Quality self-service support is expected by customers

According to a study conducted by Microsoft – 90%+ of consumers expect brands and organisations to provide online customer self-service and more than half of the consumers begin their interactions with a brand online. This trend was also also highlighted by the Harvard Business Review in 2017 as “across industries, fully 81% of all consumers attempt to take care of matters themselves before reaching out to a live representative”. The current stake for any brand is to stand out from the competition through high-quality services for their clients and that includes a help-center.

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Self-service support is also helping reducing support costs

The Harvard Business Review calculated the cost of any contact with a help-center, a “do-it-yourself transaction” costs a few pennies, whereas interactions involving humans cost around 7$ for B2C companies and 13$ for B2B companies. These relatively high costs are to be linked to customers' rising expectations and the need for better-trained agents. This is not the most efficient way of spending however, as self-serve support may yield better ROI as well as better customer satisfaction. For that reason Gartner forecasts the number of phone-based customer-service agents worldwide to decline by 10% before 2021, even though the amount of support queries from customer will keep on growing.

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The future of self-service support

It is no secret that searching through FAQs can be a frustrating experience with articles being either too complex or lacking the right level of information. For that reason, companies need a new way to provide excellent user experience while still being affordable and easy to use. That’s one of the reason why chatbots have grown in the past few years. But unfortunately Chatbots are often not good enough to do the Job. Stonly was built as another way to enhance help-centers. Stonly provides interactive step-by-step guides that can provide users with a lot of information without being overwhelming as only relevant information is displayed to users. These guides can be integrated on any webpage or direcltly in help-centers (see example on Calendly).

Sounds interesting? Learn more about Stonly here.