A self-service portal as a central interface for your customer service

synopsis

A holistic Customer Self Service Portal differs from stand-alone solutions by its comprehensive functionality, central integration and the ability to offer various support options in one place. It improves the Customer Experience and enables efficient customer interactions.

‍What distinguishes isolated solutions from a holistic customer self-service portal?

You already have a really good FAQ page, maybe even other good approaches for a Customer Self Service, but are all of these tools distributed as stand-alone solutions? Or your support is now so complex that people pick up the phone again to find a solution. Or is your support structured in such a way that it offers direct access to your support team via email or telephone? This is where the Self Service Portal comes into play for you!

What is a self-service portal?

Now you need the right presence — the location — so that all the help you provide can be immediately found and used by your customers.

A present page where all of your customer self-service functions have their starting point. Your customer knows immediately and without detours where they can get help to help themselves. The individual tools are not hidden, distributed on different sub-pages or only found at the foot of your page, but are prominently placed.

What does the practical application of a customer self-service portal look like?

An example: a personalized approach from the customer creates a good basis for exactly this required presence. Here, the opportunities for self-help are collected and prominently placed. By logging in — for example with the order number in combination with the postal code — your customer does not have to manually enter their data at a later date (when their initial nerves may have already been strained).

The portal recognizes the order and initiates a automated problem analysis one. Your customer answers a few questions to identify the problem and the portal offers all relevant service options.

If there is still no self-service function for a problem or if your customer is not sure, telephone support can be contacted in this case. However, the problem has already been identified and your experts from the support team can directly help you solve it over the phone. That means a high level of efficiency. And nerve-saving success stories for your team.

The Customer Self Service Portal can also be the central interface for your customer and support team.

How do customers benefit from the self-service portal?

All channels and options for your support must be integrated into a central technical solution. This is the only way you can keep an overview of your customer experience.

The insights from your self-service portal improve the customer experience — you can incorporate all the insights you have gained:

• What does my customer need most often?
• Where does help need to be provided quickly?
• What can I automate?
• I can use customer interactions as a source for new feature ideas.
• The FAQs can be extended again and again based on past customer inquiries.

The Customer Self Service Portal can contain tools such as FAQs, chatbots, guided problem analysis, complaint forms and form a central interface for the customer and the support team.

If you still have concerns, feel free to take a look this item on. There we described why other companies do not yet have a self-service portal. There are some prejudices, but they are easy to refute.