This is how you benefit from customer self-service

By Customer Self Service customers can help themselves. Concerns, inquiries, problems, complaints, modifications can be carried out independently by the customer without having to access the valuable human resources of your company. This saves both the company and the customer a lot of time and ensures a pleasant user experience.

However, to make this possible, your company's systems must be able to communicate with each other. This is often the biggest challenge when implementing self-service functions. Some important basic questions should therefore be clarified beforehand so as not to fail with the implementation.

What does customer self-service bring?

Customer self-service allows your customers to literally help themselves. Digital functions that enable your customers to independently obtain solutions to their problems and questions. Without using your support team. This gives the team the space to do exactly what makes people special: personal and professionally competent interaction with the customer — but only when this is necessary for the really tricky cases.

Your customers can largely solve their own support requests themselves, for example by providing knowledge databases, formulated in a comprehensible way faqs, logically structured Exploded drawings and product information. Orders can be tracked, transactions can be carried out independently. Tools that help identify problems, can be used by customers at any time.

Other options include exchanging ideas with other customers in forums, or using chatbots, whose artificial intelligence you can work out.

What are the benefits of customer self-service for your company?

Digital self-service saves a great deal of time. Your customers will find the solution to their problem in a short time, without having to wait in a time-consuming and annoying queue for the next free support agent.

Every good solution increases trust in the competence of your company — you also create a positive User Experiencebecause customers were able to get a solution faster and find it themselves. Meaningful offers result in immediate noticeable and measurable relief for your support team. Your customers will usually find the right answer to their question completely independently. Only if this is not successful, tickets created by the customer are forwarded to the appropriate support department without administrative effort.

Another area with potential to relieve your team is maintaining the master data. Here you can enable your customer to maintain or adjust their own data independently. The same is also possible for tariff changes or ordering spare parts. The more your customers can do on their own, the fewer resources you'll need.

What are the challenges of customer self-service?

The prerequisite for successful customer self-service is the best possible implementation in your existing processes. Only when your systems can communicate with each other and handle customer inquiries together can you really talk about self-service. Without these interfaces, someone from your team is always needed to solve problems manually.

Which basic questions are decisive before implementing a customer self-service?

We support you in analyzing the current and target situation, for example with the following questions:

• How are your customers currently finding the solution to their problem?
• Which self-service functions do you already offer?
• Which problems are currently causing the greatest effort in customer service?
• Which customer inquiries are recurring issues?

Based on these questions, we can then develop and implement self-service solutions together. However, there are often already existing solutions that are simply not used enough or are found. It therefore makes sense to standardize customer access first and foremost in order to connect all existing and planned solutions. For example, in the form of Self Service Portals.

This creates a customer self-service that is really focused on the problems and questions of your customers and relieves your support team.