How to Create the Best Customer Self-Service Strategy

Do you know what the essence of the success of your company is? It’s your customers. And it’s not just any customer, it's your happy customers. In fact, happy customers stay loyal to your business and make your business more prosperous.

However, it’s not easy to make customers happy these days, and even when you make them happy, it’s usually not easy to keep them that way. Today's customers have become much more demanding than ever. They expect you to give attention to them at their every need, without delay. And the longer it takes to respond, the more likely it is that the customer will leave. There’s no doubt that the most crucial aspect of the customer experience is a timely response.

So how do you make your customers happy and maintain a high-quality customer experience? Providing quick and effective responses to requests and keep changing according to your customers’ feedback. Self-service customer support can be a great solution to achieve these goals.

What is customer self-service?

With self-service, you can empower your customers to find a solution to their problems whenever possible, instead of asking customer care representatives to manage every customer request. This means that the company provides the customers with all the tools necessary to meet their needs in full autonomy. In other words, customers use company tools to find solutions to their problems, rather than contacting the support team.

Thanks to self-service portals customers receive fast, accurate responses that require little effort on their part. The sheer effortlessness of their experience ultimately increases their loyalty to your company. On top of that, with the introduction of self-service support, you can substantially reduce costs, increase agent efficiency, and improve the overall experience for customers. This represents a win-win situation for the customer and your business.

Self-service is a must

Self-service is no longer a plus. It’s required to deliver a positive customer experience. According to research, it has become so crucial that 70% of customers now expect a company’s website to include a self-service application. Self-service is fast becoming the first choice. Long gone are the days when a phone call was the only alternative to reach an assistance team.

When a customer encounters a problem with your product or service, their first thought is no longer to grasp the phone and call the help center. Instead of talking to one of your agents, they now expect to find a comprehensive answer online, on your self-service platform.

Over time, companies have been adapting to this new trend by introducing different sources that customers can access online to solve their problems. However, 55% of customers find self-service web portals challenging to use. And, if the self-service portal is not easy and intuitive to use, instead of speeding up the process of finding a solution, this will make it difficult for customers to receive support.

The truth is that self-service is a wonderful invention, making life easier for both agents and customers, but it does raise a new set of challenges. The secret lies in taking the time to introduce a well-thought-out customer self-service strategy.

In this article, we’re sharing 5 essential tips to help you create and develop your highly effective customer self-service strategy.

Tips for Creating the Best Customer Self-service Strategy

Successful self-service requires thorough planning and a step-by-step approach:

1. Monitoring customer experience

To be able to identify the best strategy, you need to keep track of your customer activity. In other words, by monitoring the current customer experience you can find pain points, and adjust your self-service support accordingly. You need to monitor customers’ experience and performance across all existing self-service channels and, if you don’t offer a self-service option, examine how customers currently perform their tasks.

Use this information to draw your strategy based on the type of product you are selling and your target market. By collecting data about your customers you can find out which kind of information they need and what they really value when it comes to customer care. Use these insights to build your self-service support platform.

To monitor your customers’ experience, asking for feedback is a key activity. Make sure you create a space where your customers can give you feedback about their experience with the customer service. That way you will be able to get qualitative information that you can use to shape your self-service platform to meet your customers’ needs.

With Layerise, you can both create an excellent self-service platform and collect relevant data about your customers thanks to the registration through QR code. With Layerise, you can get an in-depth view of your customers based on geographical, demographical, preference, and behavioral variables. Understand what your customers do and track their satisfaction.

2. Keep your content up-to-date and current

Based on the feedback you are gathering from your customers, make sure you keep meeting their requests. Keep your self-service platform updated based on what the customers are looking for the most. For instance, if you notice that most of your customers are struggling with a specific feature, make sure all the information regarding this specific topic is well displayed in the support interface.

Remember that your self-service platform is not a “set it and forget it” scheme. This means that your self-service platform is never really done, it is an always evolving universe. You need to continuously modify your content in order to meet customers’ needs and expectations.

3. Emphasize the most searched contents

To make a self-service portal a valuable resource, it is important to highlight the relevant topics, being the ones customers search for the most. Your customers should be able to find the answers to these questions in your self-service portal without having any difficulties.

To understand what customers need the most from your support platform, keep monitoring where the so-called pain points arise in the customer journey. Put simply, a customer's pain points are essentially any problems that the customer may experience along their customer journey. You can monitor them by observing what customers ask your support team or by collecting data about the performance of the content on your self-service platform.

With Layerise you can monitor the performance of your content. The ones with high performance are the ones that customers click on the most. Based on these numbers you can work on the ones with low performance and optimize your support platform accordingly.

4. Consistency across devices

The second most significant attribute to providing a great customer experience consistency across all channels. This means that your customers should get the same self-service experience, regardless of the device they are using to look for help.

If your self-service portal is not mobile-friendly, your customers are less likely to use it. According to a survey conducted by BaseKit, 91% of websites are not mobile-friendly. This means there is a huge opportunity to stand out against the competition and provide a superior customer experience by making your self-service portal mobile-friendly.

5. Never stop innovating

You probably already know that customer experience is key for your company to be successful. Providing effective post-sales support is crucial to increasing customer retention and growth in a long-term perspective. For this reason, you should invest resources in this field to stand out from the competition.

Do not stop looking for innovative solutions, for new ways to accompany your customers throughout their user journey. Monitor the evolution of self-service customer support and keep an eye on new technologies that can help you offer excellent support to your customers while increasing efficiency.

Layerise is with no doubt one of the most innovative solutions out there, as they not only give you the possibility to offer a great experience to your customers but they also allow you to collect data from them. Thanks to the information you can gather from your customers you can design the perfect solution for them, both in terms of customer experience and in terms of post-sale service.

Conclusion

Today’s customers mainly prefer to use self-care services over other forms of support. But, a customer self-service portal is only effective if you make it easy to use. To achieve this, you need to put in place the right strategy, based on the information that you can gather about your customers. And, never stop looking around for new solutions, both cheaper and more effective.

In any case, it is important that the tools you offer to your customers to autonomously solve their problems are easily accessible, up to date, and visual through the use of images and videos. Remember to show first or to highlight the most searched content and make it possible for customers to search within the portal. All content within the self-service portal must be optimized for desktop, tablet, and mobile users.

Once you achieve good self-service support, you will be rewarded with an optimized customer engagement process and also lower costs for the business.

If you are looking to provide your consumers with self-service support but you don’t know where to start, Layerise can help you! Book a demo to see how Layerise can help you introduce self-service support and improve your customer's experience.