Self-Service Support Has Become the Standard. Are You Falling Behind?

The global customer self-service market is thriving and only trending upward, with a compound annual growth rate of 18.4 percent.

What does this industry jargon mean?

Self-service is outgrowing other sectors of customer support and becoming the main player in the field.

Today’s world demands information at our fingertips. Especially as so many employees continue to work from home, users want answers to their questions quickly and they don’t want to have to rely on someone else to get it.

Are your support solutions failing to meet their needs?

The Rise in Demand For Self-Service Support Options

Research from Harvard Business Review shows that people tend to favor answering their own questions and solving their own problems without defaulting to customer support.

As customers become more tech-savvy in their own rights, their expectations for finding the information they need when they need it becomes non-negotiable, and the clunky and often ineffective customer representative programs struggle to keep up.

The customer experience has become incredibly important, and one of the most important attributes to a positive experience is a quick response time. In fact, 88 percent of customers want to see a response from your customer service team within an hour.

While it’s great to have customer agents available for the 20 percent of customer support queries that are lengthy and complex, 80 percent don’t require this kind of attention.

For those challenges, there’s customer self-service. What do we mean by self-service? Chat is not self-service but is on-demand support from actual representatives or AI bots.

Self-service, on the other hand, puts the power in the customers’ hands to complete a task or an action on their own without needing assistance from an employee. Self-service can be seen in grocery store self-checkout lanes, at gas pumps, and movie ticket kiosks.

Benefits of Self-Service Support

There’s more to self-service than simply less work for support staff. When you provide your customers with self-service options, it creates a host of benefits that everyone enjoys, from the customers to the support teams, to the companies themselves.

  • Enhanced customer experience. When customers can solve problems for themselves quickly and easily, they’ll have a more positive experience and view of your company.
  • Reduced customer service expenses. When you shift toward self-service support, you’re able to serve a greater number of customers at a much lower cost. You’ll be paying pennies per customer with this approach, while live service interaction can cost about $13 for a B2B business.
  • Expanded support availability. There are obvious limitations to human-powered support only. However, self-service tools are available at any time of day, any day of the week.
  • More engaged, happy employees. When customer service representatives are spending less time on repetitive, tedious tickets, they’ll be more engaged in their work and may perform better when handling complex challenges on a customer’s behalf.

Self-Service Tips

If you’re ready to upgrade your customer service options with self-service, consider these tips for providing effective self-service support platforms and methods to your customer base:

  • Create a knowledge base. A knowledge base will serve as the foundation for your self-service offerings. Here, you can publish articles, FAQs, and other content in a way that’s easy to organize and search. Your customers will know to always start their problem solving with the knowledge base and go from there.
  • Build thorough product or service training materials. When you’re dealing with a complex product like UC or cloud computing, it’s helpful to provide additional training content to get new and existing customers up to speed. Just as you provide in-depth materials to employees, providing the same kind of detailed explanations to your customers can close the customer experience loop and help them understand your product or service better.
  • Publish pre-recorded content. Take advantage of the content you already have available, like recorded webinars, tutorials, or how-to videos. Video is an engaging medium and can strengthen customer onboarding as well as troubleshooting.

Even with these steps written out in front of you, it can be tough to know where exactly to begin. That’s where B-Lynk comes in.

Knowledge At Their Fingertips with Smart-Lynk

Smart-Lynk is the ultimate knowledge base and managed training portal for any unified communications service provider. Our custom-branded training portal comes packed with all of the support, training, and features that both educate and empower your customers to solve problems just as quickly as they come up without the need for employee intervention.

Smart-Lynk provides your customers with a vast library of content that comes tailored to your product and customized to your brand. Our flexible solution takes the burden off your team while placing power in the hands of the customer as they see fit.

Ready to give your customers what they want with self-service through Smart-Lynk? Contact our team today to get started.