When your support portal has a high ticket deflection rate and customer satisfaction, it indicates that your customers can use your support portal effectively to resolve their queries. As a result, they become more knowledgeable about your products or services, and their experience with your brand is exceptional as they experience minimum effort and no delays in query resolution. With an efficient self-service portal, your support agents can focus on handling complex issues rather than solving simple problems that customers can manage independently. This saves the support team considerable time, reduces call and ticket volume, and optimizes support costs. Customers also receive better support, enhancing their loyalty to your brand. Here are 4 steps to maximizing your self-service portal!
Step 1: Offer self-service on the web and mobile
Nowadays, customers expect to be able to access information and support on the go. Enabling self-service for both web and mobile allows customers to access your support portal from anywhere, at any time. This enhances the overall support experience, making it easier and more convenient for customers to get help when needed.
Step 2: Utilize community forums
A community forum can be a valuable tool for customer support. It provides customers with an opportunity to collaborate to solve problems, increase product or service discussions, and help customers better understand your products or services. By creating and managing a community forum, you can turn it into a repository of knowledge and a platform for regular customer engagement.
Step 3: Utilize AI-powered tools
Using AI-powered tools to suggest relevant solutions to customers on your support portal can help deflect tickets and bring agents in only for the more essential questions. AI-powered tools can also provide valuable feedback on the topics or questions your portal could not answer. Taking feedback into account helps you streamline and improve your portal.
Step 4: Track customer journeys
Tracking the customer journey through the support portal helps to determine whether the self-service portal is effective enough or if customers still require assistance. This can help identify areas for improvement and fine-tune the support portal.
By optimizing the self-service portal, you'll notice a direct impact on ticket queues as more customers solve their queries on their own. As a result, there will be an improvement in portal usage and customer satisfaction, leading to better engagement and increased loyalty.
Final Thoughts
Listen to customer feedback.
To effectively evaluate customer feedback, it's crucial to have reliable methods in place for collecting it through your self-service portal. A practical way to do this is by adding a "useful/not useful" button at the end of articles, as well as allowing customers to like or dislike articles and tracking views to identify areas that require improvement. By analyzing the types of questions your customers are asking, you can create a powerful FAQ section. It's also worth considering chat conversations on your website to help you finalize the questions for your FAQ. Check out the next blog for a quick guide on setting up your FAQ.
In conclusion, optimizing your self-service portal is an essential step towards improving the overall customer support experience. By enabling self-service for both web and mobile, harnessing the power of a community, using AI-powered tools, and tracking your visitors, you can streamline your support process and enhance customer satisfaction while saving time and reducing support costs.
- Discover more about Customer Engagement Strategies
- Find some tips on e-Commerce Strategies
- Looking closer at Omnichannel Support Strategies
Tags: #zendesk #omnichannel #digitaltransformation #digitalintegration #digitalsolutions #smestrategy #ecommercestrategy #emarketplace #customerengagement #customerretention #customersuccess #edg #psg
