By Catherine Heath (Freelance Technical Writer and Marketing Advocate)
Catherine is a freelance writer based in Manchester. Blogs. Copy. Documentation. She believes in ditching the jargon – just give her plain writing.
In collaboration with Syed Abdul Qadir Gilani (a Python developer and data scientist),
Find Syed on LinkedIn.
User self-service is a rising area of customer support, with 88% of customers expecting customer self-service while shopping, according to Tidio. While customers will always need some measure of assistant from the business, there’s a lot they can do to help themselves.
Giving users the information they need to solve their problems helps both sides. They get answers fast, and we get fewer support requests.
Knowledge bases, FAQs, and chatbots are all forms of self-service support.
Users are happier when you provide them with forms of self-service instead of expecting them to contact the company.
User Benefit:
1. Fast answers – instead of waiting around on live chat or worse, on hold, customers can access fast answers in a knowledge base.
2. Choosing the best – users can find the best answer in your knowledge base if you take the time to organise it for them.
3. More time for growth – when customers help themselves your business can focus on mission-critical activities that further business growth.
Benefits for Businesses:
1. Less work – when your business has implemented a self-service solution, that’s less work overall for the support team working on tickets.
2. More users – You can support a much bigger user-base when you have self-service content to support users.
3. More savings – it costs much less to use self-service than one-to-one support when you are supporting a large number of customers.
4. Business grows – self-service content helps your business grow as you can quickly expand the topics you cover.
Best Practices:
1. Simple words – keep your self-service content simple and use words that the average person would understand, avoiding too many technical terms.
2. Well-organised – use information architecture to keep your content organised so users can find it.
3. Stay updated – regularly revisit your knowledge base content to keep it updated for users. 91% of users would use a knowledge base if it was available.
4. Quick search – implement quick search so users can type terms that they’re looking for in your knowledge base.
5. User input – take into account user feedback when constructing and revising your knowledge base.
Result:
A user finds quick answers, makes informed choices, and points towards growing. A business has a reduced workload, more satisfied customers, and cost savings. The benefits of self-service are numerous, compared to the cost required to implement the systems in the first place.
Advantageous self-service is not guaranteed. That’s why self-service documentation success depends on simple language, well-organised content, staying updated, enabling quick searches, and encouraging user feedback.
By implementing self-service documentation, companies can create self-service documentation that works. Customers will be happy, and companies will save time and money. It’s a success!
