Customers that come your way are probably going to have a good experience with you if you do your job well enough, but there are inevitably going to some occasions where they have a problem or inquiry that they need dealt with.
While a customer support software like Kayako can help you deal with these complaints with ease, you can sometimes let customers help themselves by offering them web forms and other self service options. Here are some benefits to doing this:
1- Customer Preference
Customers often don’t want to have to talk to someone in order to resolve a complaint simply because of the fact that most of their complaints are going to be rather simple such as a late delivery or a defective product. They can handle these complaints themselves if you give them an option to do so, and they are definitely going to appreciate the fact that you cut through a lot of bureaucracy in order to help make the complaint resolution process a great deal easier for them.
2- Efficiency
Customers can handle their own inquiries and complaints more quickly if they don’t have to contact a CSR in a few cases. Giving them the option can help streamline your customer support process and allow your team to focus on those customers that actually need their help. This is going to help you log more complaints in a shorter period of time which can enable you to notice negative patterns in your products a lot quicker, thus making it possible to rectify these issues in a much shorter period of time than would have been the case otherwise.
3- Cost Effective
You are going to save a lot of money with this kind of customer support, especially if you combine it with what Kayako is offering in terms of live chat optimization. This way you would be able to hire fewer CSRs and save a lot of money that would have otherwise gone towards paying multiple salaries. You would also be able to save money on the equipment that you would have otherwise had to buy for the CSRs you would have ended up hiring in order to handle your heavy flow of customers.
4- Allows CSRs to Specialize
You are obviously not going to get rid of your entire team of CSRs if you apply this technique. Rather, you can keep a core team of CSRs that are trained to specialize in certain kinds of customer complaints and inquiries, and they would be able to earn higher salaries as well because of the fact that they would have gotten special training for the work that they are doing. This is sort of specialization can also help you take your customer support to the next level, improving your overall reputation as a company and allowing you to improve your profitability overall.
Potential Challenges
1- Requires Constant Maintenance
Any kind of set up that allows customers to help themselves will have to be maintained on a constant basis because of the fact that if at any point the system goes down, customers are going to be left with no way to address their complaints and the like. Hence, it is important that you start to hire a team that would handle this server and keep optimizing it. While this is an expense without a doubt, it is going to cost a lot less than the CSRs that this system is going to end up replacing so it is worth it in the long run.
2- Takes Away Personalized Support
A big part of making customer support top notch in quality is offering personalized service that would make customers feel comfortable and would add to the image that your company is a family where they will be taken seriously and respected. Creating this type of customer support system, one where the customers help themselves, is going to take away from that. This is perhaps the only serious problem that you are going to face when it comes to this type of customer support as to the more personalized provision of call and live chat customer support.
The Bottom Line:
Self-service customer service is one of the highly effective forms of support in this digital age and customers today are not just ready for it, but also prefer it in many ways. However, customer self-service portal will improve productivity only if you make it easy to use, up to date and is visually rich, i.e. images & videos.
