Customer Self-Service: Advantages, Types, and Best Practices

Do you know that 88% of your customers expect self-service features to enhance their experience while interacting with your brand? Customer self-service largely reduces friction as your clients interact with your business.

How about deflecting a sizable part of your tickets without any involvement of agents by deploying automated technologies? Thanks to automation and the self-service portal eServeCloud, brands are streamlining their support mechanisms.

Interestingly, 91% of customers tend to count on knowledge bases if they cater to their requirements. With a reduced number of tickets, your agents can personalize the experience of customers who need their involvement.

What is customer self-service? What are the different self-service options for customers?

Customer self-service refers to a calculated blend of resources and technologies that allow customers to get issues resolved by themselves. Each time a customer faces a difficulty, different self-service options for customers can help in sorting the issue out without the involvement of your agents.

Have a look at the different self-service options for customers:

• Knowledge base
• FAQ page
• Self-service flows
• Custom automation workflows
• Chatbots
• Forums and communities
• Informative articles and blogs
• In-product tutorials
• Webinars

What are the advantages of customer self-service?

As the business head or CEO of your organization, you should understand that deploying self-service options can translate to a 70% drop in calls, email, or chat inquiries. Wouldn’t this free up time for your agents to prioritize other inquiries?

Let’s take a look at the prime advantages of customer self-service.

1.  Quick resolution of problems

Customers habitually hate late responses from your support desk. To uphold your brand image and trust, make sure to sort out their queries at the earliest. This explains why forward-thinking brands are using the eServeCloud customer portal to provide self-service features to their clients.

With customer self-service features, they can resolve their issues instantly without reaching out to your agents. This significantly enhances your customer satisfaction rate.

2.  Slash customer service costs

Have you considered how much you need to pay your employees for ensuring 24/7 customer support? A typical day involves three shifts considering the working hours to be 8 hours per agent. So, you would end up hiring 3 agents to provide uninterrupted support.

With self-service resources like knowledge bases, blogs, and chatbots, you can significantly curtail your customer service costs.

3.  More productive support agents

Customer support agents often end up squandering their time responding to reparative and mundane questions. With a self-service portal and customer communities, you can make your support team more productive. Besides, human agents habitually don’t like performing these tedious and unproductive tasks.

By offering different self-service options for customers, you can make better use of the energy and enthusiasm of your team. Why not let them focus on more challenging issues that make their job pleasurable and interesting?

4.  Making customer support easily available

What if a customer tries to contact your helpdesk after office hours and none of your agents are available to respond?

Counting on self-service help center eServeCloud, you can make customer support easily available! For instance, integrate an AI-backed chatbot to keep your customer hooked until an agent is ready to take over the conversation. This way, you won’t annoy your customers, and ensure instant response through self-service.

Best practices of customer self-service

Considering the potential of customer self-service resources, brands should deploy them tactically. Here are some of the best practices to adopt when you use customer self-service.

1.  Ensure one-click resolution

No customer likes being directed from one page to the next. Deploy self-service options with one-click resolution features to mitigate their woes.

 For instance, chatbots should be intelligent enough to provide relevant blog links to customers when they come up with a query. Also, these bots should present all the viable options to choose from, so that a few clicks can take your customer to the desired knowledge base.

2.  Update your FAQ page

From time to time, update your FAQ page with more resources. By deploying analytics, brands can find out commonly asked questions. When you find that a sizable part of your clients is inquiring about something specific, why not create a blog or include the question on your FAQ page?

3.  Use media intelligibly

Customers looking for self-service options love interacting with different types of media elements. For instance, mix up your self-service resources like audio, video, and text. Webinars, for instance, provide a step-by-step guide to customers to resolve their queries. Compare the eServeCloud self-service portal vs communities strategically and provide blogs, articles, knowledge resources, and FAQ sections. Remember, not all customers love to read. So, you need to furnish the same information to them through a different medium.

4.  Deploy AI-bots

AI bots are capable of initiating conversations and even imitating the human approach to responding to customers. This is one of the most practical self-service options for customers. If you haven’t integrated one of these bots, go for this inexpensive feature. A basic bot would hardly cost you $20 a month.

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Conclusion

Gone are the days when CEOs used to think that customer support necessarily involves human interaction. Balancing your agents with chatbots and other support elements drastically slashes the ticket volume. Most importantly, your customers can resolve their queries quickly without interacting with your agents.

A proactive stance to assist your customers and resolve potential issues before they arise significantly leverages your brand image. Deploy self-service resources calculatedly to streamline your customer support system.