3 Tips for Providing Great Self-Service

A great way to keep your customers happy (and cut down on tickets) is to make it easy for customers to find their own answers. In fact, 91% of customers would skip contacting support and find their own answers instead, so long as it’s a pleasant self-service experience.

A well-designed Help Center gives your customers exactly that: on-demand, specialized self-service, whenever and wherever they need it. An effective Help Center is also a huge asset for your operations (and your budget)—it’s one of the best ways to continue to provide personalized service as your business evolves and grows, without overtaxing your limited resources.

Here are three tips for giving your customers a great self-service experience, even if you’re scaling quickly or are already a big organization.

1. Provide the right information, in the right way. Mine the wealth of information in your customer service platform to help you develop content for your Help Center. Analyze your tickets, macros, and tags to discover frequently asked questions and common pain points. Make sure the answers to those questions are front and center.

Your Help Center should be more than just a list of FAQs. While written content is certainly very valuable, photos or videos often help bring the content to life. We like how SigFig uses lots of helpful screenshots, and Box’s Help Center has lots of easy-to-follow video tutorials.

2. Be where your customers are. Why should customers have to interrupt what they’re doing on your site and go somewhere else get help? With embeddables, you can insert your Help Center directly on your website or in your mobile app so customers can easily access it right where they need it. For example, Rover lets customers search their Help Center right from their home page—click the little green “Help” button in the bottom right corner.

3. Spread the word. Your customers can only self-serve if they know about your Help Center. Encourage your agents to send customers links to helpful articles. Provide links on your company website, social media channels, or even in your product. ModCloth even ran an “Information Exploration Contest” to encourage customers to explore their Customer Info Center.

How has your contact center improved upon the self-service customer experience? Share your advice in the comments below.

This post originally appeared on the Zendesk blog.