Not long ago, consumers were horrified if they were required to complete a task themselves rather than being provided with exceptional (self)care and attention. Now, businesses are spending billions on improving technology so consumers can essentially “DIY” when it comes to support issues. For instance: Magenta.at has been testing and expanding their “Tinka” chatbot on their company website to promptly provide customers with online assistance. And many companies are providing online forum community software to enable customers helping customers to answer each other’s questions, rather than calling the call center first.
Customers don’t just want self-service, they expect it.
At my current company, we provide easy-to-understand self-service tutorials in many languages, and in many different shapes and forms. Our interactive online SaaS self-service platform and our quality content have been our driving force for (customer) success for many years now.
Self-service can be very powerful, but are businesses at risk of losing relationships with their customers?
Before getting into that question, let’s look at how self-service was established. For a long time, dialing into a call center or walking into an actual store was the only way to connect with a company. And as companies scaled and customer bases grew, so did wait times. (I am not even talking about the increase in complexity with the current technology that in parallel also exponentially increased the average handling time in call centers). To keep pace without adding agents to call centers, businesses started to adopt IVR menus and automated messages to direct customers to certain departments, or in some cases, to give them the instructions they needed to solve issues on their own.
You can guess that pressing 1 for X and pressing 2 for Y can be a longwinded process that can cause irritation and frustration; most of us just repeatedly try to beat the IVR system and press 0 for an agent until we get one. So when new options became available — support portals, FAQs, Apps, direct messages, chatbots, simulators, virtual assistance — companies invested.
In the age of the 24/7 – 365 online reality nowadays, consumers needed self-service as much as businesses. And for a while, it looked like these solutions were the answer. Businesses could be everywhere customers were, and customers could use whatever channel they preferred to get the information they needed.
But how did self-service get so difficult?
With the good intentions of offering customers many paths to their answers, businesses collectively opened up Pandora’s box of customer service. With so many options of how to connect, consumers tried whatever felt right at the moment and expected the channel they chose to lead them to the answer, right away.
Businesses couldn’t (and still can’t) keep up — e.g. past Twitter research stated that 80% of inquiries were left unanswered. And past Facebook research said that its chatbots had a 70% failure rate. Designed to make things easier for customers, all of these new tools have just added complexity. Businesses are struggling to manage them, to feed them with high-quality and relevant content, and with so many choices, customers are left confused about where to go. As a result, connections and loyalty are lost, and engagement between brands and their customers is declining.
How can we make DIY service easier?
So how can companies give customers the type of service they want without taking away their options or losing engagement? Here are a few ideas:
Customers shouldn’t be expected to understand the inner workings of your business. Give them the opportunity to resolve issues on their own, but make it easy to figure out what support article to read or what channel to go to when they need support. Very clear and easy-to-understand navigation + attractive interactive content are key here. Is there a support section or microsite that someone can use to understand and set up their new service? Make that incredibly obvious and easy to find; the majority of customers visit the website before making an inquiry anyway. Is the best path for solving a problem a phone call? That’s fine too, just direct customers to the right place; if you’ve uncluttered your navigation by directing specific topics down to their own paths, the experience should be a good one. The problem in most cases isn’t that you don’t have the right tools or content, it’s that customers don’t know where to find it, or when they need it.
If the goal is to have loyal customers, you can guess that you’ll probably have more than one interaction with them during their lifetime, and many interactions in high-touch industries like finance, health, consumer tech, and telco service. Keep track of those interactions and make it easy for your customers to see a history of their interactions with you in one place. By understanding who they are and what they want, you’ll be much more successful at leading them down the right path for support.
If you know your customers, you can be proactive about directing them to take certain actions and offering them the most efficient and effective path for doing so before they even need to ask. Remind them that they are due for a software update, a certain setting change, and direct them proactively to the locations to download or read about whatever they need to understand.
DIY service is here to stay, and the advantages are clear for customers and their businesses — if it is done well. Just don’t make DIY service for completely hands-off. Remember that sometimes the interaction is required. Also, don’t forget that the presented content always needs to be relevant and up to date. Give your customers directions proactively, and make their customer experience simple and easy to find, wherever they are. Creating easy and super obvious navigation to guide them down to the right path is key to good service and high customer success.