In the present age of Google, Siri, and Alexa, we are getting used to finding information at our fingertips. However, when customers visit company websites, such experience may not be possible when they have a question.
Spending time contacting customer service, bearing a queue of multi-questions, and waiting for a rep to come in line is a burden for all. Emails can take days, and many times, live chat with an agent is inaccessible. Customer self-service, instead, makes it easier for customers to find answers by themselves. It saves on waiting time and can be done 24/7.
Table of Contents
What is customer self-service?
Customer self-service empowers customers to find the answers by themselves through how-to tutorials and other support content without the need for a service representative. Customer self-service generally brings together knowledge bases using automated handling of simple administrative tasks. Knowledge bases let customers seek answers to product-related queries, access step-wise directions for using and troubleshooting products, and many more. The administrative part of a customer self-service system helps with account-related actions like resetting passwords, managing personal and billing information.
Self-service tools like chatbots, intelligent agents, and virtual customer assistants are widely used by customers nowadays in both digital and physical environments. These are cost-effective business solutions and also support in offering a top-notch customer experience.
What are customer self-service portals?
A customer self-service portal is a web-based self-service system for customers. Several establishments provide a service portal that links with the other online properties offering customer service. It can be accessed from anywhere by the customer quickly. Service portals can be an extra page on the company website or built separately.
What makes self-service intelligent?
A couple of intelligent features offer an improved self-service user experience and make self-service advantageous to businesses. They are as follows –
- Conversational AI with NLP – NLP (Natural Language Processing) understands what your customer means to say, irrespective of how it is said. It results in lesser dead ends, natural conversation flow, and targeted responses.
- Consistent customer experience – Dynamic search bars in websites, chatbots, and self-help through a mobile website and mobile apps ensure a consistent customer experience.
- Well-integrated chatbots – It keeps humans in the loop and creates seamless bot-to-human conversions.
- FAQ widgets – It works similar to a dynamic search bar but appears like a widget. It either floats or is fixed to a page where customers seek help. It quickly offers help to the customer when they require the information the most.
Benefits of customer self-service
Several businesses can witness plenty of attractive benefits with the best self-service support software in place to offer customers a helpful self-service experience.
- Customer satisfaction – Reduced customer effort means better customer satisfaction. Happy customers are those who can find what they’re looking for quickly and efficiently. Companies that make use of customer self-service support software have improved customer satisfaction rates than those without.
- Customer retention & lifetime value – Satisfied customers have a tendency to stick around longer. They become your loyal customers eventually. Companies utilizing customer self-service software retain more clients with more significant customer lifetime value.
- Reduced costs – Self-service interactions are less expensive than those with assisted support agents. Businesses do not experience labor costs from managing interaction via a live agent call, chat, or email. When customers are allowed to meet their needs by themselves, the cost of hiring, training, and other allied expenses are eliminated. Companies are also positioned better to reduce agent over-scheduling risk that results in unnecessary labor costs.
- Increased Operational efficiency – The self-service customer support model effectively streamlines various business operations. Salesforce research report had mentioned that 68% of service professional teams had seen lowered call and email volume on using self-service AI chatbots. Almost 84% of teams that make use of AI self-service to free up bandwidth witness better-quality prioritization and scheduling of agents’ work.
- Agent productivity and satisfaction – Self-service is a boon for both agents and customers alike. Agents need to do meaningful work, and going on routine fieldwork and answering repetitive questions is not so productive. Gone are the fears of losing their jobs to AI self-service, as many agents feel it actually eases their redundant works. By automating routine tasks, the agents believe that they could focus on higher-value work. They also credit AI with growing agent morale.
- Reliable messaging – AI self-service tools guarantee that all answers delivered to customers are consistent, notwithstanding the various support channels. They may prefer to engage on your website, social media messaging platform, or mobile app. Consistent help offered to customers ensures that all answers are compliant with regulations. Therefore, it reduces the risk of potential expensive litigations. It is essential for companies falling under the finance, healthcare, and insurance segments.
- Rich customer profiles – Customer self-service is a fantastic way to pick up more about your customers. You can get to know about what exactly they’re interested in knowing about. You can generate more targeted sales opportunities and marketing messages out of this data.
Conclusion
Customers in this fast pacing world need, anticipate and prefer self-service solutions. Apart from the apparent benefits of offering the customers what they need, self-service tools provide 24/7 support. It can be offered at a much lower cost of staffing a call center twenty-four-hour-a-day.
A well-structured support portal offers access to documents, knowledge base materials, and account management solutions virtually from any device at any time. When customers are vested with self-help features, the waiting time drops, service agent productivity increases, and new opportunities ascend to render personalized support.
With the data gathered from user search, and support content engagement, you’ll get clarity of your customers’ expectations and pain points. Additionally, you’ll get to know what they think about your products and brand.
In case you are looking for any customer self-service software for your business then check out this list.
