Nearly 90% of customer journeys begin with self-service, so the appetite for engaging with a brand's tools before—or in place of—its representatives is high. But not all customers will have equally high appetites for all forms of self-service support, and not all forms of self-service support are designed to address the same customer inquiries and issues.
The initial investment of time and effort necessary to make these tools function is more than outweighed by the time and effort savings that the tools provide, so this opportunity to improve CX is exciting.
To meet customers where they are, enterprises will need to invest in developing, testing, and refining a variety of self-service tools.
Offering self-service
A support variant to "the customer is always right" might read something like: "there's no wrong way to ask for help." A customer leaving a YouTube comment isn't shouting into the void as long as someone—or, in the case of self-service, some system—is ready to respond.
Offering more access points reduces the time required on the part of the customer to see their issue resolved. Typically, self-service as a practice does the same thing by eliminating the need for a conversation with—or research by—a representative. However significant the time requirement of building self-service options, the time saved by customers answering their own questions—and the resultant satisfaction—more than pays off that initial investment.
The three formats of self-service support most widely used—and that your customers are most likely to expect when they begin their self-service journey—are knowledge bases, community forums, and chatbots.
Knowledge base
A robust knowledge base offers two major benefits beyond access to product knowledge and best practices. First: the customer is likely to encounter ways of interacting with the product that they had not considered on their own. Second: an organization dedicated to compiling such a resource owns evidence of its expertise. The solution provider appears more prepared and authoritative by being the default source of information on their own products.
Each entry in the system—whether an exhaustive video demonstration of account setup or a simple listicle of corporate sustainability pledges—must be properly categorized and indexed so that users can easily find the specific answer to their question.
Making solutions easy to find enables organization representatives to include knowledge base entries in their conversations with customers. The CX representative, for example, saves time and effort by converting the interaction to self-service (and empowering the customer to rely more on self-service in the future).
When the knowledge base is available to customers and employees alike, automation can be employed to serve up instructions and best practices as appropriate.
When building a conversation flow—for chatbots or CX representatives—include knowledge base articles relevant to each stage or talking point. Give AI-powered bots the authority to suggest relevant articles to customers based on an analysis of your knowledge base and previous customer interactions. In all cases, increase the likelihood of resolving the customer's issue within the first interaction.
Community forum
Community hubs fill the gaps in your knowledge base by centralizing both frequently asked questions and workarounds to edge cases. Their immediate benefit is circumventing the need for CX professionals to address each customer question and complaint directly. This increased efficiency more than counterbalances the time and resources necessary for properly administrating and moderating such public forums.
For non-employee users (such as partners or customers) to see value in sharing expertise with the community, they must be properly motivated. Perks, discounts, and gamification can all serve as incentives for recurring engagement.
To encourage partners to offer solutions to customer questions, businesses must clearly communicate the benefits. Partners can expand their customer base directly by interacting with potential clients and indirectly by attaining the status of subject matter expert. Earned badges displayable in the hub provide prestige within the established user community. Certifications they can include on their websites and social media pages convey that expertise to external audiences.
Because customers and partners will have different goals inside the community, they will require different engagement strategies. Customers can be incentivized to participate by earning privileges linked to the products they are already using. Discounts, rebates, or loyalty programs provide a straightforward, monetary reward for customers who offer successful solutions to the community. Expanded access to organization personnel or prioritized handling of those advocates' own issues, when they occur, might be a less tangible but appealing benefit, as well.
Every time a partner earns a reward for engaging with customers, the partner benefits. Every time the organization can outsource the effort of addressing customer questions, the organization benefits. Every time the customer has their question answered, the customer benefits.
Every time a customer earns a badge for addressing a tech support question on behalf of an organization, the organization benefits.
Chatbots
Customers looking to avoid human interaction altogether are increasingly favoring virtual customer assistants (VCAs) and chatbots. Organizations are likelier every day to add a speech bubble or robot head in the corner of their websites and apps—occasionally bouncing with desperation for you to validate its existence—because of the efficiency of these tools.
Natural language processing (NLP) common to most chatbots—including Zoho's own Zia—empowers self-service by allowing users to ask a question or describe their situation in straightforward terms and be served a straightforward answer. Until chatbots secure vacation days, their presence in-app or on a website also ensures that you are truly offering 24/7 customer support.
Chatbots are also significantly more scalable than a CX workforce. They handle a volume of queries that human representatives couldn't hope to touch. The queries they have historically handled tend to be relatively low-value—order status, password recovery, etc.—though that is beginning to change.
More functionality only makes bots more valuable. Zoho Desk's ASAP tool folds knowledge bases, user communities, and ticket creation into an embeddable bot. Including this bot in the many destinations where customers begin their self-service journey creates a unified access point to the entire selection of self-service options.
Responding with self-service
Because the task of building a variety of self-service support tools requires a massive initial investment of time and effort, it can be tempting to stop there. But deploying the tools is no guarantee that the customer will engage with them.
As soon as a new self-service option becomes available, other resources within the support infrastructure must point to it. Support reps must be familiar with the resources available in the knowledge base. Their support desk tool must fill in the gaps in their knowledge with links to articles appropriate to each stage of the support conversation.
Personalized responses—whether issued from an auto-responder or a support agent—to issues raised outside of the usual support infrastructure can direct customers to self-service options of which they were not aware.
This immediate interaction—either directly resolving a given issue or pointing toward the resource capable of resolving it—improves CX and frees CX representatives to offer more meaningful interactions to customers. The resultant increase in efficiency allows the organization to improve the support options available to customers, and —ideally—the cycle repeats.
Zoho offers a suite of intelligent enterprise business software, including an award-winning CRM suite, the industry's only comprehensive analytics and BI platform, and a powerful low-code development ecosystem.
