How can you encourage self-service application support?

1 Provide a user-friendly knowledge base

A knowledge base is a centralized repository of information and guidance for your application, such as FAQs, tutorials, troubleshooting steps, and best practices. It can help your users find answers quickly and easily, without contacting your support team. To make your knowledge base user-friendly, you should organize content by categories, topics, and keywords; use clear and concise language with screenshots and videos where appropriate; update content regularly based on user feedback and analytics; enable search functionality and navigation features; and link the knowledge base to your application, website, and support channels.

2 Create a community forum

Creating a successful community forum can foster a sense of belonging and engagement among your users, as well as reduce your support workload. To do so, you should set clear guidelines and expectations for your users, moderate the forum to remove spam, abusive, or irrelevant posts, encourage participation and collaboration by rewarding and recognizing your active users, provide official responses and solutions when needed, and integrate your forum with your knowledge base and support channels.

3 Offer self-service tools and features

Self-service tools and features are functionalities that allow your users to perform actions or tasks on their own, without contacting your support team. For example, you can offer your users a password reset or account recovery option, a chatbot or virtual assistant to answer common questions, a feedback or rating system to collect user input and suggestions, a diagnostic or troubleshooting tool to identify and resolve issues or errors, and a customization or personalization option to tailor your application to user preferences. All of these options can help improve the user experience and reduce the need for manual support.

4 Educate and motivate your users

Educating and motivating your users to use self-service as their first option is essential. To do this, communicate the value of self-service, such as saving time and improving skills, and provide easy instructions on how to access and use your resources. Highlight success stories and testimonials of self-service users and offer incentives or rewards for using self-service. Additionally, solicit feedback and suggestions from your users on how to improve your offerings.

5 Monitor and measure your self-service performance

Monitoring and measuring your self-service performance is essential to evaluate the effectiveness and impact of your self-service initiatives. This can be done by tracking and analyzing metrics such as self-service usage, satisfaction, resolution, and retention. Additionally, you should identify and address any gaps, issues, or challenges in your content, tools, or features. Benchmarking your performance with industry standards or competitors can also help you assess your progress. Furthermore, it is important to report and showcase your self-service results to stakeholders and users. Lastly, continuously improving and innovating your self-service strategy is key to creating and fostering a self-service culture that can enhance user experience, loyalty, and retention while reducing support costs, workload, and stress.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?