headquartered in Wales, the company operates across multiple regions, including the UK, US, Europe, the Middle East, India, and Australia.
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