According to Gartner, 88% of customer journeys start with self-service and touch multiple channels to find resolution.
Nowadays, customers believe in solving their issues independently through self-service support portals. Despite knowing this, many organizations struggle to deliver accurate and relevant results through their enterprise search. Consequently, customers feel frustrated, and in most cases, they abandon the business and turn to competitors.
32% of customers will leave a brand if they provide a bad customer service experience.
Harsh but true!
So here’s our question: Is your business’s digital self-service support strategy up to the mark? Because this shift demands robust digital self-service strategies to drive results.
5 Critical Questions to Improve Your Self-Service Customer Support
1. Is Your Search Solution Truly Customer-centric?
Having an enterprise search solution is the first step toward delighting your customers with self-service support. But the real question arises here: “Is your search solution anticipating and addressing customers’ needs?” Does it have the capability to decipher user interaction, history, and behavior and expect what they need help with?
A customer-centric enterprise search solution leverages the power of AI technologies, understands query context and intent, and provides relevant and accurate information quickly.
For instance, if a customer searches for a password reset or AirPods are not working, the search will only show relevant results. If searches come up empty or don’t meet customer needs, this should be alarming. You can use enterprise search analytics to identify gaps in both content and self-service opportunities.
Paying attention to it helps you create solutions for hidden support issues and efficiently meet customer needs.
2. Are Your Content Assets Easy to Find and Understand?
Ever wondered about what makes self-service customer support exceptional? The answer lies in well-organized and easily accessible content. In companies, information is scattered across different teams or departments in the form of product manuals or support articles, which often leads to data silos.
Therefore, customers hit a snag while hopping multiple pages to find relevant answers. But no worries! A unified search experience can break down these silos.
By leveraging an AI-powered search solution, you can securely index all your data through out-of-the-box connectors or flexible API connectivity and help customers access information across channels.
Quick Read: Content Findability: The Cornerstone Of Customer Self-Service
3. Are you Prioritizing Search in UX design for Seamless Navigation?
Have you ever thought, what if the search bar is not visible on the self-service support portal?
Customers will not leverage the search solution, and you won’t have analytics to fill content gaps. Additionally, they will struggle to find the information, leading to frustration.
Therefore, prioritizing the search box in the UX design of your self-service support portal is crucial, as it assists customers in getting help and getting on with their resolution journey.
4. Are Your Recommendations Personalized and Helpful?
The personalized recommendations make customers feel like the brand understands and values them.
When a customer looks for a resolution, the search solution gathers a lot of data about them, such as past purchase history, past interactions, and even their location. This data helps to give your customers proactive and personalized recommendations on what they expect next, which not just saves time but frustration, too.
Imagine submitting a support ticket against your insurance plan to simply have a recommendation pop up or suggest as the customer types “insurance plan,” saving them from clicking aimlessly from page to page in search of assistance. This way, customers like to solve their problems, resulting in fewer support tickets for your agents.
So always remember that knowing your customer well is a crucial aspect of delivering exceptional self-service.
5. Are you Leveraging Agentic AI?
As we all know, it is crucial to have a customer-centric search solution for self-service support success. However, anticipating customer needs is often nuanced and complex, which traditional ML algorithms struggle to capture. This is where an agentic approach comes in.
Agents are equipped with multiple tools, each responsible for gathering specific insights. Powered by Large Language Models (LLMs), these agents can synthesize data from various tools, bringing together real-time insights. With this capability, agents can autonomously interpret customer intent and execute actions that drive personalized experiences at scale.
Agentic AI is revolutionizing the way support tickets have been resolved nowadays. As per Salesforce research, 95% of decision-makers at organizations report cost and time savings that leverage AI. Awesome, right?
Agentic AI is elevating the self-service experience by combining various information from different tools and taking action to resolve issues autonomously. Additionally, it provides smarter recommendations and even brings chatbots to life, engaging in a more natural and meaningful way with users.
Get a Competitive Edge with an AI-powered Enterprise Search Solution
Customers expect seamless self-service experiences. Falling short to deliver on these expectations can lead to frustrated customers and lost business. To stay competitive, assessing and refining your self-service customer support strategies is essential—because if you’re missing key components, your competitors might be one step ahead.
But don’t worry! Our AI-powered enterprise search solution is here to give you the edge.
With our cutting-edge technology, you can quickly implement robust digital self-service strategies that empower your customers to find the answers they need—anytime, anywhere.