No matter how good your self-service content is, it needs to be effectively helping your customers. A good self-service portal is one that goes beyond putting high quality content together, and creates the right structure that resonates with its audience and stays relevant to what a particular user wants.
One of the most important aspects to keep in mind while building your self-service portal is making the right information available when customers are looking for it, be it on user onboarding emails or within the product. Here is a list of must have components for your customer self-service portal.
Frequently Asked Questions, often referred to as FAQs are one of the most important components of customer self-service. It is a list of questions and answers written in a way that is useful for your entire breadth of users. Therefore, a well-written FAQ is the one that is written in a simple, straightforward language and covers a plethora of questions your customers might commonly have.
It is important to group the questions according to relevance. For instance, you can group the questions around the different product plans (subscription options) with payment options or how one can upgrade or downgrade from a plan.
Here are some category of questions to consider:
How to activate and log into the product?
How to set up your profile?
How does one integrate with product XYZ?
How are user roles defined?
How does billing work?
How to select or switch plans?
A knowledge base refers is structured to share information about your product or service. However, a useful knowledge base goes beyond content and is easily discoverable for the customer and intuitive. While building a knowledge base, you need to make sure you know what your customers are looking for and build it across formats that is easy for them to consume.
Customer support agents should be an integral part of identifying topics that should go into the knowledge base, as they work closely with customers. It is advisable to have a process where support agents can flag topics that need to be continuously updated in the documentation.
Some suggested formats for knowledge base include:
With the rise in adoption of chat and messaging tools like Freshchat, companies are increasingly offering self-service options such as FAQs within the chat interface, referred to as in-app FAQs. Based on the page of your website or support portal, the customer is on, you can customize the relevant self-service options and thereby improve the overall customer experience.
Globally, the online consumption of content in the video format has been continuously increasing. Reports by Wistia suggest that the average time on videos is 2.6x more than on pages. So, it makes more sense for companies to use videos as an effective self-service format. In fact, self-service videos are more effective in explaining issues and solutions. Tools such as Wistia and Loom are already enabling customer support teams in creating and sharing videos, thus contributing to the increase in video usage in knowledge bases and FAQs.
Next topic - Using self-service data to deliver better experience
A knowledge base is a collection of articles, videos, and helpful information that you build about product such as how to customize your product or set up a profile.It helps customers self-service, giving your support agents more time to focus on other important inquiries.
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