You’ve probably seen first-hand how helping your customers help themselves isn’t just a great way to reduce support costs, it’s a necessary way to serve customers the way they want to get support. Do you think your current knowledge base or help articles are designed to achieve that goal on your customers' terms? Are your current tools even optimized for it? That’s exactly what Stonly was designed to do: create self-service support content that is simply better. This article will show you how to quickly get started and begin seeing self-serve success right away with Stonly.


To begin: choose 2 or 3 customer issues to solve with self-serve guides

After you create your Stonly account, give some thought to which customer issues or help topics would have the highest impact if they were more simple, more personal and presented in interactive steps. Usually, 2-3 is enough for you to start seeing the value in improved service and impact on your KPI. It is also the right amount for your content creators to experience how rewarding it is to create more powerful help content in Stonly.


How to choose the right topics for better self-serve content

Two things make a great first Stonly guide:

  1. The topic is visited by a lot of your users.

    Solving a meaningful problem for your users is key. Even if it is assisting with an issue that may eventually need a person’s assistance, Stonly will help your customer take the right trouble-shooting steps and help you help them faster. It is very likely you can just guess these and be on target, but if you have the data, take a look at the volume of questions to your support team, visits to your support articles or searches in your knowledge base or community.
  2. It is a problem that is best solved in steps or can be personalized based on the customer situation.

    You can use Stonly for a one-paragraph answer or a one-size-fits-all scenario, but it won’t have the same impact. We see retail, SaaS and mobile app customers have success solving these first few problems: login issues, refund issues and instructions to update to a new system or software version.

Related post: 10 Customer Intimacy Strategies to Drive Higher Revenue


How to create effective step-by-step content

It is easiest to choose an article that you already have or a FAQ answer that you have already developed and turn that into a powerful step-by-step guide. You can certainly create Stonly guides from scratch, but moving one of your current pieces over and making some tweaks will make a big impact right away.


How to publish your Stonly guide and take it live

Chances are, your first Stonly will be embedded into one of your other pieces of content or on a current web page. We’ve made it simple to embed and publish your guides anywhere.


Measuring the success of your self-serve content

It is important to measure the ROI of self-serve content; the cost reduction and retention improvements. But it is also important to measure customer happiness and the results of branding your company as a customer-first organization. Common outcomes that you can measure and achieve with Stonly are: tickets coming from the Stonly topic reduce by 25%, first-contact resolution when people contact support after experiencing a Stonly guide improve by about 15%, your customer satisfaction and article satisfaction will improve and your help content creators may buy you flowers!

Need help? Let us know!

If you need help getting started, schedule time with someone on our team, today. We’d be happy to help!

Related Post: How to Build a Help Center? The Complete Step-by-Step Guide