Enabling customer self-service and task automation
To enable customer self-service, companies must start by producing a rich set of support content, including frequently asked questions, YouTube videos, knowledge base articles, and FAQ pages that are well-indexed and search engine friendly. To develop this content, you must work closely with content teams across your organization – within product, marketing, and support.
Content teams are crucial in determining the most appropriate material for self-service portals. While documentation typically covers the proper usage of a product under ideal circumstances, customer self-service portals should address the information found in the documentation and potential issues that may arise when things do not proceed as expected.
To identify common concerns, content teams must actively listen to their customers, who continuously communicate their needs to organizations. Some pertinent questions for content teams to consider include:
- What questions do customers frequently ask?
- What types of requests do customer service representatives receive?
- What search terms do customers input into support portals?
If faced with lengthy questions, teams can prioritize addressing the most common requests and gradually expand the available content.
The primary focus of self-service content should be providing customers with customer-centric solutions to problems rather than product-centric instructions on utilizing features, which should be covered in the documentation. Since customers may only sometimes know which feature can resolve their issues, content titles should emphasize problem-solving and addressing challenges.
As part of a company's service strategy, they must plan for self-service content to be easily shared across many platforms – whether on a website, inside a support agent’s system, within a customer portal, or directly within a SaaS application to make it as seamless as possible for customers to access self-support content across many different channels.
