Across industries, fully 81% of all customers attempt to take care of matters themselves before reaching out to a live representative.
Empowering your customers to solve their own problems not only saves the agents’ time but also saves your cost.
When your business learns ways to improve customer self-service, it allows customers to fix their own problems without having to write an email or make a phone call. You significantly save expenses, boost live agent efficiency, and enhance the entire customer experience.
Customer support extends beyond simply being available to customers when they have an issue. It is also about providing people with the tools and knowledge they require in order to obtain answers on their own.
5 ways to improve a customer self-service strategy
Customers in almost every scenario are seeking solutions to limit their interactions with human agents and handle common problems on their own.
When self-service support is done correctly, it helps customers to locate information fast, reducing the number of calls or emails received by the support team leading to a better customer experience.
Enlisted below are 5 ways to improve a customer self-service strategy-
- Know what kind of self-service needs to be offered
- Make self-serve portals more visible
- Build a powerful knowledge base powered by AI
- Take feedback from customers
- Fulfill your customer’s expectation
- Learn and evolve as your business grows
Sef serve options to offer customers
1. Know what kind of self-service needs to be offered
Many conversations still need human intervention, but for those that do not, self-service may deliver a personalized experience that results in high customer satisfaction.
With evolving growing technology, there are so many ways to empower your agents with tools and features to help themselves. Knowing the right self-serve tools needed that can help your customers save time is the first step of improving customer self-service.
FAQ and knowledge base sites, where users may actively search for the info they need and watch videos or read an article to seek help, are among the most basic possibilities.
Chatbots can be an advanced solution, a tool capable of searching for answers to difficulties on behalf of a client and delivering rapid advice on how to continue. Chatbots are widespread in an age where customers are accustomed to interacting with businesses through online chat tools and applications.
Setting up a community forum for the customers to interact with other customers so that they can discuss and resolve problems amongst themselves.
Different types of self-serve options that you can choose for your businesses are-
- FAQ page
- Knowledge base or help center content
- Community forum
- AI-powered chat and messaging
Kapture helps you empower your customers with all the powerful self-serve options mentioned above. The AI-powered bot that uses machine learning easily predicts the solutions for the customers by analyzing their responses.
2. Make self-serve portals more visible
More than 60% of US consumers say their go-to channel for simple inquiries is a digital self-serve tool such as a website, mobile app, or online chat.
What’s the use of having a world-class AI-powered chatbot feature on your website when it’s not accessible or visible to your customers?
Make sure your customers are aware of your self-service portal. Spreading the word includes your IVR and holding messages on websites, as well as service agents promoting self-service during client engagements.
Display links to your help center, prominently on your main page, and make sure your internal search bar connects customers to relevant information.
A complex self-service environment may lead consumers to contact your support personnel directly making it useless. In certain circumstances, sophisticated technologies might lead to increased staffing shortages, increasing the likelihood of unpleasant customer service experiences.
3. Keep knowledge base updated
Your self-service support site’s material is never truly done. To ensure that your self-service portal is working as hard as it can for your clients, you must constantly expand your knowledge base.
Content creators and product managers must create more content, update old content, and grow multimedia content. Knowledge bases should not be fixed; they should be regularly updated to offer clients relevant and helpful information.
Kapture’s Knowledge Management System is easy to use and easily customizable. You can frequently update the content of your knowledge base by yourself without any external help.
4. Take feedback from customers
Customers are ultimately the end-users of the self-serve and their feedback can help you understand how effective your self-serve is.
The more data you have about their experience, the easier it will be to design meaningful experiences that decrease client turnover. You can design the self-serves according to their inputs for a better customer experience.
5. Fulfill your customer’s expectation
Assumptions about your clients might lead to errors in user experience design. Seek input from both critics and supporters; they frequently have important ideas and are eager to share them. Consider what you can do to lessen complaints and convert them into compliments.
The more information you gather from your customers about their specific needs and common problems, the more you can update and expand your knowledge base.
Keep an eye on your metrics and consider how you need to update your solutions in the future. If your self-service strategy is working well and more customers are using it, it may be time to automate your strategy more and implement more advanced technologies into your virtual agents and AI tools.
6. Learn and evolve as your business grows
Self-service solutions can assist with a wide range of customer journey touchpoints in the following ways-
- During the first purchasing process, a self-service solution may assist clients in determining which goods and solutions are ideal for them based on their individual needs.
- Chatbots may help customers in addressing crucial questions about the differences between various packages and then transmitting information from those conversations to a sales expert when the customer contacts them.
- Create active self-service solutions so customers don’t have to seek help in the first place, which is even better than making your solutions simple to locate.
- By studying consumer behavior, more organizations are reaching out through text, email, or phone before a client reports an issue.
Kapture is a master at analyzing data and reporting it in 1000+ formats for your convenience and better understanding. An analyzed report about consumer behavior can help you set self-serve options according to the needs of your customers.
What are the benefits of self-service?
The ultimate goal of offering self-serve to the customer is to improve the overall customer experience.
Customers nowadays are not just ready for self-service; they really prefer it over other types of help! However, a customer self-service portal will only be effective if it is simple to use.
Listed below are 3 major benefits of self-serve for your customer support.
1. Faster customer resolutions
You don’t like waiting in the queue for getting a petty issue resolved from an agent, do you?
Self-serve features can allow your customers to solve problems on their own, hence providing a seamless and delightful experience.
2. Saves the agent time
Most of the common and repetitive problems are being addressed or resolved with the help of self-serve. This saves the agents time and gives them more bandwidth to look after more serious issues that seriously require assistance.
3. Saves cost
Making your customer solve his/her own problems helps you significantly reduce the number of agents from your customer support department.
This can ultimately help you save a lot of money spent on agents that resolve common customer issues.
Kapture to power your self-serve
Make Kapture, part of your customer support team and resolve more customer queries and questions in an effective way.
Kapture’s AI-powered chatbot uses machine learning to resolve customer queries. It makes smart decisions by analyzing the internal data thereby providing the most suitable solution.
In fact, we empower your customers with a solid knowledge base with a lot of content in the form of FAQs, articles, videos, presentations, community forums. We’ve got your back.
Let your customers be their own problem-solvers.
About the Author | |
 | Ankit Kochar |
| Ankit Kochar is a content writer at Kapture CRM who loves to write creative as well as informative content. He has worked as a creative and academic content writer in the past and has a keen knowledge of writing reports, essays and dissertations. His current field is helping him research and hone his SaaS knowledge. | |
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