What is self-customer service?

The clock is ticking. A customer is frustrated, struggling to resolve an issue, and their patience is wearing thin. Every second that passes without a solution risks losing their trust and loyalty.

This is the high-stakes reality of customer support, where speed, reliability, and accuracy are everything. But as your business grows and support requests surge, how do you maintain this level of service without sacrificing efficiency or your team’s sanity?

According to Harvard Business Review, a staggering 81% of customers attempt to resolve issues themselves before reaching out to a live representative. This presents a golden opportunity to meet these customers where they are and to reduce the burden on your support team. By embracing self-service and providing exceptional resources, you can empower customers to find solutions quickly and efficiently, preventing tickets from ever being created in the first place. This proactive approach translates to faster resolution times, reduced support costs, and happier customers.

Let’s see how you can leverage self-customer service options to your advantage.

What is self-customer service?

Self customer service enables customers to find solutions to issues independently on their own time, without the involvement of a human agent. Offering customer self service options is a part of customer experience (CX). Self-service support platforms empower customers with the resources such as automated chatbots, FAQ pages, and knowledge bases.

Benefits of self-service

Self-service customer support is a win-win for both customers and your business.

1. Increased customer satisfaction

70% of customers use self-service options at some point in their journeys, and every one of these customers wants to find answers to their questions quickly. Self-support options allow customers to find answers fast, and since you have pre-approved and vetted this information beforehand, you can ensure that the information is accurate even without human agent involvement. Delivering fast and accurate solutions is the way to win your customers over, as by doing so, you create a smoother customer experience.

2. Lower support costs

Offering self-service options reduces the workload on your support team. By providing detailed information, solutions, automated support, and resources, customers can benefit from self-service at different points in their customer journey, reducing the total human interaction time. Less human interaction translates to cost-effective support.

3. Support scalability

Connected to cost-effectiveness is also the scalability benefit of self-customer support. Typically, scaling your customer support operations can be expensive, given the resources, time, and manpower you need to make it work. However, with self-service options, scaling up is easy as self-service options like knowledge bases and FAQ pages can take on a higher volume of requests without additional expenses. Also, unlike human agents, your self-support options can work 24/7, which allows you to work across time zones and markets.

4. Higher support efficiency

If you have a well-functioning self-customer service mechanism, most basic L1 support requests can be addressed without human interaction, and only those that need more in-depth solutions or analysis are escalated to your support team. In fact, 40% of live support requests can be successfully redirected to self-support options. This means you can allocate your customer support resources and time to tasks that need expert intervention and human insight.

Apart from this, with self-service options and automation, you can ensure that your customer support is consistent and accurate even as the volume of support requests increases.

5 Key customer self-service channels

Customers may need support at different points in their customer journeys. They may also be looking for different levels of support and a range of issues. This means that customers will interact with your support platform through various channels, and the more channels you offer, the better their CX will be.

Some popular customer support channels include:

1. Automated chatbots and AI agents

Chatbots are the primary tool used to deliver automated customer support. The most basic level of automation chatbots offer is through canned responses. However, when you add AI agents to chatbots, you can offer intent and sentiment-aware support with natural language processing tailored to every individual customer’s unique needs. This conversational AI gives customers a natural interaction than a distant and robotic one that traditional chatbots offer.

AI agents can also be placed at different levels of the customer journey to offer proactive support and suggestions even before the customer raises a support request. For instance, an AI agent could pop up during the checkout process to offer assistance with payment options or address any concerns about shipping.

2. Knowledge base

Effective customer support starts with a well-structured knowledge base that acts as a central repository of information, housing a wealth of articles, tutorials, guides, and FAQs. It is like a comprehensive library that customers can go to and look for answers. They can search for solutions using keywords, categories, or filters. A good knowledge base is easy to navigate, concise, and offers multimedia information.

3. FAQ pages

FAQ pages are a quick and easy way to address common customer inquiries. They provide concise answers to frequently asked questions, offering instant solutions to recurring issues.

To create an FAQ page you must be able to anticipate common customer questions. If you do this successfully you can reduce the volume of support tickets and empower customers to resolve simple issues on their own.

4. Community page

A community page is essentially a forum that facilitates peer-to-peer support. It’s a platform where your customers can connect with each other, share tips, ask questions, and discuss topics related to your products or services. This type of support can be incredibly valuable, as customers often have unique insights and solutions that may not be readily available in your knowledge base or FAQs.

5. Customer portals

For a better self-service customer experience, you can create a customer portal, which is a dashboard where customers can access all their account information, order history, support tickets, and relevant self-service resources. This makes navigating and finding solutions much easier and quicker, which translates to increased customer satisfaction.

How to set up your self-service customer support success

While a winning majority of customers prefer self-customer service for their customer support interactions, only 9% of customers are able to fully resolve their issues using self-service options. This means that a lot of customer support requests still get routed to human agents. To increase the number of support requests that get resolved entirely through self-support options, start with these best practices:

1. Understand what customers are looking for

You cannot help someone if you do not understand what they need help with.

A major part of self-service is offering proactive support and anticipating what a customer might need. The best way to understand what customers usually get stuck with is to loop your support team into the process of designing your self-service options. The support team can help you identify the most common questions customers ask, what point of their customer journeys results in the most friction, and what type of solutions customers find most effective. This information is invaluable in creating a self-customer support platform that actually works.

2. Use language customers understand

The simpler things are to understand, the more likely your self-service option is to be successful. Making everything on your website and support portals sound fancy and interesting is tempting. However, interesting phrasing and jargon may not be accessible to many of your customers.

For example, if you add a button with the CTA “Submit a ticket,” not everyone might understand what it’s for. Replace it with “Get help” or “Ask a question,” and people instantly know that by clicking on it, they can resolve their issues.

3. Make things easy to find

Let’s say a customer wants to find information on setting up a product. They visit your website and find the support section in the menu. When they click on it, it leads them to a page full of options: “Contact Us,” “Warranty Information,” “How-to,” etc. They click on the “How-to” button only to be greeted with a long list of PDF files they can download to find the set-up information they need. This is an example of a self-service support platform that can only lead to frustration.

When a customer finds the information they need quickly, the result is a happy, satisfied customer who is likely to stay loyal to your business. Organize your support portal in a way that customers can navigate it intuitively. You can also use search bars and smart suggestions and offer contextual help to empower customers to find answers without having to browse through pages and pages of information.

4. Enable forum interactions

Community forums are a great way to deflect one-on-one customer support interactions while building trust and loyalty towards your brand. Community forums allow customers to talk and help each other resolve issues. Offering customers a platform where they can have genuine conversations about your product or service, exchange solutions, and discuss issues, you can show them that you care.

An additional benefit of community forums is that by monitoring interactions across these forums, you can identify common issues, what your customers like and dislike, and so much more information that can be used to improve your customer support.

6 Tips for optimizing your customer self-service strategy

Self-service tools are exceptional in reducing the burden on your support team. However, simply setting up self-service options is not enough. These self-service tools must fall in line with your larger support strategy and objectives, such as offering quicker and more accurate support to increase customer satisfaction.

1. Use AI agents for support and routing

AI chatbots and AI agents are effective ways to give your customers the experience of talking to a real agent without actually having to engage support staff. AI agents are powered by LLM models and Machine Learning, which allows them to provide support. AI agents can understand customer intent and sentiment and tailor replies to accounting. It can also learn from each support request and automatically route it to concerned parties when needed.

2. Keep your knowledge bases fresh through AI reporting

Knowledge bases need upkeep and updation; without that, they offer little value to your customers, which wastes their time and tests their patience. Manually tracking areas in your knowledge base that need changes can be difficult. However, AI-powered analytics and reporting processes your data and shows you what information is no longer relevant to your product or service, what needs to be added, and what needs to be edited.

3. Build self-service content with generative AI

Once you’ve identified areas in your knowledge base that need improvement, the next step is to create content to address the gaps. However, creating high-quality, comprehensive content is a challenge. Generative AI allows you to produce material for your knowledge bases, FAQs, and guides. You can train it to match your brand voice and tone without having to write every article from scratch.

4. Use proactive nudges

Guiding customers proactively is the most effective way to offer self-support. Start by analyzing user behavior and anticipating their needs so that you can chime in with relevant self-service options at points where they usually would face friction. These proactive nudges can prevent frustration, reduce support tickets, and empower customers to resolve issues before they escalate.

5. Offer easy escalations when needed

While self-service is great, not all customers may be satisfied with it, and not all issues can be addressed this way. When a customer encounters a complex issue or simply prefers to speak with an agent, make it easy for them to do so. Display prominent “Contact Us” buttons, live chat options, or even escalation forms within your knowledge base, FAQs, and community forums so customers can enlist human support when needed.

6. Analyze your self-service support constantly

Your entire self-service support platform needs constant monitoring and analysis to make sure that you are actually helping your customers. Consider usage patterns, search patterns, escalation rates, and customer feedback to identify areas where customers face trouble and optimize your self-service strategy accordingly.

Offer frictionless self-customer service with DevRev

When it comes to self-customer service, the more resources you offer, the better chance you have at helping customers resolve their problems independently. However, creating and maintaining these self-service resources and tools manually is a time-consuming and resource-intensive process. AI-powered customer support platforms can help you automate self-service and resource creation to a great extent.

DevRev, an AI-native, cloud-based customer support platform, offers a bouquet of self-service options, allowing you to reduce resolution times on your L1 support queries. DevRev’s Turing AI-powered chatbot PluG allows you to deliver intuitive, intent-aware customer support interaction without any human interaction. DevRev’s Gen AI capabilities help you identify gaps and create content for your knowledge bases, freeing you up from manually writing all your support articles.

Book a demo with DevRev today to see how you can improve your self-customer service options!