Reduce Customer Effort
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Content needs to be readily available when and where your customers need it the most. The interaction points that we tend to lead with are the obvious locations for help content: before your customer submits a support ticket, in the form of a chatbot or made available for the support agent to access while they are on call. Yes, the content at this point is available, but what was the experience like for your customer to get to the content?
Knowledge management (KM) strategy should start from the perspective of your customer journey.
Leverage knowledge management to deliver consistent, high-value customer experience. Most customers prefer to self-serve rather than contact you, so organizations need to start where customers start.
Self-Service Strategy
Customers attempt to self-serve in a variety of channels, including Google, in-product, chatbot interfaces, virtual assistants, and support sites. Most will start with the easiest channel available and only move to the next layer of self-service if they absolutely have to.
The easier it is to use these channels, the more likely customers are to handle issues on their own. As customers move through self-service channels, their effort level increases along with the chance that they will abandon the channel—or their journey— altogether.
Reasons for abandonment per channel
- External search - Lack of relevant, branded search results, or too much content from competitors and other SERP hijackers.
- Branded website - Poor navigational experience, content gaps, and lack of personalization.
- Chatbot - Slow, inaccurate responses, irrelevant content, and dead ends.
- Live chat - Having to repeat oneself, lack of agent knowledge, or improper routing.
Shift Left
When effort increases, the positive, seamless experience decreases. Mitigate high effort and a poor customer experience by making your content available at all points of the customer journey.
Customers often start at Google, so the best experience for them includes optimizing how search engines find and deliver your content. But the actual point of need often starts even before Google.
Extend self-service opportunities
The majority of users prefer to self-serve. Identify other entry points of the customer journey and make content accessible there.
Ticket deflection
Surface possible solutions to problems during the ticket submission process. Prior to a customer reaching out to your support team, surface relevant content that might address issues customers are having. Collect key data around the content that is deflecting the ticket to inform product, training, and support teams so they can provide a better experience specific to their team’s charter.
Action Item: Use Expert Touchpoints to implement ticket deflection.
Community forums
Community forums serve as virtual hubs of interaction around a topic where users can share knowledge, and communicate with others about a relevant subject, product, or service. Unfortunately, most customers do not find the information that they really need on a community forum without consistent monitoring of the discussion output.
Action Item: To ensure that useful content is available, integrate authoritative help content within your community forum to allow users to validate the accuracy and validity of information.
eCommerce
Proactively address common reasons why customers abandon their shopping cart without a purchase. Customers want to know essential information during a purchase and feel confident they will have a low-effort support experience after their purchase.
Action Item: Present help content alongside the shopping cart to provide assurance to post-sale support and to offer relevant product information.
Marketing
Customers may default to a marketing site not knowing that that the type of content they need may not be the primary focus. Or, customers researching your product may need technical validation to confirm information they encounter on your marketing site.
Action Item: Within your marketing content, provide additional details on functionality to help customers become successful product adopters.
Connect self-service to CRM for agent enablement
Empower your service and support teams with access to the most current and relevant content to quickly assist the customer and close the ticket. If you integrate help content into your ticketing system, your support agents will benefit from efficient access to solutions.
Empower agents with insights to reduce customer effort. The Expert Customer Insights Touchpoint allows your agents to see customer search and viewing behavior from before they submitted a ticket.
Action Item: Configure Expert Integrations for your CRM or other cloud solutions.
Start where your customers start
Google and other self-service opportunities play a pivotal role in delivering low-effort customer experiences. Understand the important role that support content plays to avoid frustrating journeys for customers who need help.