Many new support cases can be avoided if customers are able to access the knowledge and expertise of Support without needing to interact with live agents. It’s all about helping your customers help themselves — and everyone benefits.
Support teams represent a repository of product expertise and must work to make their knowledge available to customers. Many new support cases can be avoided if customers are able to access the knowledge and expertise of Support. Transferring knowledge to customers to help them become more self-sufficient should be high on the list of strategic imperatives for all Support organizations.
Leverage these 9 self-help best practices to help customers successfully help themselves:
- Provide direct customer access to up-to-date solutions to common customer issues.
- Provide enhanced search and discovery capabilities to help customers find answers.
- Implement formal knowledge management processes to create new and update existing knowledgebase content.
- Supplement the support knowledge base with customer access to documentation, release notes, getting started guides, help files available.
- Deliver more than just answers to frequently asked questions and develop a repository of best practice guides, examples, same code, templates, etc.
- Take advantage of delivery formats including text, video, and interactive guides.
- Provide access to self-guided tools and utilities to assist customers with self-diagnostics and issue repair.
- Create and nurture and active user community to facilitate peer-to-per issues resolution and sharing of best practices.
- Provide access to self-paced training, recorded webinars and other skills development resources.
