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Help Customers Be Their Own Hero with Web Self-Service

written by

Emily Randolph

last updated

February 25, 2021

With web self-service platforms, customers can find answers and solve problems on their own. It is fast, flexible, and gives customers freedom when browsing online.

In addition, web self-service gives you and your company the following benefits so that you can continue improving your products and services:

• Saving time – reduces incoming support tickets 
• Reducing costs – don’t have to worry about paying for customer support representatives
• Building customer confidence – customers feel more confident in themselves and your brand when they can find things on their own
• Driving traffic – customers get their answers and get to conversion quicker

Self-service is a superpower just waiting to be unleashed on your website.

There are endless possibilities for support on a website. Whether or not you think you need it, 78% of Americans report that they can find the information they need in self-service portals.

These 5 tricks for web self-service will show you what is really possible for customer support on your site:

1. Help Availability & Accessibility
2. Fast Search
3. Feedback
4. Easy Management
5. Artificial Intelligence

Accessibility for your self-service means meeting customers where they might have friction. Find a place on your site where users can get confused or where they may be searching for an answer about a product or service.

Then include fast, accessible help right there on your website. This could be a URL to a knowledge base or physical manual, a URL to an FAQ page, or offering knowledge base article links within product emails.

Users are impatient, so the search should be really fast. It also needs to be quick so that users don’t get bored or give up before finding what they need. Speed also helps more customers convert. 

Updating the page according to customer feedback will help to prevent other users from having the same issues. 

If you just put up a portal without iterating or updating, it will help less customers. If this perpetuates, your customers will believe that you provide bad customer service.

Artificial intelligence brings an added interaction to the table that allows customers to feel heard. That way, their expectations are met and they aren’t just combing through what your company thinks they want to see. 

All customer service channels are important, but if you can get web self-service right, it could eliminate the need for any others almost entirely. 

Every fast and accurate help article reduces incoming support request emails and the overhead managing support. When your customers are finding the help they need, they don’t need to contact you.

They can do it themselves. They don’t need you. They can follow a smooth path that you have paved the way for, and it is quick and easy.

Web self-service is very affordable. With all these superpowers, you won’t have to worry about paying for extra services or customer support representatives. 

There are many different self-service systems that can be implemented on your website. You want something that covers all the bases and is affordable.

Not many services contain every superpower mentioned above, but knowledge base systems do the best job of collecting everything you need.

Self-service can be a tricky business, so make sure you implement something that will take care of everything for you. You don’t want to be doing all the extra work that you would have without a self-service AND the work of keeping the self-service updated. 

A knowledge base is a self-service library of information that your customers can access to find information about your business or product. Customers and employees alike can take matters into their own hands by searching for information on anything they’d like. 

Some knowledge bases, like ChipBot, embed the knowledge base within the website. This saves time the user might spend on trying to find help and reduces tech overhead in hosting.