We all know that a company’s customer service efforts can make or break the business.
And, while we’d certainly advise that you make customer service a priority within your organization, the fact is that doing so can come with a number of frustrations—for both your team and your customers. Whether we’re talking long wait times, redundant processes, or unresolved outcomes, there are a number of ways your customer service efforts can go off the rails from time to time.
Even if you do offer top-notch customer service to your audience, the modern consumer essentially assumes that working with your (or any) service team will be “the absolute worst.” At least, that’s the premise of a Wall Street Journal article titled “Everyone Hates Customer Service. This Is Why.”
This general disdain for hands-on customer service is a main reason that many brands have begun providing various self-service options to their audiences. In fact, back in 2011, Gartner predicted that by the end of 2020, 85% of customer interactions would be handled without a live representative at all.
Customer self-service is becoming less of a “nice-to-have” and more of a necessity in the eyes of your customers. It’s vital, then, that you offer the self-service experience your audience expects moving forward.
Key Benefits of Providing Customer Self-Service Options
There are both customer-facing and internal benefits to providing your customers with various self-service options.
Firstly, self-service allows your customers to quickly find the information they need to begin resolving their issue with minimal delay. This surely trumps the alternative of waiting an unspecified number of minutes, hours, or even days for a response.
For your company, this means less time spent on basic queries that your customers are now able to solve on their own, which allows your CS team to focus on the more intensive issues customers face from time to time. Offering self-service options also drastically reduces your cost-per-service-contact numbers.
Self-service options also give your customer more control over the entire scenario. They can digest information at their own pace, dig deeper into aspects of the product or service they’re interested in, and explore your solutions and other content as they wish.
In digesting your self-service content at their own pace, customers will get much more value out of it than if they were rushed through the solution. The more value they get from your content and self-service experience, the more likely they are to trust your brand as a whole—and to continue doing business with you for a long time to come.
This leads to the ultimate customer-facing benefit of self-service:
It empowers your audience, handing them the control over their own growth and journey with your brand. They no longer need to rely on your service team to bring them where they want to be; they can get there on their own.
As your customers reach their initial goals, they’ll be able to move their personal goalposts even further—at which point they may very well need to make use of your more advanced products or services. This, of course, provides major upselling and cross-selling opportunities for your team, leading to an increase in the customer’s overall lifetime value.
Creating and Optimizing a Self-Service Experience for Your Customers
Remember the stat we mentioned earlier about how 85% of customer engagements are done sans human service representatives?
This only applies if your self-service experience:
- Provides the information and resources customers need to accomplish the task at hand
- Allows for intuitive accessibility and usability of the necessary resources
- Supercharges your customer’s overall experience with your brand
Let’s take a closer look at what this all means.
Cover as Much Ground as Possible
At the center of every self-service initiative is a comprehensive library of content, information, and knowledge that attempts to answer any questions customers may have.
In some cases, this means providing short, to-the-point content that answers your audience’s quick questions—such as those pertaining to store hours, shipping charges, and return policies.
You may also need to create more in-depth, instructional content on specific topics:
So, in terms of content creation, you have a lot of ground to cover.
If you’ve been in operation for a while, you probably already know the kinds of questions customers generally bring to your service team. Additionally, you have customer reviews, comments, survey responses, and a ton of other information that could help identify areas and topics to focus on.
Beyond creating content to address your customers’ issues as they appear on paper, you also want to address relevant peripheral issues.
Think about:
- The questions your customers might have as they digest the initial content
- Follow-up questions they’ll have after they’ve digested the content and begun putting their new knowledge into action
- The doors to growth that will open for them once they accomplish the initial task (and the questions they’ll have moving forward)
See what we’re doing here?
On one level, we’re mapping out our knowledge base and other content to ensure that customers’ questions are answered proficiently. On a deeper level, we’re creating content that interconnects with each other—allowing the audience to gain a more holistic and fundamental understanding of how our products work and the value they provide.
The crux of providing a top-notch self-service experience to your customers is in anticipating and proactively answering the questions they bring. Start by answering the most common ones, and you’ll eventually be able to scale your content library to cover more informational ground.
Make Your Self-Service Features and Content Accessible
Once you’ve created your self-service content, you need to ensure your customers are able to access and derive value from it.
For starters, be sure to include multimedia content in your self-service articles whenever relevant. When providing step-by-step instructions on how to perform a task, you might provide a video or a set of sequential photographs demonstrating the process in action.
Or, you might simply use images to clarify written instructions as necessary:
(Consider also linking to further reading on your blog, additional related videos, or any other content that may supplement your customer’s new knowledge.)
The idea here is to ensure your customers get value from your self-service content in the first place. To be sure, the addition of multimedia will only improve their ability to recall the information they take from your content—improving its effectiveness right off the bat.
It’s also crucial that your self-service experience is platform-agnostic, allowing customers to serve themselves regardless of the device they’re currently using.
On a basic level, this means offering a mobile-optimized knowledge base and website.
On a more fundamental level, it means taking an omnichannel approach to self-service across the board. For example, your customers should be able to pick up where they left off with your chatbot at any time, on any device.
Finally, your self-service content needs to be structured and tagged clearly and intuitively.
(If your customers can’t find what they’re looking for on their own, it defeats the purpose of self-service, right?)
As far as structure goes, your knowledge base and other content should follow a logical hierarchy.
For example, Meijer Home Delivery’s Help Center divides its content based on the relevant processes:
Clicking on each topic brings to you a set of related questions that are then answered directly on the page.
A logical hierarchy can help those looking to browse your knowledge base and content library in search of information related to particular topics.
To add even more accessibility, make sure to tag or label your self-service content appropriately so that the self-service search feature always returns the most accurate results:
…and program your chatbot to do the same:
But remember: if your self-service content is too difficult to access, it may as well not exist. As your content library continues to grow, be sure to maintain your hierarchical and tag-related systems accordingly. Your customers will always be able to find the information they need to get moving in the right direction.
Use AI-Assisted Technology to Supercharge Self-Service Engagements
Okay, so:
You’ve created your self-service content.
You’ve put the structures in place to ensure your customers can access it whenever they need to.
Now, you want to supercharge both these efforts through the use of artificial intelligence-based technology.
(As a quick note, many modern knowledge base and chatbot tools offer AI-based features to varying degrees. For our purposes, it’s important that you know a) which tools best serve your purposes, and b) how to get the most out of them.)
Artificial intelligence can have both customer-facing and internal benefits in terms of self-service.
On the customer side of things, natural language processing (NLP) allows your search function and chatbot to better understand user queries. In turn, they’ll be provided the most accurate results possible.
Similarly, NLP and semantic analysis can allow for dynamic search capabilities as well. Here, user queries will be auto-completed as they’re being typed—allowing the user to quickly identify the right content for their current needs.
Throw machine learning into the mix, and you essentially have a self-service function that continuously improves itself based on specific customer engagement. Depending on how it’s implemented, this should mean more accurate search results or more productive chatbot interactions.
In addition to making automated improvements, AI technology can also help you further develop your self-service initiatives.
A few examples:
- Automated intelligent data analysis can help identify topics your audience is likely interested in learning more about—allowing you to flesh out your self-service content accordingly.
- Sentiment analysis of customer questions, feedback, and other commentary can allow you to better empathize with your customers in need. Following this, you can tweak your self-service content, chatbot scripts, and other assets.
- Automated analysis of your customers’ engagement with your self-service options can provide insight as to when an issue should be escalated to your service team. This can help you maximize the value provided through your self-service options—while also streamlining the handoff to your human support staff should the need arise.
Customer Self-Service: Not Just a Recommendation
Enabling and equipping your customers to serve themselves throughout their engagements with your brand is, by today’s standards, an absolute must.
First of all, it’s what your customers want: namely, the ability to find the answers and information they need with minimal friction and wasted time.
Secondly, providing self-service options frees up your support staff to take care of your audience’s more pressing issues.
Overall, customer self-service is about ensuring your customers always receive value from your brand every time they engage with you. If they can accomplish their goals when interacting with your brand, they’ll have every reason to continue coming back for more in the future.