Customer self-service alters how companies engage with their clients. Even though self-service is not a new concept, customer trends can call for more self-service options in new areas.
According to Harvard findings, 81% of clients prefer to take care of issues themselves before reaching out to live representatives.
This blog post will examine seven benefits of self-service in customer support and ways to improve customer self-service in your business.
What is customer self-service?
Customer self-service enables customers to find solutions to their problems, access information, and perform various tasks without directly interacting with a company representative.
Customer self-service in customer support is available through a variety of channels, including knowledge bases, FAQs, chatbots, how-to videos, and online portals.
Benefits of self-service in your organization
Here are the top seven significance of a customer self-service system in your business.
1. Increases efficiency and productivity of the support team
Self-service in customer service options is available around the clock, allowing customers to find solutions to their issues anytime without needing any intervention from the support team. As a result, the brand’s total effectiveness can be improved.
Additionally, the support team can be more productive and efficient with fewer support tickets and queries to manage. They can spend more time on initiative-taking tasks, such as improving the knowledge base to continuously boost their support level.
2. Provides 24/7 support
If you want to succeed in the market, you must live up to the grand expectations of the modern consumer. Customers want businesses to help whenever they need it, around the clock.
The availability of support services is increased because of customer self-service. In this way, even if a consumer has a question at four in the morning, they may easily oversee it themselves.
Businesses can only offer human support to employees during specific hours and certain days of the week. However, self-service is available around the clock and on holidays. Consumers no longer must wait for answers as a result.
3. Serves more customers at once
Support representatives can serve a finite number of clients. Customers have a speedier option that often satisfies everyone when using self-service systems. For example, businesses like restaurants may find that installing self-service booths results in more customers.
Self-service offers significant benefits to both the customer and the business. Some significance include:
- Customers can consult the latest information on websites and knowledge bases to obtain the same answer they would receive from support staff.
- Provide businesses with the opportunity to gather valuable information from clients for future marketing strategies.
4. It is cost-effective
Maintaining a self-service portal is much less expensive than hiring a support team to manage client inquiries. A significant percentage of a company’s money utilized in other areas can be saved.
With self-service systems, businesses need to spend less time and money on employee training since performing specific tasks is shifted to the customer. This can lead to significant savings in training expenses.
5. Enhances the customer experience
Companies are aware that offering top-notch customer service is essential to their success. Contacting the support team may cause consumers inconvenience in addition to a delay in assistance.
The research may find that customers prefer to oversee their difficulties instead of asking for help. Using this information, self-service support can become a trustworthy substitute for the support team in the company.
Customers will be more satisfied and have a better experience if they can solve their problems without assistance from support personnel.
6. Reduces the burden on support staff
Support staff strain must be reduced for businesses to maintain high productivity and customer happiness. Implementing self-service alternatives in customer assistance is one method to do this. Customer assistance is crucially dependent on self-service for a few reasons:
- Reduced need for additional staff: With self-service options managing a huge portion of customer inquiries, organizations may not need additional support staff to manage the workload.
- Scalability: As an enterprise grows, so does the demand for customer support. Self-service options allow organizations to scale their support efforts without needing a proportional increase in support staff.
7. Provides insight into customers’ needs
Customer self-service provides insights into customers’ needs by enabling businesses to collect and analyze customer behavior, preferences, and feedback data. This information can then improve products, services, and customer experiences.
Companies use a self-service portal to collect customer feedback and receive suggestions or related information. These insights may be leveraged to develop consumer-focused offerings, enhance the self-service experience, and guarantee outstanding customer service to clients.
Tips for building the best customer self-service tools
Companies looking to begin offering self-service to their clients have many choices. Here are five top techniques to consider.
Highlight the most popular FAQs
Building a FAQ page on your website is the quickest way to start offering self-service in customer support. An FAQ page answers clients’ most frequent queries and is a more structured form of a knowledge base. Finding the subjects to include in your FAQ page is the challenge.
The best place to start curating topics for your FAQ is your support team reports. Use them to identify the questions and subjects that clients most frequently ask about.
Create a knowledge base
Creating knowledge bases continue to be a valuable source of information across all aspects of the customer support experience. They are especially successful in flattening the learning curve for onboarding new clients.
However, you can do a few things to get the most out of a knowledge base and maximize your investment:
- Give it a prominent place on your website and incorporate links to it in customer emails and newsletters to ensure that people know it exists.
- Make sure the knowledge base articles are appropriately arranged. The portal must include a search bar and be simple to navigate. Adding tags and labels to group materials into categories helps.
- Consider including images, graphics, videos, and other media types in your knowledge base material.
For more tips to create a knowledge base effectively, read the article.
Community forum
Making a community forum is another valuable way for customers to help themselves. They can use this feature to ask questions and find solutions from other customers.
Additionally, they may find other customers with the same issue and work together to find a resolution. A forum is an ideal setting for customers to exchange stories and offer helpful guidance.
How-to videos
How-to videos are an excellent self-service tool allowing users to learn and solve problems independently. These videos provide step-by-step instructions on performing specific tasks, allowing users to gain knowledge and skills without needing direct assistance from customer support or a professional.
Some of the steps include:
- Identify the topics to determine the most common issues or questions your users have about your product, service, or subject matter.
- Creating a script where one writes a clear and concise script for each video, outlining each step in the process.
Finally, monitor engagement and feedback to regularly review comments and feedback on your how-to videos to identify any issues or areas of confusion.
Wrapping it up
Customer self-service offers a fantastic way for customers to identify solutions and address their issues independently, without the assistance of support staff. Online community forums, knowledge bases, and FAQs are all examples of customer self-service.
Self-service tools can significantly enhance the productivity of an organization by empowering users and reducing support workload.
Schedule a live demo to experience how BoldDesk offers magnificent self-service tools for your business. BoldDesk provides an incredible knowledge base application for customer self-service portals. To experience the value you can deliver to your support team and customers, sign up for a BoldDesk free trial. If you have any queries, contact the BoldDesk support team.
Related articles
Reasons why a knowledge base is important in an organization.
Best practices to improve your knowledge base.
Knowledge base article templates for great content creation.
