Customer Self Service Can Change Your Life

You may not realize it, but I’m going to make things amazingly easier for you and your company by telling you the benefits of customer self service. We’ve talked about it in the past, from various angles, you may recall. This included examining what naysayers had to say against it, possible real risks, and the potential benefits it could bring. We cited at the time that it needed more time in application before a definitive conclusion could be drawn.

Well, at last, we can come to a conclusion about customer self service in this decade, and it does indeed work. Most of the fears of customers being more than onboard software could handle turned out to be bunk, and most of the cases where it did manage to happen, still-present human agents remedied it in minutes, and it rarely happened twice thanks to the resilience of these learning platforms.

So, what can self service do for you? Customer service is a mess for everyone, with conversion to online mediums being a bit of a difficult and young science, and call centers being choked, bloated monstrosities that are only affective half the time at best.

Self service can alleviate this call center problem, especially right now when the other platforms are still very experimental for this purpose. They also reduce costs significantly, with human man hours not being wasted on routine things customers should be able to handle on their own.

Before the onboard software, this meant entrusting the customer with too much destructive power, but thanks to this software, that can be moderated effectively.

There’s a lot to be said for the convenience and automation empowering and thrilling the customer, too. Remember, they see it the same way you do that the less nonsense and drama brought about, the happier everyone is. They will enjoy their time being valued and used appropriately, not squandered on latencies with routines needing divine intervention perpetually.

Self service is now very viable, and with onboard software like WalkMe, it’s very possible to implement these frameworks with minimal understanding of how programming works. In fact, you need no prior programming experience to configure these beasties. They are dynamic, software-like interfaces, and they can add a lot of slick dynamism to an interface and aesthetic too.

Aesthetics do count, after all, so you need to make sure your self service system makes sense and is pleasing to look at, otherwise it will be a subconscious chore for your user to interact with its mundane ugliness.

So, there are quite a lot of benefits to this, cost and convenience just being a few. While there is a cost to implementing it, and an expense behind onboard software, it more than pays for itself within a few months of smooth, issue-free customer interaction. If your call centers are a mess and you’re not ready for the web revolution for customer support via social platforms, then customer self service is definitely the right angle for you. Just be mindful that a user is going to need to know how to use this manual service which they previously saw as automated when your intervention was involved.

Self Service Adoption

is Specialist in Customer Success and chief writer and editor of I Want It Now, a blog for Customer Service Experts. Follow her @StefWalkMe