Customer support service function received a great impetus with the addition of self-service portal and has become a firm favorite of the tech-savvy millennials and GenZ. The positive impact of self-service goes beyond the help desk, team of agents or the customers they serve, with the info serving as a powerful tool in the business growth. As I see it, the marketing, sales, product development and support functions in the organization are the ones that benefit directly and the most.
With a self-service function, the marketing function can understand which features and functions are most important, and which aspect of the product is working or not working. It also tells us about the product positioning, its effectiveness, and help build marketing campaigns, sales assets, and other customer support materials.
Self service portal can help sales understand the pain points in addressing customers, provide information to back up their claims, and become knowledgeable about the product. Managers can access reports that give details about the articles shared and their role in a closed deal. With this info in an easy to consume form they can understand customer challenges. The insights from self-service support activities can be a major advantage and help the sales team accelerate the process to purchase.
With a customer self service software on the customer service, the product development team can find out which product features are most searched for, the product pain points and the expected features in it. The team can understand which features are working, failing, or need to be improved upon. With this information they can rework their product roadmap to customer’s needs.
Easily solved questions of the customers can be addressed by the self service software and with this support can focus on other issues. It can help support reduce ticket response time. A robust knowledge base can totally free the support team from simple, recurring issues help them upgrade their skill and knowledge levels. Even with customer interactions, a knowledge base that ensures the customers are also knowledgeable. This helps customers gain confidence in the company and provide positive reviews, serving as brand ambassadors while the negative ones can be attended to immediately.
To Conclude
My favorite example here is my experiences with my first smart phone and DSLR camera which I proudly acquired and showed around excitedly. The king-sized manual put me off and I decided to head online. While the online videos and posts from bloggers/ vloggers or forums didn’t exactly match my requirement, the material on the product company website was the same user manual online.
I would have, like any other use, appreciated the manual in a web-ready format, highly searchable list of topics and user requirements, which was arranged into easy-to-use topic clusters. This would have made for an enjoyable customer experience. As a plus, the product company would have gained insights into the favorable section, paragraph, camera feature, topic, their navigation and other valuable info about the customer. I suppose it is now possible to appreciate how a knowledge base provides great customer service and experiences all across the organization.
