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The Ultimate OnLine Self-Service Customer Experience
How to create a smooth, easy to follow Online Self Service Support Center for customers
Jackie Golden
December 18, 2023
Why is a Self Help Support Center so important to B2B customers in making their SaaS solution decisions?
Customers have to work with so many different technologies that are always changing or being upgraded. It makes it hard for employees to keep up with how to use these technologies to do their job better. What helps them get to a productive state with new technologies faster is an integrated, well organized self help center with great content that gets them the answers they are looking for quickly.
A highly productive digital workplace
“74% of the IT leaders we surveyed agreed that workers have to use too many tools right now. Improving the digital employee experience makes the digital workplace more streamlined and seamless because it connects all of its elements.
Employees will no longer need to manually log into and toggle between different enterprise systems. Instead, the information they need is delivered to them from every system, enabling them to work more quickly and efficiently across the entire digital workplace. “
Customers want to be independent and use online resources to find answers quickly. Many users prefer to find answers on their own without calling their CSM, Account Executive or Consultant.
One of the keys to a successful growth plan for any CX model is designing an amazing online Customer Self Help Center that enables customers to find the answers they need easily. The design of the online support center becomes the gateway to creating loyal, independent customers.
The Top 7 Goals to Designing an Effective Customer Self Help Center
Easy to Find Content
Quick Get to Content (i.e. within 3 clicks…)
Quality Content to Answer Questions or Provide Needed Information
Hot Buttons for Common Use Cases (i.e. Product updates, Open a ticket)
Get Started Guided Tour
Feedback Button on Every Page
Automate Customer Communication
1. Easy to Find Content
At Workfront, we created a custom online help center so we could customize the customer experience to deliver them the right content, easily. The goal was to understand what were some of the common requests customers had when onboarding and using the software in production. We wanted to design these elements to be front and center or easy to find on the landing page.
Good and easy to follow Navigation is one of the most common customer requests we received from customer feedback loops that helped guide us in the design of the website to make finding content easy. (See example below of the Zoom Support Center website.)
Self-service offers your customers a much faster resolution to their problem.
Great self-service allows your customers to find answers instantly instead of having to wait around for customer support to respond. This is a huge deal. 73% of customers say valuing their time is the most important thing a company can do to provide them with good online service, and you can honor that desire by delivering with self-service. (Forrester, 2016)
2. Quickly Get to Content
Keeping the number of clicks to a minimum for them to get to the topic they are interested in is key to improving utilization of the online content and customer satisfaction in finding their answer quickly.
What does this mean? It means customers generally don’t like to have to click more than 3 times to get to their content. The more clicks they have to go through the more often they bail on the process and give up on pursuing the online process to get their answer.
“I asked customers in every customer interview what was the most frustrating experience they had when using our online support center. The number one response was having to click through more than 3 to 4 clicks trying to find the content.
The number two answer was the search engine not being robust enough to bring up relevant content to lower the clicks.”
Keep your process clicks under 3 clicks to get to their final content element to improve the customer’s engagement with your online support center. Spend the time to create a robust search engine on your online support center and have a team of employees across the company help you test it with finding answers to common questions they get from customers and prospects.
The most popular elements to include in an Online Self Help Portal:
Single sign on enabled
Automated welcome letter and sign on instructions with credentials
Hot topics buttons to common information requests
Product updates
Product uptime and resolution plan for downtime
eLearning - Learning paths for learning the product, best practices and or sample designs for custom configurations
Open and track support tickets
Product Knowledge center - How to articles and videos
Get started automated pathway with a mini project plan and steps for customers to complete to launch the solution on their own.
Integrations and automations section to download and utilize plug ins
Account and contract information, automatic renewal unless this is available in the Admin console of the application
In Product Content versus Online Self Help center content
Customers tend to prefer applications that provide help content from within the product as much as possible. Additional elements can be added to the Admin or Security consoles within the product over time. The initial In-Product self service capabilities recommended are:
Track license and contract information. Usually in the Admin module.
Renewal information and an option to automatically renew with a link to the online support center with an online store capability to renew or add licenses.
Customer feedback surveys (NPS, CES, etc.)
Customer Analytics on software usage and business impacts
After just 10 minutes of searching online, 52% of customers will give up and call or email a company's support team instead. This means you need to make your self-service content readily available and easy for customers to find. Is your help center searchable and intuitively organized? Make sure it's easier to self-serve than it is to fire off an email or dial your phone number. (Software Advice, 2015)
However, you can provide all of these options as part of your online Customer Self Help Center until the product team can add some of these capabilities within the product. I recommended asking your Product Management team to at least provide a link from within the product to the online Customer Self Help Center using SSO so it is a smooth experience to start to get to the information they need quickly.
3. Quality Content to Answer Questions or Provide Needed Information
“When it comes to the quality of the content, we don’t mean just the text of your articles.
It’s really the quality of your overall website.
And that includes everything from the layout to the design.
Like, how you have things presented on your pages, how you integrate images, how you work with speed, all of those factors they kind of come into play for the user.”
The team members who own the content on the Customer Self Help portal can be made up of employees who are Subject Matter Experts(SMEs), Technical Writers and Editors. The SMEs can be folks from any department, partners or other outside expert consultants depending on the type of content that is needed to help customers understand how to use and get value from your products and services. The goal is to create quality content that will provide the right level and detail of information to ensure a customer can continue moving forward in using your software.
There is an art to making highly technical information easy to understand. This is where having good writers makes a difference in helping customers understand and consume the information easily and take the action needed to resolve their issue or question.
Definition. Content quality is how well your content achieves its goal(s). It refers to the depth of information and insight contained within a piece of content. Content quality goes beyond information to include formatting, readability, and grammatical correctness.
It’s the beauty of simplicity that customers like when using an online support center. Having Hot Buttons for the most common requests and use cases in a logical easy to read format provides customers with the ability to quickly get the answers they are looking for.
Most software companies have a top menu bar that is a quick link to their support center which is highly desired and can always be a go to place for customers if they don’t know what the link is to the support center.
I like the way Zoom has designed their online support center. See this example below of how well it is organized. It is simple and easy to read and you can find what you are looking for quickly with “Hot Buttons” to the most common use cases and additional links to other common topics and questions. It’s easy to navigate and scroll down and see all the options without having to go into multiple clicks to find the topics you are looking for. Great design.
Here is an example of Zoom’s Support Center website that is well organized with the Hot Buttons at the top of the most frequent customer requests
5. Get Started Guided tour
As you can see in the example above on the Zoom Support Center website, they have a Hot Button to their “Getting Started” option to guide customers through how to get started using Zoom quickly.
The mission is simple, help customers to setup their first conference call. This is great way to think about how to create a “Getting Started” option for your software. Keep the end game simple but impactful for the customer to be able to do one or two options on their own using your self guided tour or step by step program.
These Quick Start programs can be in the form of an elearning path, video or in screen guidance solution. It can also be with an interactive project plan with the links to relevant content in each task to help the customer complete their own onboarding plan and review the progress.
This is one of the elements that I find missing on many Customer Self Help Centers. The main reason is because the Support solution they are using only has an option for feedback on a specific article or video they select. When using some of the more common Customer Support Center solutions (i.e. Freshdesk, Zendesk, etc), these solutions have limitations on what and how you can obtain customer feedback. The Feedback is only available on specific articles published and do not have an easy to use custom configuration for each page of the website. You may want to consider adding a solution to your Support solution that provides and tracks this critical customer feedback.
I suggest adding a feedback button on every page to ask customers to share how to improve the support center content, organization or missing information as well as ask for feedback on a specific article or video content.
The value of a Feedback button on every page is that you get feedback on how to improve more than just the content of a specific “How to” article. Customers will share what else they were looking for when they came to the website and where they were confused; providing suggestions on what would make it better. Customers usually have the greatest solutions!
At Workfront, we had a mission of “Tickets to zero”. We knew this would never happen, but this was our our obsession to improve the customer experience. We spent the time to evaluate the tickets logged as well as the customer feedback to define quarterly goals that were specifically aligned to improve the customer experience and help our customers to be completely self-sufficient.
I would also interview customers each quarter during my customer tours to find out more about how they used the support center and what would make them use it more or never have to call or log a ticket into support. The data trends collected from these interviews showed the customer’s desire for us to improve the experience from within the product as a first priority and a quick link to the online self help center as the second priority to ensure they could get to their answers quickly.
7. Automate the Customer communication plan
The last element is automating the Customer Communications. When working with your Product Marketing team, it is recommended to develop a quarterly communication plan with the customer base that drives them to specific content on the online support center. This helps train users on where to go to find answers and review new content that could be useful for them in utilizing the software to broader use cases.
Using various Customer communication vehicles to bring customers through the online experience will teach them to self help and develop the customer habits to become more self sufficient in obtaining answers and solving their own problems quickly.
Customer self-service will be one of the top requirements customers will evaluate as part of their decision when looking to invest and continue to invest in a software solution. This can be a huge differentiator between you and your competitors.