What is Customer Self-Service? And How It Can Help Your Business

Martin Perez -

Customers love fast and efficient Customer Service.

And sometimes, the fastest and most efficient way to deal with a problem is to deal with it yourself.

Not to say, the customer should be left to their own devices in figuring out any issues, but rather, you should be providing them the proper tools for them to be able to tackle these issues.

This is called Customer Self-Service

What is Customer Self-Service and how does it benefit your business?

Customer Self-Service is a Customer Empowerment strategy that seeks to provide your customers with the tools and knowledge they need to solve simple product and service issues.

For example, you could provide customers with a billing portal in order to update their billing details by themselves. Rather than having them contact your support team to update their details.

This ends up making for a faster and more pleasant experience for your customer. It also empowers them by letting them have some control over their own customer experience.

Additionally, Customer Self-Service can significantly lower requests made to your customer service and support teams. Allowing them to allocate more time and resources to bigger customer issues. This, in turn, improves the overall quality of your customer service and support offerings.

Lastly, you must not ignore that customer self-service is almost expected by today’s customers. In fact, over 90% of customers expect companies to offer some sort of customer self-service.

Now that you know the importance and benefits of Customer Self-Service, let’s discuss some popular tools that can help you offer a self-service experience for your customers.

FAQ or Knowledge Base

Offering your customers with easy-to-find answers to common questions is the first step toward a self-service experience. Frequently-Asked-Questions sections usually target these sort of questions for products and services with small technical requirements.

For more complex products or services, a more thorough Knowledge Base should be offered to customers. This Knowledge Base will have numerous aspects on multiple aspects of your product and service. From tips on getting started to guides on advanced product settings.

When putting it together, make sure that your FAQ / Knowledge Base is:

  • Easy to find
  • Clear and Concise (it should resolve confusion, not create it)
  • Searchable
  • Up-to-date

At the end of the day, your FAQ / Knowledge Base will only be as good as you make it.

Tutorial and Guides

Your product or service might have multiple uses depending on the goals of your customer. As a result, you might want to create separate guides and tutorials for each kind of customer, as their needs are different.

For example, while we offer a general guide on how to install a free live chat on your website. We also offer guides and tutorials to add a live chat to specific platforms such as WordPress, SquareSpace and Shopify.

After all, each of these platforms follows different steps to achieve the same result.

These guides can help the customer add live chats to their website without the need to reach out to our support team.

Customer Onboarding

A good way to provide customers with the empowerment that comes from Customer Self-Service is to offer it before they even need it.

Your Customer Onboarding process plays a huge role in this. Through the customer’s onboarding process, you can provide them with the knowledge and tools they might need to solve simple issues in the future.

Think to yourself, what are some questions my customers always have right out of the gate when using my product or service for the first time?

Customer Onboarding plays a larger role in your whole customer strategy. Learn more by reading our guide on Customer Onboarding.

Closing Thoughts

Customer Self-Service brings a plethora of benefits to your business. Not only that, but it also improves the overall experience your customers will have with your business.

Which Customer Self Service Strategies will you implement first?