As businesses move away from paper-based to digitally enabled workflows, customer service and support follows this trend. Organisations are in many instances streamlining their phone-based customer services teams as they reallocate resources to digital help. HMRC is a good example – the tax authority customer service team has gone from 25,500 to 19,500 in the last five years.
While most companies still offer phone customer service for queries that require a high level of personalised information and human handling, it’s becoming more common to redirect easily or previously answered questions to online services, where customers may find their answers faster. This is especially true in the technology and SaaS world, where our customers expect to find their answers digitally – and quickly.
However, when it comes to the digital customer experience, not all services are equal. While many companies may have invested in digital assets such as online training courses and knowledge bases for their customers, these resources need to be carefully crafted to ensure they are delivering helpful information that delivers positive outcomes. So, what are successful companies doing to make the new digital customer experience more accessible and contextual?
Courses and everyday learning
When it comes to official certifications and compliance-oriented training to build competence, courses are usually the official route. However, when it comes to providing knowledge and solutions to solve everyday issues, sometimes taking a course isn’t the most direct or preferred option. The reality is, most of us just don’t have the time to take all the courses we’d like to, and more often than not, we simply need an answer to a question we have in the moment, while we’re trying to complete a task.
This is why knowledge bases, short video tutorials, and webinars are gaining popularity. By taking knowledge out of courses and putting it into more accessible formats, people have access when they need it – in the flow of work. And, if they can stop briefly to search and find their answer and apply it immediately, they can continue with their task without breaking that flow.
Growing self-service digital customer support
In the past few years, and like many other businesses, we’ve grown from having a basic support site to hosting a comprehensive, end-to-end customer community knowledge base, with detailed e-learning documentation that is searchable across the entire community. We also have community forums, where customers can answer the questions of others who may have perspectives surrounding issues they have successfully navigated.
What we have found is that these 24×7 resources are growing in popularity, and we see our customers wanting to access help in the way that these forums provide. It’s about giving customers choice: the one-to-one help and personalised attention of a dedicated customer account manager will always be there, but more often than not, customers are seeking a quick answer that they can find easily without having to pick up the phone.
Analyst research supports this. Forrester Research indicates that two-thirds of customers say valuing their time is the most important thing a company can do to provide them with good service. And Gartner estimates that 85% of customer service interactions now start with self-service, up from only 48% in 2019.
Start with customer understanding, follow with technology
As great as a highly digitally-enabled and self-service-oriented customer support base is, if you put the technology in place but don’t understand your customers, it’s unlikely to be as helpful as intended. The most successful digital experiences start with a close understanding of who your customers are, what their biggest pain points are in their roles, and what their goals are. If you start with the technology first and then attempt to automate before understanding your customer, it will only serve to deliver a backward result.
Beyond this, if you don’t keep on top of updating the knowledge contained within the resources you make available, your customers won’t get the helpful, contextual answers they need. Businesses must invest in user journey mapping to understand that their customer support environments are providing answers to the questions their customers have, and not just providing volumes of unhelpful information. Building and maintaining an effective digital support customer resource is not a static task, and it takes a daily effort to analyse and update the information that is there to ensure it keeps pace with the real day-to-day issues customers have.
This is particularly true for SaaS vendors, where new functionality and new regulation may affect our customers daily. Like any business, the pain points of our customers change frequently, and we need to ensure our digital customer support environment reflects this.
Thank you for sharing your insights, I completely agree that investing in user journey mapping and understanding customer pain points is crucial to building an effective support environment. How do you ensure that your digital resources remain up-to-date and effective even as customer pain points and needs evolve?
Hi Dawn, thank you for your query!
Data analysis is a fundamental area that we focus on. There are a number of metrics we track, e.g. page visits, click rank etc. but in regard to keeping up to date with the customers’ evolving needs one of the key metrics we focus on is the content gap. This measures the percentage of searches entered by customers over a given time-period, where content was not returned and we are able to drill down into the specific search terms that were used. By reviewing these search terms, we are able to quickly fill any such gaps in content. We also look back at previous years’ search terms to proactively fill any content gaps for upcoming months to try to ensure our customers find the content they need, when they need it thereby maximising case deflection.