With the size and scale of a company, its customer support needs also keep increasing. Even in the world of quick tech, your customer support team might get overwhelmed at times, with response time running unbearably long. During times of high traffic, unless you have more than enough staff onboard, your customer service calls can be left on hold for several hours and email responses might take days to finish up. Such situations can have disastrous consequences for your business, especially as modern customers want instant gratification.  

According to a survey by American Express, 78% of customers abandoned a purchase due to bad customer experience.  Hence, you need to step up your customer service game for long-term business success and growth. No business can survive without satisfied customers.  This is where self-service options come in. These technologies and resources make it simpler for customers to find solutions to their problems on their own, thereby streamlining the customer service process significantly.  Rather than waiting for one of your customer service representatives to be free, customers can always use self-service options to troubleshoot problems on their own.  Having a customer self-service desk can make solutions swiftly and readily available for your customers.

Why Should You Provide Customer Self-Service?

Today customer-self service is gradually becoming the most proffered preferred method for customer service. This is the case because self-service options manage to provide way faster solutions to customers than they can find on their own time. Instead of calling a company and being put on hold, they can always use the resources of the company to find answers to simple support questions.

On the other hand, with the implementation of a customer self-service desk, your customer support team would get rid of the hassle of having to answer similar or repetitive questions daily.  Such a system reduces the stress on your incoming request queues, while clearing up more time for your representatives so that they can focus on solving more complex issues. 

Customers who have more immediate issues or bigger problems can get the attention they need after the implementation of a self-service desk, as your reps would be busy handling repetitive questions.

Implementing a self-service customer service desk

Customer self-service is quite easy to adopt, integrate and implement into your customer service process. Here are some of the most effective, yet simple self-service options that you may use:

• Add a knowledge base: A knowledge base is a section of a website that helps customers to solve common product problems, as well as answer simple questions. Usually, it features organized documentation of the services and products of a brand. The knowledge base includes informative and comprehensive articles that aid your customers to competently troubleshoot their problems.  By having a robust knowledge base, your team would be in the position to provide detailed troubleshooting steps for various common customer issues within moments.
• Create product training for customers: All your customer service reps are likely to undergo training after getting appointed that helps them to learn more about your offerings. 
• During this training, they are provided with detailed information about the workings of your products, their top features, issues it might face, and the manner to optimize the product for customer workflow.  As this training works effectively on your reps, it will be smart to offer something similar to the customers as well.  Training the customers will not only help boost their experience and get better results from your offerings, but also demonstrate the level of dedication your brand has towards customer success.
• Offer flexible automation features: Including automation in the customer service process is an extremely smart move as it saves time for both the customers and the representatives. You can integrate automation features like chatbots into your website to help customers find information fast, without having to email or call your team. On the other hand, your representatives can easily set up workflows that send emails to customers automatically and subsequently remind them to follow up on open cases. You must, however, make sure that any customer-facing automation tool used by your company is intuitive and flexible. Your customers must be provided with the benefit to ask questions in a varying manner and yet receive consistent answers for every inquiry.

Advantages of having a self-service customer desk

• Reduced expenses: If your customer service agents spend too much time handling questions that are repetitive, it can actually be a massive wastage of resources for your company.  Routing frequent and monotonous questions through self-service channels can cut down your ticket volumes, and hence reduce operational expenses.  Such an approach can allow agents to put more focus on a specialized and important task that can help with revenue generation. 
• Improved productivity and employee morale: When your customer service agents are freed from the trouble of handling mundane questions, they will actually get time to solve more complex and interesting ones.  This will accelerate the customer service process of your company. Moreover, your reps will also find it more interesting and rewarding to take care of complex concerns, rather than having to deal with the same monotonous requests on a daily basis.
• Deeper Insights: The customer self-service option provided through chatbots or portals can be a great source for tracking customer behavior. They can provide your business with valuable insights about common customer challenges and issues, so that you can improve on them.
• More website traffic: A good number of customers today research a product online before making a purchase. Having knowledge centers, FAQ pages and other content-based resources can be pretty helpful in driving more traffic to your website.

A customer self-service option through portals, chatbots, and forums can be an excellent source to track consumer behavior. This can give your business powerful insights into the most common problems or challenges customers face when using your product or service.

Most of the customers today are pretty tech savvy. They can competently navigate diverse online portals and web pages. Their digital knowledge, coupled with the increasing demand for fast solutions, makes it important for companies to implement a robust self-service customer service desk.