Have you ever had an aha moment, where you were able to solve a problem on your own? For example, being able to fix your WiFi router by just reading a help article, without having to connect with a customer support agent. This is the objective of self-service customer support.
Apart from not wanting to call support for help, people also like figuring out things on their own. According to a report by Zendesk, 67% of customers prefer to use self-service options instead of talking to a customer service agent.
This is why it is extremely necessary to deliver high quality self-service customer support solutions where customers can find answers to their questions fast.
What is a Self-Service Solution?
Self-service is an approach in which customers utilize resources to find solutions on their own, without requiring assistance from a customer service representative.
With the objective of catering to large customer bases using relatively small teams, companies have witnessed a notable shift in tasks from being driven by the company to being driven by the customers themselves.
A self-serve solution is a combination of different support channels like knowledge bases, chatbots and portals working together in providing a seamless self-service customer support experience.
5 Reasons to Provide Self-Service
Let's say, you currently have 50 customer support representatives who help troubleshoot customer queries on call. However, the reality is that most of the time your customers need to wait for minutes before they are able to connect with one of your support representatives.
Now, imagine if you had much fewer agents and still wanted to have happier customers. Seems difficult? Let’s look into how we can make that possible.
Better Customer Experience
With self-service portals such as a knowledge base or a chatbot, customers can find information and solutions quickly and conveniently, leading to a positive customer experience. It empowers customers and gives them a sense of control over their interactions with a business.
Empowering customers to help themselves is vital for all businesses. It gives them a sense of control over their interactions with your business. It also gives them the confidence to use your product or service. Knowing that there is a public knowledge base that they can access from anywhere at any time, gives your customers a sense of comfort.
These are some of the reasons how customer experience improves with a self-service portal.
Reduce Support Tickets and Save Time
A majority of customer questions are usually repetitive, or frequently asked. You do not have to use your customer support to repeatedly give the same answers to every customer.
These questions could be an article that the customer can refer to on their own. Additionally, an AI chatbot trained on your knowledge base will also be able to resolve such questions quickly.
Decreased Customer Support Costs
Running a large customer support team is very expensive. Employee salaries and benefits, hiring and training costs add up to a significant expense for a company.
Implementation and up-keep of a self-service solution would also incur expenses, but this amount would be much lesser compared to the costs of running a large support team.
With repetitive and simple issues now being solved by customers themselves, your support team would have lesser calls and inquiries to attend to. You can now operate with a lean customer service team who would also be more productive as their assistance would only be needed with more complex support queries.24/7 support availability
Your employees have working hours, but chatbots & knowledgebase don't. Customers are free to reach out to your self-service solutions anytime, anywhere and get answers to their queries. This leads to improved customer experience as they would not have to wait for the operating hours of your business to be able to connect with a support executive.
Businesses with a distributed customer base, who would use the product at different hours of the day would especially benefit from this.
SEO Benefits
Little is talked about the massive SEO (Search Engine Optimization) benefits of having a self-service support solution.
Although this does not help in improving your customer service directly, there are many added benefits for your business.
Providing self-serve options can drastically improve search engine optimization (SEO) for your business. By creating comprehensive knowledge base articles and FAQs, your business can rank higher in search results when customers search for related queries.
This would increase the organic traffic and visibility for your company. You would also get discovered by customers using the product / service of your competitors.
Search engines consider your website to be useful when visitors spend more time on your knowledge base. This would improve the SEO of your landing pages considerably.
What a Great Self-Service Solution Should look Like
The best self-service experience is built when multiple channels work in collaboration with one-another. Let us dig in deeper as to what these channels must include.
Frequently Asked Questions
Depending from business to business, you must either have a list of FAQ’s listed on the support page of your website, or have a dedicated section for frequently asked questions on your website’s knowledge base.
This is the easiest way to help your customers find answers to the most common questions customers have about your business.AI Knowledge Base
While FAQ’s consist of generic questions & information, a traditional knowledge base consists of how-to guides, troubleshooting instructions and other tutorials that dives deeper into how customers can use certain features and make the best use of the product.
With the boom of artificial intelligence in 2023, AI has already impacted a lot of industries. This includes customer support. An AI knowledge base goes a step further than traditional ones by providing solutions to customer queries much faster.
Unlike a traditional knowledge base where customers need to navigate through different pages to reach the right article, an AI powered knowledge base provides an instant answer to the customers search result.
It is also possible to train the AI with custom answers of your own. This will result in improved answers when similar questions are asked by customers from the next time.
AI Chatbot
Chatbots have been present in self-serve customer service for a long time now. Earlier versions of customer support chatbots were not very efficient. It almost always meant that people would need to connect with a support agent after receiving unsatisfactory responses from chatbots.
However, chatbots have improved to a whole new level with the introduction of AI. Just like how AI knowledge bases have made it much easier to get an answer, AI chatbots have taken the conversational flow of customer support to the next level.
Just like how you talk to a support agent over chat, it's now possible to talk to an AI chatbot which will provide you answers based on the help articles present in the knowledge base. Each article is studied by the AI and generates a concise answer to give as a reply for the customer. On rare occasions the chatbot does not provide you with a satisfactory result, a human can help you with your query.
Community Forum
Foster a community by providing a forum where customers can interact with each other and share their experiences and knowledge. This not only helps in problem-solving but also creates a sense of belonging and loyalty among customers.
For instance, Ghost (the platform we’ve used to write this article) has a thriving online community where customers ask questions, and other customers are free to reply with solutions if they’ve faced a similar issue earlier. Moderators also frequently answer questions customers have asked in the forum.
Escalation Options
No matter how much you improve your self-service customer support, it is necessary to have escalation options in incase a customer is not able to resolve their issue themselves.
You must make the pathway of getting support from your team very clear. This could be as simple as having a Contact Us form on your knowledge base website. Or the AI chatbot you are using should be able to provide ways to contact the customer team.
Make sure you choose a self-service product that offers these features. We at Help.center have built a powerful self-serve solution and provide all of these features out of the box.