Does a Secret Formula for Self-Service Success Exist?
While customer service is not rocket science, customer self-service is definitely an art form that takes some time to truly master. It’s not as simple as waving your magic wand, and it definitely comes down to more than just implementing the right online community platform. From the need for having brand consistency across service channels, ongoing community engagement, and straightforward case deflection to simply providing easy access to content or the role of enterprise search – they’re all equally critical components to master the art and the science behind self-service success in a community!
Today’s digitally dependent, tech-savvy customers are more than ready for self-service experiences. In fact, they demand it over traditional assisted service methods – that is, if it’s done right.
The Search for Definitive Answers
So what’s the hidden secret to getting your customers to fall in love with your self-service community?
Hint: you’ll just have to register for our webinar to learn!
While our team of customer service experts could go on and on about the fundamentals of self-service or spend hours developing a rather exhaustive list of tips to designing an engaging community, we decided to partner up with Coveo, the leader in intelligent search, to boil it all up into one big can’t miss webinar this Thursday. To make things easy for you, we went on a search to analyze and uncover the secrets to success for some of our customers’ most beautifully designed, highly engaging, and most successful community use cases to share with you.
What do you think is the single most important design element in your community?
What aspect makes self-service all come together in your community?
Capturing the Hearts of Today’s Elusive Customer
While I don’t want to spill the beans or spoil everything our team of experts have in store for you, here is a sneak peek at some of the things we’ve gathered for this jam-packed, exciting webinar with Coveo:
- Put yourself in your customers’ shoes. When thinking about the community experience itself, it’s important to understand how your customers will navigate within the community and what they need access to (when designing it) in order to help customers self-serve. We’ll walk you through the basics of branding and community design.
- Make case deflection effortless. If the ultimate goal is to enable your customers to self-serve, then your community needs to focus on providing multiple methods for case deflection as an alternative to contacting support, which often includes recommended knowledge articles, trending topics, or even predictive search. We’ll highlight the top tactics to turn your community into a case deflection engine.
- Encourage engagement. There are many ways to encourage customer engagement, but leveraging some of the out-of-the-box features Salesforce’s Community Cloud platform has to offer can definitely get you on the right path to self-service success. Features such as Chatter Answers, Groups and Ideas (don’t worry we’ll cover the differences in our webinar) encourage and reward your customers to answer questions or provide feedback on your products and services.
- Make search prominent and pervasive. Eliminate high customer effort and help them find answers faster by making search one of the most prominent features within your community. We’ll focus on ways and additional tools you can use to further maximize the benefits of search.
- Understand customer behavior. No, this doesn’t refer to monitoring and deleting any inappropriate comments or four letter words (while this is definitely a best practice). However, it does mean you should look at the data behind what your customers are searching for, opening/clicking on, and creating cases on. This will help you optimize the self-service experience, identify any gaps in content, and leave your customers satisfied.
To learn more about designing an engaging a vibrant self-service community, attend our webinar, Make Customers Fall in Love with Your Salesforce Self-Service Community.
