What’s a self-service website?

A website, where consumers and customers can ‘self-serve’, or serve themselves, is a platform where they can carry out a function themselves, or in part, without having to interact with a person from your organisation.

In contradiction to how consumers demand the human touch when they buy goods or services from a company, or have a customer service need, there’s an estimated 79% demand for self-service options.

Typical examples of digital self-service

Think of the simple forms of help obtained online, without interaction from another person. Here are a few examples:

• Online shopping – from selection to checkout, a platform or website where you can browse, purchase and pay for goods and services. 
• FAQs – a static / searchable database of queries you can find all those fiddly bits of information you may need about a company, their products and services. For example, how long it takes them to make orders, why they only make a certain type of product or information about sustainability, etc. 
• Chatbots – an automated ‘chat’ a browser can type into as if they were messaging a real person. The chatbot basically functions as a conversational FAQ or customer service operative to answer queries quickly, efficiently and positively. 
• Customer support portals – an online ticketing centre where you can raise service requests and receive response or resolution in ticketed order – like joining a virtual queue for service, but it’s all dealt with and communicated to you online. 
• User forums – this is an online area where you can raise a question with other users to discuss or solve a query, or receive advice. The response is not coming from the company, but they facilitate you to interact with other users so you can help each other.

Why you should have self-service as part of your digital strategy

There’s a genuine demand for self-service; reason enough for you to have this on your radar as part of your digital growth and strategy. But it’s not just good for consumers, it’s good for you as a business or commercial organisation too.

Here’s why:

• Consumers expect to be able to self-serve – they are time-poor, with demand that doesn’t necessarily fit in with your office hours, so round-the-clock customer service makes sense and is a way of you fulfilling that demand.  
• Online all the time, saves on staff overheads – there’s no need to fill a call centre with real people if you can provide the answers to most queries online, or via a chatbot. You may need technicians to resolve issues raised via tickets, but this won’t be in addition to people answering the phones or direct emails. 
• Make-it-once, reusable content – easier for you, and cheaper, to construct a simple tutorial to help a customer than explain it over and over again in person, or by email. Look for commonly raised queries to guide you in these. 
• Increase engagement – whether it’s with informative, useful and educational content, the efficient service via an online ticketing portal, or the slick online shopping function you provide, the opportunities to impress, gain customer engagement and increase loyalty are boundless.

Where to start with online self-service

It’s difficult to know why you wouldn’t want to increase customer satisfaction, usability and service without the relative cost of additional staffing.

Here’s what to think about to get started adding self-serve options to your digital strategy:

• Look at the data to understand the most-commonly asked questions, queries and requests that take time and money to answer/resolve 
• Test the content / portal or self-service journey to understand usability and resolve any issues 
• Optimise the onboarding experience to your portal, or becoming an online customer 
• Advertise and promote your self-service options – if an online shop is new, shout about it on your channels 
• Collect metrics on usage and bounce rates to further refine the experience 
• Using the data collected, start to think about further down the line and personalising the options pertinent to each customer

Want to talk about digital self-serve options?

We are self-service experts at Cultrix, with our own customer portal and ability to build customers’ self-service options according to their business and their customer demands.

Talk to us about self-service possibilities for your business.

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