Article

Maria Marinina
Maria Marinina 29 August 2019

Boost Your Brand with a Self-Service Customer Portal

Business success relies on great service delivery. Quick and consistent customer support is a massive part of this, albeit pretty costly. For many, building a dependable service that provides adequate advice and support is a real challenge as it’s necessary to consider several factors to pull it off.

Changes in Users’ Service Expectations

According to the Gladly Customer Service Expectation Survey,

  • 92% of respondents are willing to switch to another company after three or fewer experiences of improper customer service
  • 59% say that personal touch is highly important
  • 76% claimed unclear answers from various support systems
  • 68% were ready to pay more for a service with good customer assistance.

This only highlights the crucial function of adequate customer service within a business and its challenges.

In addition to these existing obstacles, the whole concept of customer interaction itself is rapidly changing.

Millennial and post-millennial age groups, who have grown up in the century of technology, are slowly transforming the sphere of customer service by shifting to online communication.

According to Microsoft’s report, 63% of Millennials prefer to interact online with customer service, and 74% of them claim their brand perception improves if the brands responds to them on social media. Finally, 96% of respondents state that customer service influences their choice of a service or product and increases brand loyalty.

So, how can you transform your support service into a practical helper, attract more customers, and reduce expenses? This is where a self-service portal can come in handy, which is a website with the functionality of customer self-help. It enables the customer to find solutions and information without the need to actively contact the customer support center.

Here, we’ll discover the benefits of including a self-service portal into your business tooling, as well as its uses and challenges to help you find out if it’s the right solution for you.

Essential Functions of a Self-Service Portal

A self-service portal is a complex structure, consisting of a wide range of tools to use. Depending on your business needs, there are a number of tools and functions you can employ on your portal:

  • Automation of customer requests

Integrate ticket processing systems and ensure no question remains unanswered. You can also track tickets online and monitor progress in real time.

  • Knowledge management

Build up your own data library with relevant help information in the form of guiding manuals and step-by-step video instructions. Integrate a search bar and an intellectual assistant into your online chat to facilitate the process of searching for information.

  • Blog and forums

Make your support interactive. Through the use of chats, forums, social networking sites, or messenger channels, you can build an active crowdsourcing community that would provide peer-to-peer advice and help to find quick solutions.

  • Account-based access

Implement user accounts on your portal. It’ll give you the possibility to track users’ history, making each customer interaction with the help desk more personalized.

Benefits of a Self-Service Portal

A self-service portal can be a convenient assistant for your customers if it’s well-implemented and adequately maintained. Web personalization can reduce the workload on your human support team, gather data to enhance your customers’ experience, and even lower the costs of request processing. Let’s take a closer look:

  1. Your customer support team’s load reduced

If your customers are seeking answers on their own, without addressing a help-desk, it reduces the number of tickets, making your support staff a last resort to call and leaving them with only the most vital of tasks. Automated tools, such as intellectual assistants and dynamic portals, can take care of simple tickets, while your support team could deal with the most challenging issues requiring unconventional solutions.

  1. 24/7 availability of multilingual support

Self-service not only makes support more available but also provides the opportunity to search for necessary information at all hours. Users are used to getting answers quickly, and nobody is ready to put up with the inconvenience of waiting for the working hours of help-desk staff. Self-service rules out delay factors and considerably reduces the time on request processing. Moreover, having self-service online allows you to make your portal multilingual, which increases the geographic scope of your customer care.

  1. Valuable source of data

A self-service portal can act as a source of valuable information. Through chats and forums, you can learn about the most commonly occurring challenges that your customers experience and their behavior when seeking resolutions to the issues. Equipped with that knowledge, you can build up the strategies on how to improve your service or product, or get ideas on developing new ones, thereby increasing positive customer experience and expanding your business.

  1. Cost savings

You may reduce the costs of request processing by encouraging your customers to refer to the self-service portal instead of calling services manually, the costs of which can range between $10 to $25 per ticket. Another factor that will cut the costs is opening up forums with peer-to-peer support, which encourages customers to communicate and strengthens brand loyalty all at the same time.

  1. Customer satisfaction

When customers try and find the solution themselves on your self-service portal, this is likely to increase their satisfaction as they save their time. It also builds up their confidence in your brand as it shows you already know how to solve their problems.

Challenges and tips on self-service portal deployment

Self-service is an excellent opportunity for any business to reduce costs and boost efficiency. However, this depends on one condition, that is the hardest to meet—active customer engagement in using the platform.

Generally, the main reasons for unwillingness to adopt new technologies among users can be:

  • Irrelevant or outdated information
  • An overwhelming amount of poorly searchable information
  • The idea of getting a faster solution from human assistants
  • Lack of technological literacy
  • Lack of personalization

So, how can you make your self-service portal more attractive for users? Here are some tips to help you get started:

Keep information clear

Well-organized information is key to success. So, before you get to help your users, you should realize what kind of information your customers need, how to categorize it and in what form to present it.

Even before starting to build your portal, ensure you have a concise plan of your information architecture. Once you have it up and running, ensure you keep the portal updated with the most relevant content.

Understand your users

It’s necessary to track your users’ preferences, answer the tickets promptly, and anticipate the possible problems of the system. Don’t leave any feedback unanswered and keep up with the trends, for example, by developing a handy mobile app to go with your self-service portal.

Personalize your portal

Establishing an account system in your site is necessary for service personalization. It helps to collect and provide the data on each user, including the products and services they use, their participation in forum discussions and feedback they leave. If properly harnessed, this data can help you analyze customers’ problems and take the next step to handle the issue effectively.

Ease login issues

By using cookies and secure authentication tools, you can prevent the struggle with password and login settings for your users. You may consider introducing a single sign-in authentication widget, where your users can enter your portal with their Google or Facebook accounts.

Boost customers’ independence

Encourage your customers to refer to your self-service portal before turning to a helpdesk. Make it easily accessible from your website by providing the link on the main page, embedding it at the top in chat-rooms and forum threads. Make sure that your new customers are aware of your help center by sending this information in your welcome email letter.

Engage users to participate in forums and assist other users with solutions they have found helpful. This boosts your active user community, making your portal an educational platform that people turn to when seeking answers.

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