It’s not pro­duc­tive for small busi­ness­es to be stuck on the phone all day, field­ing sim­ple ques­tions that could eas­i­ly be in a data­base. You may not even be aware that your cus­tomers don’t want to use the tele­phone for sup­port – in a recent sur­vey, 72% of cus­tomers said that they pre­ferred to use self-ser­vice helpdesk, rather than the tele­phone. Your cus­tomers want to help them­selves – they want to find the answers quick­ly and easily.

This may not be news to you. You may already have built a Help Cen­tre, with an all-in-one knowl­edge base and cus­tomer por­tal. Now you need to increase aware­ness and get cus­tomers to use it. Any­one in your busi­ness, who is engag­ing with cus­tomers, can refer them to your knowl­edge base, whether it’s on the phone, via a social net­work such as Twit­ter, or at the bot­tom of your emails with a link. Link to it every­where your cus­tomers might be.

Self-Service Helpdesk Benefits

Your cus­tomers or clients are vis­it­ing your self-ser­vice helpdesk, but are they stay­ing long and are they return­ing? If not, it’s time to look into why this is hap­pen­ing. We have put togeth­er a few tips for a suc­cess­ful self-ser­vice helpdesk.

User Experience

Cus­tomers need to be able to eas­i­ly nav­i­gate your self-ser­vice helpdesk por­tal. Nav­i­ga­tion needs to be effec­tive, effort­less and seamless.

Search

The search fea­ture is very impor­tant there­fore the search func­tion should be promi­nent and notice­able. Your cus­tomers are already com­fort­able per­form­ing online search­es, so main­tain that famil­iar­i­ty on your self-ser­vice por­tal. Fine-tune your knowl­edge base by mon­i­tor­ing the most com­mon words used and the search­es per­formed. Con­tin­u­al­ly test your self-ser­vice sys­tem before you roll it out. Keep updat­ing your list of fre­quent­ly asked ques­tions by using the top search enquires.

Branding

Brand­ing is also extreme­ly impor­tant for your self-help desk, as cus­tomers and clients need to feel your brand con­fi­dence whilst using your sys­tem. Many self-help por­tals, such as Zen­desk and Freshdesk, offer dif­fer­ent lev­els of cus­tomi­sa­tion and brand­ing. You’ll usu­al­ly have to pay for the license lev­el that allows this kind of cus­tomi­sa­tion, but the ben­e­fits over free self-help por­tals are immense.

Visual Aids

Your por­tal needs to be visu­al­ly appeal­ing. As well as your own logos, colours and fonts, you need to pro­vide con­tent-rich sup­port media, includ­ing visu­al aids such as videos, images, webi­na­rs, how-to guides with clear instruc­tions, not just text, and def­i­nite­ly no jar­gon. Too much text on its own can be off-putting for cus­tomers, espe­cial­ly those with less time or a lim­it­ed atten­tion span. Cus­tomers need to quick­ly find their required solution.

Feedback

Cre­ate an area at the bot­tom of each page for cus­tomers to leave com­ments and feed­back, such as “Did you find what you were look­ing for?”. This will be a valu­able insight to help you con­tin­u­al­ly update and improve your self-ser­vice portal.