What is Customer Self-Service?

Why offer Customer Self-Service options?

Not only does customer self-service reduce customer support costs, users often have a better experience and are more engaged, as they've avoided waiting on hold or writing an email; and have accessed the service at a convenient time to them. Recently Gartner reported that nearly 85% of support interactions would no longer need human intervention. As consumers are exposed more and more to a digital services, they expect responses 24 hours a day 7 days a week.

Many organisations have also found that the improved customer experience from self-service can even result in increased revenue.

Self-Service is the preferred first step of support - a study conducted by Nuance found that 81% of respondents preferred to 'find the answer' themselves. ​​Customers want to find information and solve their problems quickly and easily.

4 Ways to Offer Self-Service for Customers

1. Knowledge Base (such as FAQs) - A knowledge base is a searchable repository and ideally includes simple, concise instructions, explainer videos, and plenty of visuals to help assist the user's learning.

2. Customer Tutorials - Customer tutorials are a great way to proactively address the most-common customer queries such as onboarding workflows or training videos.  Tutorials can be interactive or an instructional video with text.

3. Customer Communities – Forums and community spaces allow users with similar problems to connect and support one another. These can be a really powerful tool, so much so that StackOverflow's entire business model is based on their community for software developers. Often members of a community "step up" into guide or moderator roles, where they gain additional privileges in return for their support.

4. Conversational AI Solutions - Conversational AI enables you to offer automated personalized, and relevant responses to customer inquiries across almost any channel, utilising your customer database and AI/machine learning to provide the intelligence.

If you want to find out how conversational AI can help you deliver a top quality customer experience contact us or call us on 0333 6000 360 to find out more.

‍