In an age where a majority of
businesses have a digital presence on the internet, it is important to design
one’s digital storefronts in a manner that makes it easy for customers to
browse through them. A self-service
portal plays the role of a front door for one’s digital store that allows
customers to interact with the company in a variety of ways.
Self-service portals are basically websites that provide customers
with access to various aspects of a company, they are mostly used by companies
to provide their customers with access to “self-help” customer support and
interact with certain parts of the business itself, such as resetting passwords
for their accounts, tracking orders and more. Self-service
portals are quite common in customer support since it has the ability to
provide customers with access to help whenever and wherever they want.
The beauty of a well-designed self-service portal is that it has customers
carrying out various tasks that normally, a support agent would be responsible
for, all by themselves, this makes providing support less costly for businesses
and significantly reduces the time needed to support every customer. A
well-designed self-service portal will
have a customer log their own ticket, and then give them a great degree of
control over choosing the kind of help that they need.
A self-service portal can really make a business’ support functions
more efficient, however, in order for a self-service
page to be useful, it needs to be designed exceptionally well. Surveys show
that 73% consumers have the ability to solve problems on their own, but only if
they are provided with the proper tools and access to the right kind of
information. If you are thinking of creating a self-service
portal for your customer base, then there are several things that you must keep
in mind during the designing process in order to make your self-service as effective as possible.
The first thing that one needs
to plan out is the service request catalogue of the portal; this catalogue
basically provides a customer with a list of all the products/services that you
have to offer or various categories of problems that they need help with. The
catalogue will act as a guiding map of your self-service
portal that will direct customers to various knowledge articles on your portal;
these articles provide customers with detailed how-to guides, tutorials and
useful information that they may need to solve their problem. Knowledge
articles should be to the point, provide quality information that is easy for
the customer to understand, a poorly written knowledge article will only lead
to further confusion and hinder the self-help process for your customer.
A core aspect of implementing
a self-service portal is to make your
customer’s interaction with you as pleasant as possible, meaning that it is
important to develop a portal that has an intuitive UI and makes the self-help
process as simple as possible for everyone. A well-designed self-service portal should also have a
monitoring feature that basically gauges each customer’s user experience.
Gathering data on user experience can be as simple as asking the customer to
rate certain aspects of the portal out of 5, this information can be critical
in helping you figure out what can be improved in your portal in order to
further enhance the user experience.
The list of advantages that a
well-designed self-service portal has to
offer is quite long, it provides customers with a greater level of information
about your products and services, empowers them to deal with their problems
without having to rely on the company too much and also helps in enhancing the company’s reputation in the customer’s eyes.
Even the most thoroughly
designed portals have their drawbacks though, the biggest one being that they
sacrifice the feeling of support being “personal” in exchange for enhanced
efficiency. This lack of a personal touch can make the customers feel that the
company does not care for them that much, resulting in customers feeling devalued.
All in all, the effectiveness
of a self-service portal comes down to
its design; a portal that is well-made will always provide customers with
reliable support and a poorly designed one can result in dissatisfied
customers, frustration and a bad reputation.
You can visit this website to find
out more about how you can efficiently set up a self-service portal for your
customers.
