Customers want quick and straightforward solutions to their problems from companies they do business with. To support this goal, many companies use a combination of self-service options and live customer support.
But finding the perfect balance between these two approaches can be tough. Relying too much on self-service may make customers feel abandoned and like you don’t care about assigning an agent to help with their issue.
On the other hand, live support may be overdoing it. It may not be necessary to assign a human agent to help someone when all they have is a basic request or question. We’ll go through the benefits of both and decide when you need to use self-service or human support.
What is self-service?
Self-service lets customers find answers online, anytime. It’s usually a knowledge base, portal, chatbot, or some other form of non-human interaction. Self-service means that customers use your resources to solve their problems themselves instead of interacting with a human, not to mention using AI in self-service.
Benefits of self-service include:
- Convenience: Customers get answers fast, 24/7.
- Speed: Simple issues are resolved quickly.
- Savings: Technology reduces support costs.
Self-service is massively cost-effective, and customers (over 63%) prefer using a form of self-service to talking to a customer service rep. Customers don’t want to have to wait around when they know a company has provided self-service content for them to take advantage of.
Limitations of Self-Service
Although customers love self-service, there are some disadvantages to using it.
Self-service has these limits:
- Complex issues need human help: you’ll still need to escalate some issues when you find that a knowledge base or chatbot is too limited for the problem.
- Customers may need emotional support: angry or upset customers may still not feel their problem is completely resolved without a human being giving them comfort or an apology.
- The personal touch is missing: customers using self-service are missing out on the personal touch because they are deflected by the knowledge base.
Self-service is limited because customers want to speak to your agents or they just feel like self-service is not enough.
What is live customer support?
Live support involves human-to-human support, with a customer support agent on one end and a customer on the other end. It might be through email, over the phone, or in person, but it’s different from self-service because it actually involves the interaction between human beings.
Live support provides:
- Human interaction: personalized help and empathy involved.
- Expertise: Complex issues resolved by proficient agents.
- Loyalty: Customers appreciate reliable support.
One-to-one support is a great way to build customer relationships and get to know your customers when they need you most. Customer support agents are a specialized job function that you need to help your customers when they are in trouble.
Challenges of Live Support
Although live support is important, and helps with building customer relationships, live support also has its own challenges:
- Cost: Human support is more expensive than self-service.
- Time spent waiting: Customers get annoyed with the queues.
- Limited hours: Support isn’t always available when agents are sleeping.
Spending too much time on live support is not cost-effective nor is it better than using self-service to handle the majority of queries.
Finding the Right Balance
Businesses should combine self-service with live support to make customers happy, just like combining automation and human support. Organize your tickets into tiers so that the lower tiers can be deflected by your self-service support such as a smart knowledge base.
1. Use self-service for simple issues. If customers want to understand your delivery policy or find an installation guide, they can consult the knowledge base.
2. Route complex issues to live support. Billing issues can go to live support for example, or troubleshooting the software platform.
3. Offer support across channels (phone, email, chat). Customers appreciate being able to get support across channels depending on what suits their needs.
4. Monitor customer behavior. Make sure customers actually know when self-service or live support is available and check which customers prefer.
5. Offer live support when customers request it. Don’t make it difficult for customers to access live support even though self-service is available.
6. Regularly update self-service channels. Make sure you add the latest content to your knowledge base to make sure channels are up-to-date.
Conclusion
When businesses find the perfect balance between self-service and live support, they will be able to improve the customer experience. You’ll be able to help customers at their own pace more easily and spend less time and money on support. Support becomes more seamless and you can invest in support materials such as a knowledge base to help customers.
Training your agents to help customers with more complex needs is more worth it and combining this expertise with self-service is the goal.
References
[1] “32 Customer experience statistics you need to know for 2024”
https://www.superoffice.com/blog/customer-experience-statistics
By Catherine Heath (Freelance B2B SaaS and Customer Support 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.
Loved it !
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