What exactly do customers want? That’s the golden question that every business tries to answer in its own way with customer service. All too often, our focus is on the products and services we sell, and customer experience tends to be more of an afterthought. But we need to be giving just as much attention to the customer journey after a purchase as we do to making sales.
Since according to Gartner® 87% of customers who attempt to self-serve end up switching to an assisted channel, it’s critical to get customer experience right.
So, what can we do to improve this?
Tackling Search
We can’t underestimate the power of search. It’s one of the main ways that users find information on a website or help site. But, we’ve become used to incredibly intelligent searches thanks to popular search engines.
Today we can type vague, misspelled, and even incorrect queries into popular search engines and still find relevant results most of the time. But, many organizations are still using search engines that can’t handle this type of ambiguity. Without searching the exact query correctly, your search might surface no results. And this is incredibly frustrating for customers.
Adding features like faceted and federated search will propel your search capabilities forward. It will also provide a better help experience for your customers.
Cultivate Community
While it’s important to provide the best answers possible from our company resources, we can also let customers help each other. Creating an online customer community is a great way to gather new insights, connect with users, and solve problems in innovative ways.
A well-established customer community can go a long way in helping establish credibility in your organization.
Additionally, you can harness the power of your community by using posts in your search engine. This way, when users ask a question, answers will surface from both your official documentation and your online community.
You can also use your customer community to collect feedback on current products and systems, and research future offerings.
Many large organizations like Hubspot and Google have taken advantage of the benefits of an online community, and more businesses are launching them.
Consolidate Knowledge Bases
When creating documentation sites, companies often separate customer-facing sites from internal sites. While these two audiences do often need different materials, separating out the knowledge bases is a recipe for disaster.
When customers get a different answer talking to an employee than they do from the website, it creates confusion and undermines trust.
Customer service team members waste valuable time searching for accurate information when there are separate databases.
The solution is to provide both employees and customers with a Single Source Of Truth. An SSOT is often one consolidated knowledge base for both internal and external audiences. This way, company knowledge is shared across the board, eliminating content silos.
Prioritizing Customer Service
In today’s fast-moving world, knowledge really is power. But for your customers and employees, it’s only powerful if they have it when they need it. Making customer experience a priority for your organization will increase customer satisfaction and loyalty and cut down on wasted time and employee frustration.
Discover how businesses are using Heretto Deploy Portal to provide an extraordinary customer experience.
*Gartner®, [Accelerate Self-Service Adoption by Focusing on Customer Needs], [Published 17 March 2021]. 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.
