The customer self-service train has picked up massive momentum over the last few years. These days, an exciting mix of emerging strategies and technology has emerged to help brands deliver experiences that drive customer loyalty and retention. However, too many businesses are failing to take advantage of these new models and best practices.
This article will examine the state of customer self-service in 2024 and how your business can embrace a more user-centric future.
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The evolution of customer self-service
In many ways, the conversation around customer self-service is too fixated on cost savings. While that is a major concern for many businesses, it ignores the fact that the true value of self-service tech lies in its potential to provide added value for users, which in turn boost retention, loyalty, and revenues.
So, when it comes to customer loyalty, what do these value-enhanced interactions look like? Well, for starters, it means that customer service interactions should serve three purposes:
Resolve your user's problems satisfactorily.
Your users should leave each interaction confident that they’ve chosen the right product.
Each interaction should add to the user’s competency with the product, meaning they can achieve their objectives.
Considering this, it’s clear that customer service is not just about retention. It’s also about elevating customer experiences and driving loyalty and advocacy. This is underlined by Gartner's research into the subject of value enhancement.
Here are some tips on how to drive value enhancement with your customer self-service.
Use predictive analytics to anticipate user needs and address issues early.
Ensure customer onboarding is focused on user goal attainment.
Encourage users to get the most from the product via product tours, onboarding, knowledge base articles, and more. This approach will help them get value from your product and assure them that they’ve chosen the right solution.
Customer loyalty tech and trends
Tech is the biggest driver of change for brands that want to boost customer loyalty. To a large extent, the technology that is making an impact is focused on freeing up service representatives' time through automation-driven self-service channels.
However, the tools that will help your business thrive make things easier for both your users and your employees.
Let’s take a look at some of the broader trends within the space.
#1. Customer representative augmentation
Some of the most impactful customer service tools over the last few years are not built for customers. Instead, they indirectly benefit users because they help teams use their resources more efficiently.
Some of the best tools here include:
Customer onboarding self-service tools like Usetiful, which help users get the most from your solution through product tours, tooltips, in-app widgets, and more.
Internal customer service team portals that centralize communications into one place while driving collaboration through document sharing and facilitating task management and allocation.
Software that centralizes omnichannel communication, allowing brands to present a unified customer service experience.
#2. Personalization will continue to grow
Predictive analytics tools offer businesses a way to derive value from user data while offering better and more relevant customer experiences. This trend is being expressed in different ways, including:
Understanding user communication preferences, goals, and use cases and leveraging that to provide more targeted self-service options.
Using personalization to recommend articles, videos, product tours, etc, based on user data.
Finding patterns in user behavior to predict customer churn. Identifying these “in danger” accounts means that customer self-service teams can proactively intervene before users leave.
#3. AI chatbots
Generative AI and large language models (LLMs) have huge potential in customer self-service. With the right setup, these tools can provide a reasonable facsimile of a human customer service rep. However, that’s only the start of the possibilities.
LLMs are particularly adept at analyzing huge quantities of data, including social media comments. Social media monitoring tools can help teams stay on top of user sentiment and notify businesses when users are expressing discontent with your product.
#4. Customer survey and feedback tools
The death of the third-party cookie is tough news for marketing teams. User data privacy is a huge concern these days, but without third-party data, PPC ads have become less precise and more expensive. Collecting zero- or first-party data is essential, and feedback and survey tools are a great pathway towards capturing that data.
Customer onboarding self-service tools like Usetiful allow you to build forms and surveys. By collecting this data, you can gain insights into current and prospective customers. This information can help you improve your product, as well as your marketing and retention.
#5. Marketing automation
Marketing automation continues to impact customer self-service. These tools allow teams to push email or social media content, such as how-to and best-practice articles, that helps their users get the most from their solutions. For marketing teams, automation allows them to schedule consistent, personalized communication that can promote offers, build trust and authority, and even nurture leads.
#6. Customer onboarding self-service tools
Onboarding self-service tools are perhaps the most impactful way to drive greater customer loyalty. By ensuring that your users can get oriented with your product and complete their goals, you are starting out your relationship on the right foot.
Solutions like Usetiful allow you to create a wide array of customizable onboarding content, such as product tours, tooltips, hotspot beacons, banners, and checklists. On top of that, features like the Usetiful Assistant are a gateway to your knowledge base and help articles.
#7. Self-service demo tools
Automated demos are another growing trend in the self-service space. They allow teams to build product demos that are available 24-7, meaning your salespeople can spend more time on closing warm leads and less time scheduling meetings and qualifying leads.
What’s more, interactive product tours are an important lead magnet in the post-cookie era. While you can use interactive demos to automate your entire sales pipeline, they’re also a great choice for teams who want to increase deal velocity or achieve great efficiency.
Barriers to shifting toward customer self-service
Customer self-service has many compelling benefits. It’s cost-effective, convenient for users, and can run around the clock. However, taking advantage of these benefits requires adjusting your approach. Let’s examine some barriers to customer self-service and see how your brand can solve these issues.
SEO: If users search your brand and add the term “customer service”, the SERP (search engine results page) will often direct users to your contact number.
To reduce this self-service pathway:
Provide in-app help so users don’t need to use search.
Use SEO to target common customer questions.
Site navigation: When users need help, a large proportion still see a company website as their first port of call.
Nudging users toward self-service options requires:
Making it as easy as possible to navigate towards self-service options.
Overlaying a help widget on your website to allow customers to find self-service help.
Self-service quality: The final issue is the most obvious. Customers want self-service options, but they need to be functional, easy to use, and capable of delivering good outcomes.
Ensuring your customer self-service options are up to scratch involves:
Offer users different self-service channels.
Ensuring your self-service channels are easy to access and searchable will lead to content that will resolve most help issues.
Is there still room for live support?
Customer self-service is often seen as a blanket replacement for live support. While there is strong evidence to suggest that customers want self-service channels, it’s not to say that they welcome a wholesale elimination of one-to-one support.
The economics of live support makes it unattractive to some businesses. However, instead of closing down those channels, modern brands have shifted their stance.
Gartner’s Devin Poole suggests that “While there will always be live service, that type of service should be treated like a precious resource and reserved for opportunities that significantly move the dial on outcomes the customers and the company care most about.”
In other words, if your users encounter problems that can affect their overall customer loyalty, live support can be seen as an investment rather than a financial millstone around the neck.
Usetiful Assistant offers in-app help that provides 24-7 access to articles, product tours, FAQs, and knowledge base content. Additionally, the customer self-service widget can also direct unresolved queries to your help desk, allowing you to provide live service when and where it’s needed.
So yes, there is still a place for live support. However, for smaller teams, the move towards self-service means that, at a minimum, you can get more productivity from each new staff member.
Final thoughts
Customer self-service is one of the hottest trends in 2024 as businesses seek to use technology to improve efficiency. However, it’s also a golden opportunity to add more value to customer interactions through personalization, predictive analysis, and unified omnichannel support.
Responsiveness and helpful resolution of problems are the hallmarks of loyalty-generating customer care. However, if you want to take a more proactive approach, you need to get your onboarding right. Start for free with Usetiful today and see how you can create customer experiences that last.