Customer Self-Service Portal: The Right Way to Connect

Customers don’t expect you to be perfect. They do expect you to fix things when they go wrong. - Donald Potter.?

You can do that by offering human touch and customer service deliveries through various communication channels like chatbots, phone calls, help desk applications, etc. However, long response time, email responses are not the services they expect.?

In the 21st century, humans want instant gratification and a service that offers convenience with instant results. Lousy customer service can lead to business disasters. A study found that 78 percent of people abandoned their purchases due to bad customer service.?

That is why offering self-service with a customer self-service portal is a great option. They can find solutions on their own.?

So, What Exactly is a Customer Self-Service Portal?

The self-service portal is a support system that empowers customers to fix problems and find answers themselves. It offers a unique experience to support customers to find what they need and a quick way to troubleshoot queries.?

Instead of waiting for customer support to call and guide in the installation or problem solving, a customer portal allows customers to find answers on their own anytime with the help of FAQs, knowledgebase, interactive tools like chatbots, etc. Self-service, as the name says, limits the dependency of customers on the companies for urgent answers.?

Knowledge base with step-by-step guides will help them find information in a way that’s convenient to them. Interaction elements like forums, bulletin boards, create a sense of community, boosting customer satisfaction and retention.?

Why You Should Implement Self-Service

Most of the customers today are tech-savvy. They prefer finding information on their own. Hence, most businesses provide them with a customer self-service portal. 69 percent of decision-makers say that self-service is an important strategy.?

Self-service provides customers with

• Knowledge base including videos, tutorials, how-to guides, to find information.?
• Single sign-on and password reset capabilities for convenience.
• Collaborative spaces like chatbots, forums, and community to resolve issues.?

Adopting it with minimal interaction benefits businesses as well.?

• Reduced Support Costs

The average web service desk cost per ticket is $15.07, with a max of $29.57. If your customer service spends time answering repetitive queries, it’s a total waste of time and resources. Self-service takes over these routine, mundane tasks and lets the desk support team focus on specialized tasks that can help with revenue generation.?

Backend automation and features like knowledge base, community support, chatbots reduce the ticket volumes and operational costs.?

• Improved Productivity

Since customers can solve their issues and requests themselves, the support team gets more time to focus on important tasks, which, when accomplished, boosts their confidence. It also eases the pressure on overworked service desks.?

• Decrease in Support Calls and Response Time

As customers can easily find the answers they are looking for, it reduces the number of support calls. This allows the support team to handle complicated queries and interactions instead of spending time on repetitive queries.

Self-service enables businesses to serve more customers in a short span of time.??????

• Better Insights

A self-service tool with features like chatbots, forums helps you track customer data and understand customer behavior. This gives you powerful insights into the challenges that customers face while using the product or service.?

• More Website Traffic

Self-service enhances customer satisfaction by providing relevant information like FAQs, knowledge centers, and content-based information. This helps build brand awareness and increase the retention rate. As a result, customers will likely make more purchases, and new customers will keep coming in.?????????

Self-service doesn’t mean your customers don’t need help. It’s more about giving customers autonomy to find information themselves and letting the support team solve complex problems.?

How to Enhance Effectiveness of Customer Self-Service Portal

Make customer service your primary focus and integrate features that treat customers as individuals and not numbers. Here’s how you can do that.?

Customer Services Best Practices

• Empower Employees

Your customer service team is the face of your brand. It’s them who interact with customers and provide solutions. Hence, you should attract talent with competitive pay and benefits. Make the job fun. Provide a gamified approach to onboarding with videos and quizzes on the portal. Track their performance and appreciate their hard work. Find ways to reward their jobs. When your team is satisfied, they are likely to provide customers with the best service possible.?

• Meet Customer Expectations

Provide customers with what they expect like self-service, automated tools, live chat, 24*7 support. Be transparent with the services that you can’t/don't offer. Tell your customers what they can expect from you and go the extra mile to fulfill those expectations. When customers see that you’re willing to provide them with the best service, they will be your loyal customers.?

• Strengthen and Personalize Relationship

Customers like to share their brand experience with others. A positive experience will help you build your brand reputation. Hence, build relations by recommending products or services based on their past purchases. Let them access resources and request support anytime. Encourage your agents to provide every customer with wonderful service.??????

• Collect Data

Give your support team the tools to ask the right questions, take inputs, gather customer data, and feed it into the CRM. These questions will help you gain valuable feedback and improve interactions with customers. You can utilize this data to personalize every customer's journey.?

• Be Omnipresent

Omnichannel services are the norm. Research and find out where your customers are - phone calls, chat, social media, mobile devices, online forums, etc. Offer services over there. For instance, you can integrate social media with your customer self-service portal. This way, customers can chat with agents from their messenger. Make your portals mobile-friendly so that everyone can use them while on the go.?

• Maintain Focus

Clearly define your company’s customer service standards and ensure everyone follows them. Keep the communication lines open for customers all the time. Provide your agents and customers with the tools required for self-service. Your customers are the key to business success, so your primary focus should be on them.?

Whatever service you provide, put your customers at the center of it. A customer self-service portal is the best way to do this. You can integrate all features and services that you want to provide in that unified solution. Customers can leverage everything from one place. The below section explains how you can enhance it.?

Tips to Make Customer Self-Service Portal Better

Always define your goals. What purpose do you want the self-service portal to accomplish? It can be - reducing the number of tickets or providing customers with their preferred solution. Do it clearly because unless you know what you need from the portal, you won’t be able to list down the features.?

After defining the goals, start aligning your requirements.?

• The portal should be easily accessible. It should allow customers to access resources like FAQs and basic articles without logging in.?
• The articles should be up-to-date and well categorized. There shouldn’t be any technical jargon or sales pitch.?
• The portal should provide smooth navigation to ensure quick access. There should be a search bar and auto-suggest feature that helps customers skip the hassle of browsing several resources—interlink relevant resources to help customers navigate to the information swiftly.
• Your portal should be responsive. It should allow customers to access and browse through the resources from any device or browser.
• The online platform should provide ways for your customers to share feedback.?
• It should have all the necessary features like community forums, role-based access, single sign-on, and more. Most importantly, it should be flexible and customizable.?
• Your portal shouldn’t be considered as a separate solution. From password reset to searching an article in the knowledge base, everything should be consistent.?
• Last but not least, it should help you track your customers. Only then will you know what areas need to be improved and what services need to be changed.?

Things you should avoid in your customer self-service portal:

• Don’t frustrate your customers, whether it’s about services or the UI of the portal.
• Don’t make users enter data that you already have. Instead, add an auto-fill feature so that they can add previously entered information with one click.
• Don’t let your old content be stale. Keep revising and updating the content frequently.
• Avoid being too salesy. Teach them to undertake a transaction instead of selling them off.

Most importantly, don’t just go for any customer portal solution available in the market. Do thorough research and hire the right development team. At CRMJetty offers innovative portal solutions.?

With our years of experience in portal development and industry knowledge, we can help you develop a custom self-service portal tailored for your business.?

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