Today’s customers don’t want to waste their time on the phone with support reps or go back and forth in an email chain. They want to resolve their issues immediately.
That’s why you need to let customers help themselves by providing effortless self-service options. In this day and age, tech-savvy customers expect to be able to find answers by perusing your website or navigating through your app, and are willing to put in a little effort, if it means side-stepping an interaction with a brand entirely. Plus, deploying a self-service software can help you significantly improve your customer experience and reduce support costs. It’s a win-win!
Self-service software is any tool or application that lets your customers find information about the product or service, answers to their questions and resolutions to their issues in real time without the assistance of a human agent.
Research shows 88% of customers expect brands to offer an online self-service portal. And this number is likely to grow as customers increasingly prefer digital methods of researching a brand, making purchases and looking for support.
Customers don’t want to wait to speak to your reps; if they can help themselves, most will. And the vast majority expect your brand to help them to do so.
You can provide self-service support through several mediums, including your website, app, text, and live chat software.
The right self-service software will provide a ton of benefits to businesses. These include:
An improved customer experience: By adopting self-service software, you can offer access to information 24/7, in multiple languages, offer instant resolutions, and make the entire process of interaction with a business effortless and therefore , dramatically improve your customer experience.
Faster customer resolutions: Ninety-four percent of respondents believed that quick responses defined a great customer experience. Customers don’t want to wait for a support rep to respond. They want to solve their issue now and brands know it. There’s nothing faster than helping them find the answer themselves through a chatbot or knowledge base.
Lower support costs: When you provide self-service software to customers, you don’t need as many human support reps on hand. That can mean much lower support costs in the long run. Case in point, the round-the-clock delivery platform Dunzo used Freshchat’s self-service features to reduce support costs by 30%.
24/7 support: When you integrate self-service software, you don’t need human customer support reps to work every waking hour. Because everything is automated and web-based, customers can access your self-service features whenever they need them.
Reduced pressure on customer support reps: If your customer support reps are feeling overworked and burnout, self-service software could be the support they need. Research shows 82% of customers are willing to use self-service support features, with 45% of consumers more likely to use them than before the pandemic.
Provide proactive support: Some self-service features, like chatbots, let your brand provide the kind of proactive self-service support that means customers don’t even need to search for an answer to their questions. You’re already there to provide the help they need.
Self-service software comes in many forms and can be used by companies in all kinds of industries, including hospitality, finance, and retail.
Smart chatbots are one of the most advanced forms of self-service software, allowing you to provide 24/7 support to customers. Use AI-powered chatbots that understand user intent and can personalize support to each customer’s needs. AI chatbots can also be used to provide proactive self-service, offering up links to knowledge bases and forums as well as answers to the most common user questions.
A collection of text and video-based guides can guide users on how to set up your product and get started quickly. There are also in-app self-service software that allow you to set up an onboarding journey so users can be directed on how to set up and start using a product, without requiring an onboarding specialist or dedicated account manager.
A knowledge base is basically a help center for customers. It’s much more comprehensive than just supporting documentation and other guides, acting as a one-stop self-service page for all of a customer’s questions. Combine written articles with videos to provide the best self-support possible, and continue to add to the knowledge base every time your support team receives a new request.
Typically powered and moderated by customers, a forum is a relatively low-tech form of a self-service center. Customers help each other as well as themselves, reducing the number of questions your reps have to deal with.
Even something as simple as an FAQ page can be a key component of self-service. These pages provide short answers to the most common questions.
Omnichannel customer self-service: Freshchat offers support via multiple channels, including online and via SMS.
AI-powered chatbots: Chatbots that leverage machine learning can better detect intent and learn from the questions they’re asked over time.
Intent detection and faster resolutions: The better self-service software uses Machine Learning and Natural Language processing to detect intent, and therefore easily point customers in the right direction.
Proactive engagement: Freshchat lets you proactively reach out to customers who act like they may need support. For instance, a chatbot could pop up after users spend a certain amount of time on a page and direct them to your knowledge base.
Real-time insights: Real-time metrics allow you to optimize self-service software while also proving the value it brings to your business.
Don’t wait for customers to overwhelm your customer support reps. Take a proactive approach and provide them with self-service software. Not only will you significantly improve the customer experience, but you’ll also be able to scale support at a fraction of the cost.
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