Quick Takeaways
- 88% of customers expect access to a self-service help portal
- The key to ensuring a positive customer experience is providing quick answers
- 40% of consumers prefer self-service over human contact
- Updating your self-service help content keeps both your business competitive and customers satisfied
Give your customers the opportunity to solve their problems effectively and quickly. Keep your help site up-to-date with the top trends for self-service help content in 2023.
What Is Self-Service Help Content?
Self-service help content offers the opportunity for users to address their own problems before involving a customer service agent. When it comes to solving everyday issues, 88% of customers expect access to a self-service help portal.
This can come in the form of FAQs, knowledge bases, online discussion forums, and more. With a federated search platform, these forms of help content can satisfy customer needs in seconds. Regardless of the type of support you offer, help content is necessary to provide a positive customer experience.
Why Is Self-Service Help Content Important?
Customer satisfaction requires providing helpful answers to customer questions quickly. In fact, a recent survey shows that the most important part of the customer experience is a quick response.
Providing self-service help content ensures that users can answer their own questions both quickly and effectively. Not to mention, 40% of consumers prefer self-service over human contact.
Top Trends For Self-Service Help Content
Simply offering self-service support isn’t enough. Your customers are technologically savvy, and your help content needs to be impressive. Here are 2023’s top trends in self-service help content that will keep both your business competitive and customers satisfied.
Rapid Cloud Adoption
The adoption of cloud technology has proven to be a key component in the rise of self-service help content. It allows companies to easily scale their customer support offerings as demand increases.
With cloud technology, business owners can efficiently control and transform their self-service efforts. For example, cloud solutions make it easy to start with a simple chatbot and slowly integrate IVR technology into your help site. They also simplify the alignment of multiple data streams into a CCaaS landscape, offering a more coherent overview of the customer journey.
Intelligent Automation
While blog posts and FAQ articles qualify as effective forms of self-service help content, they aren’t exactly cutting edge. Since 69% of customers try to solve problems independently, it makes sense to empower your customers with intelligent self-service solutions.
With intelligent automation, customers can answer more questions on their own without the help of human customer service representatives. For example, renewing subscriptions and making purchases is effortless with a chatbot and natural language processing.
Not only does intelligent automation result in happy customers, but it also saves your customer service team time, money, and resources. An efficient support team and empowered customers make intelligent automation worth the hype.
Omnichannel Service Environment
Customers value their time. They want quick and convenient ways to interact with companies on channels that are easy to use. Creating an omnichannel self-service environment allows your business to offer cutting-edge help content.
A recent study by Dimension Data discovered that 73% of users prefer to find information on a company’s website.
In today’s world of advanced technology, calling a support agent isn’t always a customer’s first thought. Instead, they want to find answers online on their own in FAQ articles or knowledge bases.
But surprisingly, about 55% of users think that online self-service help portals are difficult to navigate. To support customers in different environments, consider making your documentation available on a variety of channels like:
- Websites
- Apps
- Social Media
- Chatbots
- SMS messaging
Natural language processing algorithms allow companies to add self-service support to a variety of channels, making answers easily accessible to users with questions. With a variety of options, customers can find satisfaction on their preferred platform.
Focus on Agent Experience
Business owners are starting to think more carefully about how they treat their employees. Attracting and retaining loyal staff members is key to satisfying customer demand. Luckily, self-service help content has the potential to create an enjoyable experience for agents.
As you may know, knowledge bases and FAQ landing pages are never truly finished. They need to be continuously improved with self-service support material to ensure that content is performing as it should for both customers and agents.
This means that quality self-service content offers agents access to a knowledge base with updated, relevant information. This makes their jobs much easier, as they’ll know exactly how to find information that answers customer questions.
Self-service content can also provide remote and hybrid workers with troubleshooting measures that eliminates waiting for IT support, making it an extremely valuable resource for both agents and customers.
Increase Customer Satisfaction Today
Self-service help content is the key to customer satisfaction and organizational efficiency. Updating your help site with the latest industry trends will keep your business competitive and customers happy.
