The line between self-service and neglecting your customers

We’ve all had experiences with those companies who just don’t want us to contact their customer support team - even if you have a serious problem. It makes a stressful situation worse if you have to jump through hoops to speak to a team member. 

Customers expect a great experience when they deal with a business, and that includes easy access to customer support when necessary. They need to be able to get help 24 hours a day, 7 days a week – but offering this kind of support is very costly for companies. In these kinds of scenarios, a knowledge base can really aid your business to offer exceptional customer support.

Many businesses are now investing in self-service to help their customers alongside more traditional customer support channels. This has also reduced the burden on live customer support agents who now have more time to devote to the more complex queries. 

Here at KnowledgeOwl, we love self-service and are big fans of using a knowledge base to enable your customers to help themselves. But there’s a fine line between asking your customers to self-serve and refusing to invest in customer support.

First we’ll look at some companies who have over-invested in self-service at the cost of human-centered support. 

Budget airlines

Easyjet is a budget European airline that charges their customers £10 each time for calling their customer support line. If you call the support line, you hear a long recorded message, and they insist you must check their knowledge base for the answer to your query or you will be charged. 

This type of threatening behaviour from a company is not good customer service, but customers don’t really complain because they believe that you get what you pay for. With Easyjet, flights between the UK and mainland Europe cost as little as $30 each way. 

If your business model relies on you offering the cheapest service available, then customers are more likely to accept less than delightful customer support because they consider themselves already getting value for money. 

Internet giants

Internet giant Google does not provide any way for customers to contact support, but merely direct them to Google’s comprehensive knowledge base. Google was ranked as ‘terrible’ in a survey about customer service, coming 567th out of 605 companies. 

This doesn’t seem to have hurt Google’s growth, as it’s worth $82.5 billion on the stock market, and is the second most valuable brand in the world after Apple. 

For a company like Google, its products are so intuitive that customers are unlikely to need to contact a support agent. Most queries can simply be served by a knowledge base, meaning that Google spends virtually no money on customer support. 

Value for money

Customers don’t often complain when they’re treated badly if they think they’re getting good value for money. 

Research shows that customer service quality varies by industry. In other industries where the stakes are a lot higher and more money is being exchanged, such as in the finance or property industries, there would be uproar if customers were simply redirected to a knowledge base. 

But it’s still not good enough. Just because you don’t need to treat your customers well, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t. 

Customer support as a cost vs investment

Many companies view their customer support team as a cost for the business, rather than the area for growth that it actually is. They seek cost-cutting measures to raise their bottom line, so a knowledge base becomes a handy way to deter customers from costly phone calls. 

But a knowledge base is not a defence against customer interactions. It’s a useful way to automate certain processes, and a valuable resource that can deal with the majority of regular support queries. 

It allows your agents to spend most of their energy and time on those queries which cannot be resolved using online content. 

Not all support should be automated

A knowledge base is a wonderful tool for automating many processes that used to require an agent, such as basic information about a product or simple account issues. 

If there is a technical issue with your software, on the other hand, customers don’t want to trawl through your knowledge base for an answer. Your support agents should be on hand to deal with more advanced queries like this. Make it easy for your customers to contact them. 

Businesses can deliver amazing customer service by combining the twin pillars of people and technology. Blending these two models creates an enhanced experience for both customers and support reps. 

Now we’ll look into how businesses can leverage the power of technology to help customers. 

1. Changing customer behavior

Customers will need time and experience to get used to the new hybrid model of support. It might be difficult to train customers to look to self-service before contacting support, so you should follow these best practices. 

• If you set up a self-service knowledge base for your customers, make sure they know where it is by including a link in as many places as possible: email, social media, and any other communication channels. 

• Link product pages to your knowledge base to enable customers to easily navigate there. 

• If possible, integrate your knowledge base with your main website or application. Some knowledge base providers offer out-of-the-box widgets for this purpose, or they may have an API available for your company to build your own version. (We offer an embeddable widget that supports contextual help based on page URL, for example!)

• Train your customer support agents to direct customers to the knowledge base and communicate the benefits of self-service over live support. Add a link to the email signatures of your agents to make sure customers are aware of your knowledge base. 

• If your agents successfully resolve a customer query and there is a relevant knowledge base article, encourage them to share a link to the customer for future reference. 

It’s important to educate your customers about the existence of your self-service knowledge base, but it shouldn’t cross over the line into forcing customers to use it. Some customers may simply prefer connecting with a human or lack the confidence to solve a problem on their own. 

2. Making the transition to self-service

Since you are now relying on a hybrid system of self-service and live support, your support agents should be able to intervene to resolve a problem if a customer is unable to find an answer on their own. 

Here are some best practices to make the transition easier: 

• Make sure customers know that you have a customer support team in place to help if they can’t solve an issue themselves. 

• It should be instantaneous for customers to contact your team if they need to. Your live agents should only be a click away, so incorporate a “contact us” button on every knowledge base article or chatbot window so customers know how to get in touch. 

• If your company is using bots to help customers, make sure they are aware of the fact so they will be more forgiving if the bot makes a mistake. Make sure customers know the difference between man and machine to manage their expectations. 

• Have a system in place to make sure that customer support agents are aware of this customer’s journey in self-serving their queries. If a customer has been unable to find the right answers in the knowledge base, avoid redirecting them back to articles that the customer has already read. 

• Gather customer feedback on every knowledge base article and turn them into actionable tickets to improve your content. By taking this approach, you can continuously evolve your content and create new articles that fulfils your customers’ needs. 

• Encourage your support agents to create actionable tickets when a ticket or query's topic could be solved with documentation but no knowledge base article exists. This can further improve self-service and helps give content creators ideas for new topics.

3. Retrain your customer support agents

Implementing a hybrid model of people and technology for customer support means that you’re not only making support more convenient for customers, you’re also improving life for your employees too. 

A successful customer self-service strategy deflects many “how to” questions and level 1 queries, which helps support agents have fewer repetitive tasks to complete. This means it then becomes necessary to retrain level 1 support agents to transition them to more appropriate roles. 

You can organize formal training sessions and workshops to upskill your employees. Experienced agents can be assigned as mentors to your level 1 agents and help them adopt their new role. 

Final remarks

It’s a combination of people and technology that means businesses can treat customer support with the respect and admiration it deserves. Customers now expect self-service and it’s an essential part of any support strategy, but they must always have a way to contact a real person if the need arises.