We’ve talked at an extreme length about how to improve customer service. Time and time again, we’ve pointed out how the call center is a bit of an unavoidable plague upon humanity, and that alleviating the workload on this structure by offloading the traffic to other venues is the first and foremost thing to do.

We’ve said that using social channels is one aspect to how to improve customer service that’s become not only trendy but convenient for many, when it comes to the absolute need for human contact in support and service. But, we’ve also mentioned many times that there are times when human intervention from the service and support staff honestly isn’t needed, and in fact, the domain of this scenario can be broadened by new technologies making extended self service not only possible but practical.

We’ve mentioned WalkMe as a good solution for this in passing, but today we’d like to actually explain just why this particular technology works so well for this situation at length.

One of the biggest issues with online services and online support interfaces is that sometimes they’re complicated or confusing. At the very least, it’s hard to design these in a way that they’re compatible with the mindset of a broad and sweeping majority of people. Where it may make perfect sense to one mindset, it won’t to another and so forth.

Well, WalkMe was originally designed as a tutorial and guidance program to address this in a multitude of fields, to teach people software and processes in a “learn by doing” environment. This process, it turns out, works fantastically well for self service for similar reasons.

WalkMe has a rich, full featured GUI that allows point and click programming and layout management, so you don’t have to worry about how skilled a programmer you are or aren’t, in order to set this thing up skillfully. Once set up, it can wrap around any given web interface or construct, where it can be content aware and user aware by monitoring the state of any or all of the web interface elements. From here, it can guide users through the most complex steps of any process through popup balloons, labels and even direct intervention itself.

This software can be set up to take the place of the support or service agent talking a user through small series of steps to do complex tasks, essentially. How this helps your customer support and service staff is threefold.

First, when support or service processes need to be done, WalkMe can empower the user to do these themselves, meaning that fewer issues will require the attention of agents, thus reducing the bottleneck of traffic coming in over the other channels being used.

This also provides greater first contact resolution, which is something all support and service staff strive for. Finally, this can reduce the need for service and support to begin with, given a lot of issues are “how the heck do I …?” scenarios. WalkMe doesn’t have to just be for the support and service processes, but can guide users through your normal online experience as well!

So, when it comes to how to improve customer service, adjusting your call center and implementing additional channels are a great start, but if you’re not adopting self service through WalkMe, you’re missing out on the biggest move to improve things.