The customer service is a crucial part of any successful business strategy. Without excellent customer service, no business can succeed. There are several aspects of a business that need constant attention from management, but customer service is at the top of the list. In fact, most business analysts develop customer-centric strategies where customer service and customer experience are the most important factors. Businesses in Dubai, Sharjah, Abu Dhabi, and other parts of the UAE are aware of the increasing competition and customer demands. Sometimes it is hard to keep up with the very dynamic market trends and skyrocketing customer demands. Businesses that constantly put effort and resources into improving customer service see great improvements in revenue generation, sales, profitability, and brand reputation. Better customer experience results in a higher customer satisfaction index, which correlates to customer retention. Establishing long-term customer relationships helps businesses reduce their operational costs. According to several studies, it is 9 to 25 times less expensive to get a sale from an existing customer than to acquire a new customer. That is why customer service is the most important and absolutely essential part of your business strategy.
The Advantages of Customer Self-service and Best Practices
Another important performance indicator is customer lifetime value (CLTV). CLTV directly relates to revenue, indicating how much monetary benefit a business gains from a particular customer over the period of their engagement with the business. Furthermore, customer satisfaction and happiness also have a positive impact on employees. Happy customer sentiments mean happy employees, and employee satisfaction is a crucial factor for better employee performance. The happier the employee, the more quality work they will produce, and vice versa. That’s not all. Customer happiness also helps build a strong brand identity, and customer sentiments have a huge impact on brand awareness. So, customer happiness and satisfaction can literally have a positive influence on every aspect of the business. Happy customers are more loyal, and loyal customers want you to grow and offer better products and services. They will try to help you whenever needed. For example, if you ask them to provide feedback for new product development, you can get their attention and more honest opinions. Self-service solutions have taken over the market like a storm. Every business is implementing self-service solutions to enhance their customer experience and to optimize their operational costs. In this blog, we will discuss how self-service helps businesses achieve their goals.
See Also: 10 Customer Self-Service Best Practices to Power Your Contact Center Results
How Self-service Helps Businesses Achieve their Goals
What is Customer Self-Service?
By definition, customer self-service is a framework for providing customers with the information and tools they need to solve their own problems without having to contact customer service. It provides customers with a channel where they can find their own solutions. There are several reasons why customer self-service is important. First, customers want instant solutions to their problems. They don’t want to wait in long lines to speak to a customer service representative. This trend is not only seen in the UAE, but it is a global trend. There are several factors that have contributed to this trend, such as the rise of computers, the internet, and smartphones. Today’s customers are more tech-savvy than ever before, and they are more capable of solving their own problems. They are more likely to look up solutions online or in manuals before contacting customer service. For example, I haven’t visited my bank in years. Everything I need is available in my online banking mobile app. If I need something that is not in the app, I will call the call center as a last resort. This is the case with many businesses and industries. Customers want quicker and instant solutions and access to services and information. That is why customer self-service is one of the fastest-growing industries in the world.
What is Customer Self-Service?
What are the Advantages of Customer Self-Service?
There are several advantages to customer self-service. In this blog, we will cover only the top five benefits of offering customer self-service, which have a huge impact on a business’s success and growth:
- Enhanced Customer Experience: There is a common misconception that an average customer prefers to have a live human experience with your service staff. However, several studies and surveys suggest otherwise. Most customers (from 65% to 85%) in different industries prefer self-service over reaching out to a service staff. Customers want quick resolution, they feel more freedom in self-service, and they don’t want to wait in long queues. That is why customer self-service can greatly improve your customer experience.
- Quality and Fast Service: Customer self-service enables customers to easily and conveniently access customer service, information, and relevant tools to either solve a problem or make a transaction. Serving customers at a service counter or via call center is very time-consuming, involving long wait times, repetitive work, and being comparatively slower than customer self-service channels. Furthermore, customer self-service channels are easy to access, which improves customer experience, offers customers more control and freedom, and improves service quality.
- Lower Service Cost: Customer self-service not only enhances customer experience, but it also helps businesses minimize service costs and operational costs. Self-service channels are automated, such as web portals, chatbots, customer portals, mobile apps, interactive self-service kiosks, and signage. This reduces the number of services required at your traditional service center, meaning you need fewer service agents and staff, which lowers costs. Operating customer self-service channels is also very cost-efficient, which helps minimize operational costs.
- High Productivity: When self-service channels are integrated into a customer-facing environment, most customers who need simple things or have small problems tend to use self-service channels. This greatly reduces the workload of staff and improves their performance. It also enables your service staff to focus on high-value and complex tasks, which increases their productivity and also raises the value of their service. When employees work under a balanced workload, they are happy and satisfied, which is essential for a productive organizational culture.
- Increased Sales and Revenue: All customer self-service channels work 24/7 and are always available to customers. This means that your prospects or customers can access certain services, information, and features anytime they want. Easy accessibility and high availability are important for building trust and gaining a competitive advantage. When customers compare different vendors, they tend to prefer businesses that they can easily access. This results in a higher lead-conversion rate and helps businesses increase sales and generate more revenue.
Implementing customer self-service channels is the most beneficial method for any business. Businesses can enhance customer experience, increase accessibility, optimize productivity, and increase sales without investing more or spending more. In fact, self-service channels tend to reduce operational costs.
What are the Advantages of Customer Self-Service?
What are the Best Practices to Implement Customer Self-Service?
There are several methods and channels that businesses in Dubai and all around the UAE are using to offer customer self-service. Here are some of the most effective customer self-service channels that will help you build a comprehensive and more impactful customer self-service framework for your business:
Online Knowledge Base:
The online knowledge base is one of the most popular customer self-service channels due to its simplicity and significant impact on customer experience. The knowledge base is a complete library of resources, information, and helpful content. This content can be in the form of text, images, videos, infographics, or any other multimedia content. The knowledge base is designed to guide customers to perform any task or find a solution to their problem. A knowledge base can significantly reduce the learning curve and provide support throughout the entire customer journey.
The knowledge base is a complete library of resources, information, and helpful content.
AI Chatbots and Virtual Assistants:
Including AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants is a great way to offer seamless customer experience. Businesses are leveraging the latest technological advancements to improve their operations. Chatbots and virtual assistants are one of the most effective methods to improve customer experience while minimizing operational costs. Businesses can easily hire a professional service provider to train their chatbots and virtual assistants according to their requirements, enabling them to serve customers and resolve their problems. Implementing virtual assistants and chatbots is also very cost-effective.
Chatbots and virtual assistants are one of the most effective methods to improve customer experience
FAQs Page:
Businesses often underestimate the power, impact, and usefulness of the FAQs page. While an FAQs page may not offer as much in-depth content and information as a knowledge base, it is still a very effective and impactful customer self-service channel. The biggest advantage of an FAQs page is that it contains both questions and answers, covering all basic questions and helping customers and prospects understand the answers. Businesses can create a dedicated page for FAQs and build an intuitive navigational structure to cover everything. They can also add relevant FAQs to each product/service page, which is also very effective.
The biggest advantage of an FAQs page is that it contains both questions and answers
Tutorials and How to Content:
The video tutorials and how-to content have gained significant popularity in the past few years. Businesses can create video tutorials, how-to videos, or blog pages that can help customers solve a particular problem by providing them with a complete, step-by-step guide and all relevant information about solving a problem or performing a task. Video tutorials and how-to guides are the most effective way to improve customer experience and help businesses increase customer satisfaction and customer retention. The videos and how-to guides can be easily shared via social media, which makes them even more useful and effective.
Video tutorials and how-to guides are the most effective way to improve customer experience
Interactive Self-Service Kiosk:
Interactive self-service kiosks are gaining huge popularity in Dubai and all around the UAE. Businesses are rapidly adopting interactive self-service kiosks and signage. These kiosks come with a variety of software and hardware-based features, allowing customers to perform more complex tasks and make transactions anytime they want, without waiting in long queues. Interactive self-service kiosks are intuitive, multilingual, highly secure, and work 24/7, allowing customers to access information and services any time they want. They offer excellent customer experience.
Interactive self-service kiosks are intuitive, multilingual, highly secure, and work 24/7
Smartphone Applications:
Smartphone applications are a great way to offer self-service and an excellent customer experience. Think of your online banking app, and now imagine how your life would be without it! Each time you need a service, you would have to make a call to the call center or visit the bank branch, where you would have to wait in line for a long time. Smartphone applications have come a long way. Both Android and Apple applications can offer great features, intuitive and secure customer experiences, and high customer satisfaction. Developing and operating smartphone applications is also very cost-effective.
Smartphone applications are a great way to offer self-service
How to Align your Self-Service Channels with Customer Needs?
These are some of the most commonly used customer self-service channels. To ensure that your customer self-service framework is customer-centric and capable of delivering the desired results, you must understand how to align these channels with customer needs. Here are a few tips:
- Analyze your existing trends and patterns. See what your customers are asking for, what services they need the most, how they are communicating their problems, and what are the most common services your service staff is offering them.
- Automate common scenarios by automating the processes such as how your service staff serves your customers, what information they are accessing, and how they are sharing information with the customers, etc.
- Integrate all relevant databases, systems, and information centers to ensure that all tasks are performed in full synchronization, that all relevant information is available to customers, and that all updates are done to all relevant systems/databases to avoid repeated work.
- Offer multiple integrated self-service channels that include relevant information. Connect your knowledge base, FAQs, and all information repositories to ensure that customers have a smooth experience and can access up-to-date information they need to complete the task.
- Offer features that allow customers to connect to customer service and support teams. No matter how intuitive or interactive your self-service channels are, there will always be some customers who need human assistance.
- Evaluate your self-service channels by collecting customer feedback, conducting regular testing, and engaging industry experts to highlight areas for improvement. Keep optimizing your self-service channels for better performance and higher customer satisfaction.
How to Align your Self-Service Channels with Customer Needs?
Conclusion
When a customer reaches out to a business to resolve a problem or to avail a service, the first thing they will consider is the time it took to resolve their problem or to deliver the service, and the efforts that were made in order to complete the task. If that interaction is not satisfactory, customers will get a very negative impression. Their opinion about the business could change, they could leave, or they could even be upset. This is why customer service is one of the most crucial factors in any business’s success strategy. It is extremely important to ensure that your customers are having a satisfactory experience. The customer service sector has been evolving rapidly over the past few years. Highly advanced technological solutions have been introduced to the service industry in recent years, which can enable a business to completely revolutionize its customer service practices and processes. Especially with the rise of customer self-service, businesses can deal with the challenges of the modern day. Customer self-service solutions help businesses deliver superior experiences, improve the quality of service, increase staff productivity, and overall operational performance without breaking the bank.
With a very small investment and an intelligent solution, businesses can build a comprehensive customer self-service framework. In this blog, we have discussed the advantages of customer self-service and best practices. If you want to learn more about the subject or if you would like our help to provide you with a tailored-made customer self-service solution for your business, please feel free to contact us through our Contact Us page or leave a comment in the comment box below. We will get in touch with you soon.