Customer support is on the rise, becoming the backbone of any business. While customers enjoy fast and responsive customer service, more and more people prefer self-service over contacting a customer support agent. Could self-service be the future of customer support?
In a survey by Interactive Intelligence Group, “short response times” ranked higher in importance for customers than “efficiency”, professionalism” or “knowledgeable agents”. As we can see, customers need answers to their questions and solution to their problems in no time. Self-service could be the answer to many questions that customers have.
Why self-service?
Self-service allows your customers to solve their own issues in a fast and easy way, letting your outsourced customer support team to deal with less requests for support and reducing technical support services costs. According to Forrester, 72% of customers prefer self-service to resolve their technical support issues without requiring any interaction with a representative from your company. We can say that self-service and automation of processes is on the rise and will play significant roles in the transformation of customer support.
Customers prefer self-service. 91% of them would use a self-service channel if it were available and met their needs. Self-service channels are most utilized by millenials. 73% would help themselves if the company would provide them with the right resources to solve the issue on their own. Being faster and more convenient on mobile devices, self-service is the perfect choice for accessing technical support whenever needed. It makes you more available for your customers and it can rescue your technical support agents from repetitive issues that can be resolved through a FAQs article. It cuts the unnecessary costs and it empowers your customers, providing them with the means to solve their own issues. On top of that, self-service resources can easily be referred to a friend that is experiencing the same issue and the company can receive a valuable feedback from its customers.
How to self-service your customer support?
A self-service portal that offers immediate and constant access to common customer service issues is the kind of portal your company should have. Its resources can take the following forms:
- Knowledge bases: a centralised database of useful information
- FAQs: a collection of recurring questions and queries that are related to your product and the issues that may occur
- How-to video: a collection of videos in which step by step instructions can lead your customer to solving an issue
If you already have self-support resources, it’s time to upgrade them and give your customers the best information they can have to solutionate the issues encountered:
- Identify your customer’s needs. – If customers are gonna get the most use of your service, the resources should be relevant to their needs. Identify recurring issues and separate them according to usage and skill.
- Visibility can change the path of your service. – Display your self-service resources and encourage customers to try them. If the presence of your own resources is not noticeable, customers will miss out the opportunity.
- Highlight the most popular FAQ. – Your customers should be able to find the answers to their issues in your self-service portal. Add the most popular FAQ to the self-service home page in order to be easier to find.
- A picture’s worth a thousand words. – Take screenshots to show your customers where they need to update settings or where to click. You can also record the entire process and upload it on your self-service portal, your customers will thank you.
- Up-to-date information is the best information. – If you decide to create a FAQ section, don’t put it in a corner and forget about it. You need to improve your knowledge base continuously.
- Mobile devices, here we come! – If you haven’t optimized your self-service for mobile users, you should do it now. Consistency on all channels is the key to a happy customer. If your self-service portal is not mobile-friendly, then you’re customers are less likely to use it.
Today’s customers are more than ready for self-service. Empowering the customer to resolve the issues encountered is a victory for both the user and the customer support team. Dave Campbell, the VP of product marketing for the customer engagement and support products at LogMeIn is of opinion that “The human touch is still required for many queries, but by offloading some of the work to self-service tools, agents will be in a much better position to deliver the game-changing support that creates higher satisfaction and increased productivity.”
As we can see, self-service is the future of customer support, yet the need for finding a great customer support team is becoming bigger and bigger. Even if self-support services are on the rise, startups or companies still need a team that can provide efficient and exceptional outsourced customer support in order to form and maintain connections with their customers.
[…] an FAQ page that has in-depth content that could answer any question your customer might have. The self-service nature of knowledge bases also means freeing up your customer support reps to focus on adding value, not […]