Make self-service easy

- This video will share some tips that you can use to make cell service websites easier for your customer to use. If you work in a large company you might need to include people from other departments who are responsible for maintaining these systems. The first tip is to make self-service intuitive. Try to imagine things from a customer's perspective. Where would they go on your website to find self-service? Are self-service options easy to find? And are they easy to use? Ask.com redesigned their self-service page to make it easy and intuitive for customers to use.

When they did this they saw a 60% decrease in customer support tickets. Self-service should also be as complete as possible. One way to do this is to look at what sort of help people are searching for. Many websites will allow you to generate a report on what customers are searching for. You can then make a list of the top 10 questions then try to find ways to answer those. This also makes for a nice way to provide proactive service via social media. For example, you could write a blog post about the 10 most frequently asked questions and include a link to your knowledge base with a solution for each one.

You can then tweet the link to your followers and post it on your Facebook page. You might even schedule these posts on a regular basis so you can frequently remind customers of ways they can get self-service help for their most common issues. The last tip is to keep your self-service website updated. You want customers to get the latest and correct information about your products or service. For example, if you post product user manuals online but they're for old products customers won't be able to access the user manual for your latest product.

Keeping yourself self-service website up to date can be tricky especially if there's a lot of data. Make sure you work with the appropriate process owners to catalog the data in your self-service website and keep it up to date. Okay, now I have a challenge for you. Take a moment to audit your self-service options. You may also want to include social media sites such as Facebook or online review sites like Yelp where you can also provide company information. Make a list of common questions your customers have and then see how easily customers can find the answers themselves.

You may even want to enlist a few loyal customers to test this out for you. You can then use the results of this test to identify any improvements you'd like to make to your self-service website.