One of the easiest ways to make customers happy is to empower them to find their own answers. It saves them the trouble of contacting customer support. Also, it reduces the load on your support team. Everybody wins. Here are 5 ways to give your customers great self-service experience:
1. Provide the right Information in the right way
Dig into the support tickets, emails, issues & bugs reported by your customers to find out frequently asked questions and common pain points. Make sure you have answers for those questions. Also, ensure they are easily accessible on your site. While written answers are useful, photos & videos make them easy to understand. Screenshots & video tutorials make it very easy for the customers to see how to solve their problems and repeat the solution, if needed.
2. Be where your customers are
Why should customers stop what they’re doing on your site and go elsewhere to get help? Help Center content such as FAQs, Guides and Tutorials should be available directly on your website or mobile app so that customers can access it right when they need it.
3. Provide Guided Tours & walk through
When you log into Facebook or Twitter for the first time, you can see a series of tooltips that introduce you to the app and walk you through the key features. You can also see these tooltips when they add a new feature. These tooltips tell you what you can do with the app and how to use its features.
These are known as guided tours. Companies like Google, Twitter & Facebook do this really well, in a non-intrusive way. Guided product tours are a great way to introduce users to your site or mobile app. It enables customers to understand how to use your app or navigate your site without your presence.
source:www.onextrapixel.com
4. Provide context-sensitive help
Context sensitive help is a form of help available at a specific point in your site or app, and provides information about a specific action or situation in your product. For example, while filling an online form, you may have come across context sensitive help explaining what each field stands for. Or you may have seen a tooltip before clicking a button, explaining what happens next. Unlike user manuals and online help, context- sensitive help need not be always accessible for reading. They appear only at specific points of your app or site, triggered by specific actions of the user. Context-sensitive help is a great way to improve customer experience by providing the appropriate information at the right place & time.
5. Optimize support content for all devices
Make self-service help available anywhere, anytime. These days users are always on the go and access the same solution through multiple devices. To provide a consistent customer experience, it is necessary to optimize self-service help across various devices. For example, user manuals and tutorials should be easily accessible on laptops & phones; tooltips and product tours must work well whether they are accessed from mobile or tablet devices. According to EchoResearch, 50% of mobile users prefer to use a phone-based customer service app instead of calling the support center. Provide a consistent multi-channel experience that allows customers to quickly solve their problems on their own.
A self-serve site/app is easy to use and intuitive. It provides great customer experience and reduces the number of support issues for your business. If customers are able to figure out things on their own, it increases their confidence in your product. What’s more, it boosts their productivity, improves conversion rates and increases sales.
