Customer Self-Service

More than half of all customers don’t like dealing with customer service teams.

It’s not because they can’t help or don’t create a positive service experience, but they want to solve their issues on their own.

And they will only contact customer support when they can’t solve the problem by themselves.

So when customers don’t contact customer service reps for help, self-service makes it easier for them to find their own solutions.

In this blog post, we will learn about customer self-service and how to implement it on your website.

Let’s dive right in.

What’s self-service?

Self-service means customers complete an action or task on their own without assistance.

Companies offer self-service options because it’s easy and simple for people to do tasks themselves.

And companies save money by not hiring extra employees.

Self-service options are offered at:

• Grocery stores
• Retail outlets
• Movie theatres

Self-service options help reduce customer problems and improve brand experience.

Now customer service also offers customer self-service options to help people resolve product or service issues on their own.

Customer Self-Service

Customer self-service is customer service support for customers who want to find their own solutions.

So instead of calling customer service representatives, customers use self-service options to research and troubleshoot issues themselves. 

This feature is important in your company’s customer service because it provides customers with fast, available solutions.

Why Provide Customer Self-Service?

Customer self-service is becoming preferred for customer service. 

Because self-service options give customers faster solutions they can find in their own time.

So instead of picking up a phone and waiting on hold, customers look for answers to support questions from a company’s resources.

And customer service teams also benefit from not answering repetitive or similar cases.

Reducing the stress of incoming request queues and clearing up time for reps to solve complex or problems.

Customers with bigger problems and immediate needs can get the attention they need because reps aren;t busy answering simple questions.

Customer self-service is easy to adopt and integrate into your customer service.

And if you don’t offer self-service options, the best place to start is on your website.

Website Self-Service Examples

The following are ways you can add customer self-service to your business’s website:

Knowledge base

The knowledge base section of your website helps:

• Customers solve common product issues
• Answer simple service questions

Knowledge base includes:

• Organised documentation for products and services
• Articles that help customers troubleshoot their problems

This helps your team record detailed troubleshooting steps for common customer problems and share them with every user.

Product training for customers

Customer service reps benefit from training about products and services, like:

• Detailed explanation on how products work
• Common roadblocks they can expect
• How to optimise a product for customer’s workflow

Doing so helps reps become experts about products in your company.

So if this works for customer service reps, customers should be offered the same training on products and services which will:

• Improve their customer experience
• Demonstrate a dedication to customer success

Flexible automation features

Automation in customer service saves time for both the customer and the rep.

Customers use automation features like chatbots to help find information faster, without calling or emailing your team.

Reps can also set up workflows that automatically send emails to customers, reminding them to follow up on open cases.

Customer-facing automation should be flexible and intuitive.

With customers able to:

• Ask questions in different ways
• Receive consistent answers for every inquiry

Escalation options

More than half of chatbots don’t offer escalation options in chats and customers have to call support lines to escalate issues to reps.

This ruins customers’ workflow, especially if they want a quick clarification on one or two details about chatbot’s responses.

Escalation options are important at providing seamless omni-channel experiences for customers.

This can be integrated into a business’s customer service team.

But if your team needs new ideas, improve customer self-service at your company and a customer wants to escalate the issue:

• Make it so they can request to speak with a rep at any point in the chat
• And the rep asks the customer for their preferred contact method
• Then they reach out directly to continue the conversation live