Self-Service: The Golden Ticket to a More Personalized and Profitable Customer Experience

When a customer has a question, where do they go? Eighty-three percent of customers go to a company’s website for information. However, four of the top five reasons customers abandon a site relate to “couldn’t find information.” Chances are, your customers would prefer to find the answers to their questions online. When customers can help themselves, productivity goes up and costs go down. In this guide, you’ll learn how self-service can lower costs, improve productivity, and lead to a more personalized and profitable customer experience. From setting goals to measuring your results, discover industry-proven steps to using self-service successfully in your own organization.

Alex Hisaka is a Content Marketer at Desk.com Follow her on Twitter at @alexhisaka

To get the most from this guide, take notes. Think about how you can use the ideas, concepts and strategies inside to build an effective and consistent self-service experience for your customers.

After reading, your business will be ready to:

• Set-up a self-service Support Center

• Set self-service goals to measure your success

• Create a process for creating and updating content

• Start measuring your efforts

Table of Contents:

1. What is Self-Service?

2. Self-Service Goals

3. How to Measure Your Effectiveness

4. Best Practices

What is Self-Service?

What is Self-Service?

Self-service is not just your Support Center, but it’s all the content that you make available to your customers when they want to find information on their own or when your support team is unavailable. Some of the most common types of self-service are:

o Frequently Asked Questions

o Community Forums

o Videos

o Manuals

The pain point many people experience with customer service is having to wait for a response from a support rep from any company. Even if it’s 30 minutes, it’s still a percentage of time customers can’t use a product or service the way it’s meant to be used. If you can enable customers to find that information in 30 seconds on your website, it saves time for both your customers and support staff.

WEBSITE HELPFUL?

YES

NO

EMAILSUPPORT

CALLSUPPORT

TWEETSUPPORT

WAIT 30MINUTES

WAIT 1-2HOURS

STILLWAITING

Why is Self Service Important?

Online self-service options for your customers are important because of the nature of today’s customers and the competitive business environment. Today’s customer want immediate gratification and to have service and assistance on their own terms. In fact, a recent Parature report cited that 51% of customers prefer to have self-service options available on a brand or organization’s website. That being said, many company websites are not designed with a clear customer-focused approach and as a consequence users can’t find relevant information quickly. The resulting frustration causes 56% of customers to either leave or go to a

competitor’s website because of:

o Navigational elements does not offer a single entry point for help

o Layout offers a disjointed customer experience

o Content often lacks continuity to web interaction

o Static FAQ’s that are never updated as product or service evolves

o Ubiquitous site search returns numerous links

Customers prefer to find the answers to their question online — the most cost effective customer service medium — without ever having to engage in long conversations with your customer support staff.

of customers go to a company’s website for information.

of customers prefer to have self-service options available on a

brand or organization’s website.

of customers either leave or go to a competitor because

of website issues.

404

Something isn’t responding

TO WOW, you must:

Providing 24/7 support Global customers want to connect with your business across time zones and expect an immediate response. Self service is a way of activating 24/7 support so customers can have service on their own terms.

Self-Service Goals

“We want to offer customers a way to find answers to their questions easily and efficiently. The objective of the Desk.com implimentation is to have a clean and easily navigatable Support site so people can quickly find answers to your questions. If I’m a customer, I’d prefer to find the answer to my question myself rather than calling or writing an email to a support rep. ”

Jay Kershner, Sr. Director Customer Service at Fitbit

One of the most important parts of providing self service is making sure you’re measuring your success and moving toward a common goal. You can do that by:

Reducing costs Self-service, regardless of your business hours, reduces service load on your team and brings down the cost of service overall. According to Forrester Research, the average phone call is $33, email response is $10, self-service is $1.

Providing a rich experience Another great benefit of self-service is the visual aspect of it. Being able to give step-by-step instructions isn’t the easiest on the phone or through email. With self-srevice you can add video, audio and images to support the content and make learning easier.

“Breaking down the different types of customers and addressing their needs individually is really important. Also, a solid foundation of good documentation reinforced with plenty of product visuals helps customers learn more effectively. Documentation is an essential tool for the entire company when addressing features of the product, whether or not that is in a support setting.”

Talton Figgins, Support at Disqus

“We had tried creating text how to’s in the past and we found that our customers, with their busy work days, that they didn’t want to take the time to read and try the steps on their own. With video, we’ve seen a lot more interest from customers knowing that thye can see exactly how to do what they want to do, but keeping in mind that we’re still here to help them out in case the video doesn’t match their situation exactly.” Corey Maertz, Support at DealerFire

How to Measure Its Effectiveness

If you’re going to be providing self-service you need to be able to measure your success so you can understand whether you are investing self-service efforts in the right areas. This means the quality and quantity of information that you’re offering and whether or not your customers are able to find it. Some common metrics are:

If you’re not using Google Analytics you really should be. Get it in place early so you have months of data before upper management is asking you, “how effective is the Support Center?” Collecting this data will help you understand the value and effectiveness of your self-service platform. Definitely look at your numbers and see what you can do.

Support Center page views

How many people are viewing the suport information you make available? You can use simple tools like Google Analytics to get those numbers.

Self-service to assisted service ratio As your customer base grows, are people finding more of their own answers rather than coming to you for help?

Positive to negative rating ratio

How are people responding? Do people find your articles useful or unuseful? Do you have tools within your FAQs that allow readers to rate those articles?

Bounce rate % from self-service

If the percentage is high, chances are the answer is not providing enough context. This gives you an opportunity to improve your content.

Best Practices

In customer service — as in all business matters — the best kind of advice comes from professionals like you who are dealing with similar issues to the ones you are facing. Here’s a few best practices from the support pros who are using self-service successfully in their own organizations.

Creating new content Many businesses opt to creating static FAQ systems because it’s easy to create and maintain. However, a static FAQ page only deals with a subset of questions and requires customers to “find a question.” Many self-service solutions today lack relevance, speed and accuracy.

Creating support articles is not as easy as it seems. It takes a lot of time and devoted days to write up the proper documentation that’s going to help all your customers. It’s easy to get halfway through and give up, but that’ll leave 20 cases that could have been handled by themselves to flow through your system and waste 10-20 hours of your team’s time. It’s a formidable task, but it’s going to save time in the long run.

“I started when Rdio was in beta so I had the unique ability to create Knowledge Base articles as support cases came in. I think it can be really overwhelming when you’re starting to write articles not knowing what you’re going to put in there. You need to slowly track that stuff and pay attention to it and put it in your knowledge base daily rather than feeling like you have to have everything right at the get go. It will help you and it will help your knowledge base have everything that people are actually asking about.”

Madelyn Taylor, Head of Support at Rdio

Best Practices

Identifying new content Once you create the basic support articles, how do you come up with new content? The way to do it is by flagging cases that have reasonable self help content within them. In Desk.com an easy way to do it is to use a Label. A common one that we use is “Knowledge Base Candidate.” So if someone reports an issue and it seems like an issue someone else might have in the future, we’re going to make sure that we flag that. On a weekly basis, you should go through your cases and flag them for potential knowledge base candidates. This is one of those things that will require time, but will be a worthwhile investment in the end.

“In order to best serve our Customers, we are constantly updating and incorporating feedback into our self help. The entire team participates in this process.  Whenever a customer asks a question that a team member feels should be in the Knowledge Base, they label the Desk.com case with a “KB Candidate” label.  During our weekly WOW meeting, we review these cases and assign them to team members to improve and review.”

Dan Stern, VP of Support at Desk.com

Best Practices

Listen to and provide feedback Having a feedback mechanism and/or a Community Q&A are two ways to listen to your customers and provide responsive feedback. A feedback mechanism can be as simple as a rating system so you know whether the support article or answer was helpful. Also, setting up a Community Q&A can enable your customers to find what they’re looking for and search for answers that are a lot more granular than things you would maintain in your knowledge base. Agents can also answer a question once and 500 people can find that answer without ever having to write to support to get a specific answer. Self service enables your customers to help each other — allowing your customers to build that Knowledge Base is important.

Add a rating system within your Community Q&A so customers rate your answers.

Add a feedback mechanism within the Support Center so you know whether your content is helpful or not.

“Power users can do some amazing thing with Desk.com, especially when it comes to implementing custom code to expand the core functionality of our product. Despite having a team of support rockstars on staff, there’s always a point where a request is simply beyond the scope of what we can handle. Providing a Community Q&A environment creates the opportunity for customers to help each other in such situations, while simultaneously making our Support Center more robust than ever. ”

Graham Murphy, Senior Manager, Customer WOW at Desk.com

Best Practices

Review and update content Encourage your support team to regularly review and updating content, otherwise customers visiting your website will be confused by old and inconsistent information. Have a clear process for your agents to review and update content that needs to be clarified in the content library. Review content frequently to make sure information is up to date, accurate and useful to customers. Keeping content accurate and available improves the productivity of your front-line support team while providing solid information to customers any time they need it.

“Our knowledge base is regularly updated every two to three weeks. With every product update, we search through our articles and make lists of which KBAs need updating. We change screenshots and text the moment updates are live, so there’s no confusion on the backend. Product ‘sprints’ or updates and fixes are a regular occurrence, so it’s crucial to keep help articles current as the product evolves. It’s a team effort.”

Allison Berger, Community Manager at Ticketleap

o Make a list of topics and search for them in your Support Center as if you were a customer. What kind of success did you have?

o Use Google Analytics to look at pageviews and bounce rates. Is there a high bounce rate on any of your support articles? Chances are that they may not understand the content in your article.

o Use feedback from your Community Q&A and rating system to help you determine whether an article needs to be flagged for review.

o Keep a list of articles that need to be updated and reviewed. Google Spreadsheets is a great way to keep an ongoing list of articles to share with your support team.

o Set a goal for your team: update “X” number of support articles each week rather than doing everything all at once.

Best Practices

According to a recent IntelliResponse report, approximately 63% of customers are frustrated with the search bar within a website. When they enter a term in the search function the results are not related to their specific topic of interest. Self-service options are not the place to make customers jump through hoops to get information. Save that for registrations or resources like ebooks. Customers who are looking for information on your site are focused on one thing: getting what they need. They will feel more satisfied when you make their experience barrier-free.

Provide a single entry point on your website for help options, don’t

confuse them with too many choices. Keep the search bar front and center so customers can easily find what they are looking for.

Add hyperlinks within your support articles so people can easily from jump one article to the next or to other pages on your website.

Customize your self-service for mobile devices so that everything in

your Support Center is accessible anywhere, anytime.

Conclusion

As more service interactions involve a company’s online presence, businesses of all types must provide rapid and concise information to customers across a variety of self-service channels. It takes time and patience to establish the ROI of self-service. By developing smart workflows and tracking metrics, you can reduce your service load and cost considerably over time. Furthermore, you make it easy and convenient for customers to get the right answers to many of their questions the first time, increasing first-contact resolution. Self- service is the golden ticket to a more personalized and profitable online experience for both your customers and your business.

Desk.com has an unlimited amount of great resources ranging from more information about our product to thought leadership content. Here are some suggestions:

• TheDesk.comLibrary

• Desk.com’sBlog

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