Self-service is proactive customer service that provides support for customers who want to find a solution on their own. Rather than contacting one of the company’s customer service agents, customers use self-service options to research and troubleshoot issues by themselves. Self-service is an important feature to include in your business’s customer service offer as it can provide your customers with fast and readily available solutions.
Having reliable and dedicated self-service tools that your customers can turn to can bring a lot of benefits to your overall brand image and customer service platform. Besides offering customers a faster, more immediate way of getting their answer to an issue and helping you control unnecessary costs. A self-service tool is also a fantastic way of boosting your relationship with customers; their relationships with one another, and your outreach to new customers.
Part of assisting the customer is not just about solving their problem there and then. It’s about giving them the tools they need to solve their problems in the future, and a self-service portal does this just beautifully. By educating customers in problem solutions, you’ll be giving them so much more than just a product. You’re expanding their knowledge and their skill set.
Introduce an open Q&A section or a forum into your self-service portal and you’ll welcome a whole host of valuable voices into your customer service frontline. Peer-to-peer support is a fantastic way of encouraging your customers to trust and build relationships with one another, as well as share ideas and experiences on using your product or service.
You’ll be able to direct customers to the right information more quickly and use it as a way of gauging what sorts of problems need to be addressed more closely. If your self-service portal does indeed include a knowledge base, your social media feed will be a way of dispersing news and information on anything relevant to your product that could enhance the user experience.
A successful self-service portal will only strengthen your customers’ opinion of your company overall. Just like the phone, email, and live chat channels, self-service is also crucial for creating those positive interactions that will impress your customers and make them want to tell their friends about it.
Drawing on the previous point regarding an intuitive self-service platform, this can be a fantastic way of saving time for customers and giving them that ‘wow’ moment they crave. An intuitive self-service allows customers’ previous areas of concern to be remembered and repurposed, for the sake of helping them find what they need more quickly or revisit past problems.
A well-functioning knowledge base that has been fully optimized for search can be an extremely useful way to bring in more traffic and mark your brand as an authoritative expert in its own field. Not only does this encourage your customers to place trust in you; it again increases the visibility and credibility of your brand and can boost customer outreach.