The last few years have dramatically changed the landscape of customer interaction, and it will only continue to shift in the future. It's important to understand these changes, especially with customer experience, so we can give customers what they want.
One of the biggest ways that customer experience is changing is the rise of automated and self-service customer experiences. In the past, customer service was driven by interacting with a real person and supplemented with online help solutions. But now, the trends are flipping.
Customers are preferring to use self-service to answer their questions, and use real-person interaction as a last resort.
But many companies haven’t caught up to these changing norms and don’t have adequate documentation sites created to meet the growing demands of customers. According to Gartner® “While 70% of customers try self-service during their resolution journey, only 9% are wholly contained within self-services.” Businesses are trying, but many self-service offerings still aren’t where they need to be.
Other organizations implement solutions, but they end up with information silos and create a different experience for both internal and external audiences. When employees and customers use different systems to find answers, there’s a huge risk of error.
So, what can you do to create a seamless customer experience in 2024?
Recognize the need for self-service driven customer experience
Here are a few ways customer experience is changing:
- Self-service technology is expected to grow 15% by 2027
- AI and machine learning are expected to automate 40% of all customer interactions by 2023
- More customers than ever prefer digital interactions to in-person.
The old ways of interacting with our current customers and reaching new customers simply won’t be enough for the future. Recent years have seen an explosion of new ways to interact digitally, and now it’s clear that this is how customers expect to interact with businesses.
Thankfully, when you have the right technologies and systems in place, you can grow with future customer experience expectations.
Contextualize search results
Search capabilities are incredibly helpful for a knowledge base or help site, but we need to keep in mind how users interact with search. Today’s search engines are highly contextualized and work hard to display relevant information to users, not just any result that includes the word or phrases they’re looking for.
If your help site’s search capabilities aren’t like today’s modern search engines, customers will quickly become frustrated and overwhelmed with unhelpful information.
To fix this, content stored on knowledge bases and help sites should include metadata and taxonomy information. This allows users to create incredibly specific searches and only find information relevant to them.
This also allows you to display different sets of information to different sets of users. You can easily tag specific documents for internal use while securely storing them in the same knowledge base as your customer-facing information.
Improve customer experience by empowering employee self-service
Empowering your employees to thrive at their job will affect your customer experience. How? When employees know where to find vital company knowledge and feel confident in their ability to share it, this creates a seamless customer experience.
Potential customers can tell when an employee is fumbling for information or isn't sure what they're saying is accurate. But when digital customer experience and employee interaction match up, you're on the way to having happy, committed customers.
Unreliable customer self-service is more than just frustrating. It hurts your business's reputation and damages trust. And frankly, people hate working hard to find simple answers. Your potential customers may go shop somewhere else simply because your customer experience is difficult and confusing.
Help your customers solve their own problems
Investing in your customer service experience is crucial for long-term, future-focus customer relationships. And using the right tools is how you do this. When you have a single high-quality, searchable knowledge that both internal and external audiences can access with ease, you’ll thrive in the changing landscape of customer experience.
Why Should I Create a Knowledge Base?
Want to learn more about contextual knowledge bases? Check out our knowledge base blog.
*Gartner®, [Why Customers Abandon Self-Service], [Published 11 July 2019]. GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
