If you are serious about customer service, be serious about self-service.
Today, digital self-service is already a necessity for any respected business and far more than an additional or bonus option. As time goes by, your customers expect you to change at their pace in accordance with their demands. In particular, 75% of Zendesk survey respondents like the benefits of self-service, and 67% prefer it over calling.
What is self-service?
Self-service can be defined as a type of electronic support that provides people access to information without requiring the assistance of a live customer support agent. It allows your users to find answers and solutions on their own quickly. A well-built help center will probably know more than you or your employees, provide service to a much higher number of people, work 24/7, and won’t ask a single penny for overtime. So, why don’t you use it for the sake of your company and your current or future customers?
Benefits of self-service
Support costs reduction
A well-established and developed help center can lower your support costs by 25% or even more. This stunning number is presented in Gartner’s study dedicated to knowledge management. When customers find answers to their questions on their own, it costs much less than having a human agent resolve the issue. Moreover, you don’t need much investment to launch a help center, and this is the main reason why companies of all sizes choose to offer self-service.
The decrease in incoming inquiries
Fewer people calling and submitting tickets, 20% fewer tickets reopened, and 23% lower resolution times are the positive results that were found in the Zendesk report since people have been able to resolve issues on their own.
Time saver
Gartner’s study also proves that self-service reduces a provider’s time to answer by 20% to 80%, which is frankly a lot considering the volume of incoming traffic and the number of open tickets you have daily.
Higher customer satisfaction
A well-organized help center provides efficient and fast self-service for users that directly impact on their satisfaction level. It also means less wait time for people inquiring through other channels, which, in return, enables you to serve more customers simultaneously. According to the Zendesk report findings, 54% justified their choice of contact method by referring to the urgency factor.
Maximizing self-service results
Self-service results multiplication
With self-service, customers generally fly through. It will save time and money, unless the order is complex.
Harry Balzer
Simply owning a help center is not enough if you are not planning to contribute to it proactively.
It’s important to note, though, that just having an extended version of the FAQ section rewritten into articles is surely not enough. An overwhelming 91% of users say they would use a knowledge base only if it met their needs according to the Zendesk accumulative study.
Ideally, you want to create such a self-service experience that will exceed customers’ expectations. And the good news is that it’s possible if you analyze the most frequent tickets and issues encountered by users over a certain period and have a smart recommendation system of other relevant articles in accordance with their content.
Those companies that contribute to their help centers have 4.5 times more articles and considerably higher rates of users finding their answers from those articles, says Alison DeNisco Rayome, in her article based on Zendesk research.
So, if you are ready to take a proactive approach to self-service to harvest great benefits, you may want to look at the Zendesk help center as an example that was built with an idea of becoming a complete intuitive encyclopedia of your products and services.
References
- DeNisco Rayome, ‘How to master omnichannel customer service: 5 steps’, February 19, 2019, <https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-to-master-omnichannel-customer-service-5-steps/>
- Maoz, ‘Knowledge Management Will Transform CRM Customer Service’, 9 November 2016, <https://www.gartner.com/doc/2677716/knowledge-management-transform-crm-customer>
- Zendesk Library, ‘Customers want to help themselves?’, <https://www.zendesk.com/resources/searching-for-self-service/>
- Garter Summits, ‘Gartner Customer 360 Summit 2011’, <https://www.gartner.com/imagesrv/summits/docs/na/customer-360/C360_2011_brochure_FINAL.pdf>
- N.Kokemuller, ‘What Are the Advantages of Self-Service?’, 26 September 2017, <https://bizfluent.com/info-8064882-advantages-selfservice.html>
