Self-Service Portals to increase customer loyalty and CSAT without scaling costs

Hello! Welcome to my first article on the Knowledge Center Blog! In this post, I will tell you all about self-service portals and how important they are for your business! I hope you enjoy reading these words as much as I have enjoyed writing them!

Strengthen relations through autonomy enhancement: The plot-twist of increasing customer independence resulting in customers loyalty

It happens to me…

We all have been there: “How do I do this?”, “What is that for?”, “Why is it not working?”… Well, at least I have (and more often than I would like to).

And, these feelings are usually followed by a glimpse of pain when the need for external assistance is foreseen – the unease when in need of dedicated know-how. Then, the pain just scales depending on the available channels to reach – and hopefully, get – support. It goes through the roof of standing “on hold” even if “your call is on the line and your contact is “very important”, and they will soon deliver their best attention to serve your needs” in between the smoothing harmony of Four Seasons piece on the piano.

There is, however, an effective antidote to take added with the plot-twist potential of turning what could be a nightmare on top of a constrain to a pleasant challenge of DYI problem solving: Self Services Portals.

Despite not being the greatest fan of throwing numbers in (alone), I have found a couple of indicators whose context is quite interesting and not less expressive, and proves what it is said above:

• 97% of global consumers say that customer service is very important or somewhat important in their choice of and loyalty to a brand.
• 62% of global consumers have stopped doing business with a brand or organization due to a poor customer service experience.
• 73% of consumers want the ability to solve product/service issues on their own; more than half of these preferring to use a self-service system than speak with a representative.
• 90% of consumers now expect the provider to offer a self-service customer support portal with a clear preference for mobile responsive user experience availability brands.
• State of Connected Customer indicates that self-service availability impacts customers and business buyer’s loyalty up to 59% and 71%, respectively.

Even further, given the latest world context – stats we are all acquainted with – e-commerce and online communications became a major part of everyone’s daily routines, with that self-service grew into a key component of customer support.

Let’s make it clear: Communities and Portals are not the same

Difference between Communities and Portals

Until a while ago, there were Salesforce Customer Portals and Salesforce Partner Portals. Those were pre-configured options to provide a new channel for communication between a business and a customer. And with that, increase companies’ responsiveness and proximity laying on the transparency of “exposing” Salesforce access to the customers and enhancing customer problem-solving skillsets experience.

Despite the Portals’ achievements, there was still the need for a more collaborative and social working environment. Overcoming these needs, Portals were revamped. (*)

(*) Note that Portals are still available and usable in Salesforce organizations created until 2013. Companies that started using Salesforce after that, use only Communities.

Self-Service for everyone (and getting better by release)

Communities are Portal’s next-generation, combining the functionalities of the former Salesforce Customer and Partner Portals with the addition of new features – not “only” the portal, but a help forum, a support site, HR central, intranet, …

From now on, anytime ‘Portal’ comes up, keep in mind it is referring to Community’s Portals.

And, “self-service portals” is a term referring to a webpage that serves as a highway with resources to help users solve service needs and find related information on their own for scattered (sub)sets of information. A quick highlight here: Users refer to a company’s customers – Customer Self Service – as well as a company’s employees – Employee Self Service.

Overall, there are two primary components to any self-service system: content and delivery. In fact, any self-service portal should offer content to help users address common needs and functionality for users to reach it efficiently and without outside help. Thus, frequently asked questions (FAQ), knowledge articles, videos, up-to-date documentation, company policies, training materials, are common examples that hopefully, your company provides or that most likely engages you to a certain brand instead of others.

From here there is a universe to explore: the specificities rising from the company operating sector to the differences in assisting customers’ and employees’ needs.

From now on, we will be exploring the Customer Self Service. So, feel free to reach us if you would like more content on Employee Self Service – or anything else really! 😊

Customer Self Service

A distinctive capability of Customer Self-Service is to allow and enforce customer-to-customer support: customers between themselves can answer one another’s questions, discuss tips, tricks, and best practices related to the provider offers! This peer-to-peer support promotes a great boon to the brand.

Integration nightmares are out!

Service portals can be added to or built separately from existing company websites.

A stand-alone portal should maintain the look and feel of the main company site and live within the same domain structure (for example, support.mycompany.com, mycompany.com/support, and so on). Besides, stand-alone portals are easily connected to your company’s other digital properties with links, though context-sensitive help may provide customers a richer and more effective experience.

Cost Wise: do the math yourself

First and foremost, there are costs involved – it is a marvelous enhancement to the organization indeed, but it is not free.

However, the breakeven will most certainly be sooner than you would expect. And from there … not even the sky can be the limit (take the effort on doing a cloud gag here).

There are multiple adds to the sum of savings. Keeping neutral, just a small list below.

On the customer/support agents:

• Giving the customer what they want and/or need from virtually any device at any time – Cloud-based solution;
• Consumers become more knowledgeable about your products and – by helping one another – new online content is generated for other customers and prospects to benefit from (without anything required dedicated service agents);
• Customers are empowered to help themselves (and others!) in real-time, translating in wait times reduction;
• Self-service tools let you provide 24/7 support at a fraction of the cost of staffing a call center around the clock;
• Service agents’ productivity goes up;
• The organization’s capacity to address and deliver personalized support increases.

On the techie’s skills set:

• Pre-packaged format – reduced costs and ease of deployment;
• Leverage of Salesforce CRM data;
• Easy integration with third-party systems

With all of that said…

In a growing tendency of independent customer-centric user experience, enabling a diligent and painless problem-solving experience becomes a customer choice and maintenance differential.

Providing these tools is proving to be a win-win strategy: a cost-effective way to deliver faster customer support, cheaper, as well as a self-sustained chain for customer loyalty consolidation and recurrence.

I hope this article has been of your interest! Subscribe to Stellaxius Knowledge Center and continue to learn about technology and Salesforce! 🙂