Pro Tips to Have a Better Customer Self-Service Portal

With consumer behavior developing as it is, customers need answers quickly, demand personalized support experience, and are willing to solve their issues themselves.

That’s why, every year, customer self-service is getting more and more popular. Setting up a self-service portal is a major step towards a fully modernized customer service. But as we know, there’s always room for improvement.

So, here are some handy tips and tricks to have a better customer self-service portal. Check them out and step up your game!

Highlight the most frequent questions

A customer self-service portal needs to contain all the information your customers might possibly look for. Of course, the more information the easier it is to get lost.  

Your customers, however, should be able to quickly find the answers to their questions in your customer self-service portal, without looking too hard. So, why not add an FAQ section to your portal?

An FAQ has two major benefits: on one hand, it saves the customers time and effort, which they’ll most probably appreciate. On the other hand, it saves time and effort for your agents as well.

Add visuals to your customer self-service portal

Images and videos can deliver a message much faster than any other way, so it’s no surprise that visual content has started to dominate our lives.

Would you rather watch a 3-minute video or read a 6-page long support material? Most customers would go for the first option! As such, make sure to add visual elements to your customer self-service portal in order to help customers better understand your support material.

By creating screenshots and how-to videos, for example, you can walk your customers through important issues, while conveying instructions in a straightforward and easy-to-understand way.

Make it easy to access a live agent

When setting up a customer self-service portal, one major goal is to reduce call volumes by allowing customers to perform routine tasks without interacting with a call center agent.

But even if you have the most comprehensive self-service portal, your customers might get stuck and need to talk to a live agent at a certain point. And since they have already spent some time trying to solve their issue, they will want to be transferred to a live agent as soon as possible without any hassle.

Therefore, in order to sustain high customer satisfaction, you’ll need to make it easy for your customers to move from self-service to live agent-assisted service. Implementing, a one-click solution, for example, that takes customers directly to a live agent can be a great way of transferring to assisted service.

Assess Your Self-Service Portal – and Improve

So, you finally finished building your customer self-service portal. However, the job isn’t over. Once your customers start to use it, it’s essential that you continue to keep an eye on it.  

These days, data is everywhere, you just need to make good use of it. So, after you set up your self-service portal, make sure to start measuring its effectiveness. Amongst other things, a reduced call volume will indicate that you successfully managed to ease up your customer service lines by directing some of your customers to your self-service portal.

Last but not least, don’t forget to ask customers for feedback. After all, it is they who use your self-service portal in the first place.