How Customer Self-Service Portals Can Benefit Small Businesses

The success of your business largely depends on how satisfied your customers are. Once you can make your customers happy, then you can far more easily drive them into making more purchases from your business, turning one-time clients into repeat and loyal customers.

But constantly improving customer experience in your business isn’t as easy as it sounds. Any small problem customers experience with your staff, service, website or anything else can lead to frustrations and negative feelings that people often feel more inclined to share than positive experiences, which can be highly damaging to your reputation and brand.

Therefore, more focus has to be directed to improving customer satisfaction. Technology can really help with this and can be hugely beneficial in creating a seamless and effective way for customers to experience your services. An example of this is the software developed by Jobber specifically for service businesses such as cleaning companies, that not only manages daily operations such as appointment scheduling, job tracking, route optimization, and capturing all customer information – it can also offer a self-service customer portal.

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A self-service portal is an area online where your customers can find answers to some common questions and solutions to issues. It provides 24/7 support and can benefit your business in the following ways:

1. By Personalizing The Customer Experience

Personalizing your customer experience is one excellent way to improve your customer experience and keep people happy. This is because customers prefer services that resonate with them personally rather than generically. It gives them a better experience and increases their brand loyalty.

This can’t be done if you can only offer these types of services over the phone as its usually simply not feasible for someone to be available 24/7, seven days a week to answer every query. A customer self-service portal can address each customer by their name, as they access it by logging into their account.

Portals can record all previous engagements and display relevant topics as requested by the user. Some also have the functionality to use customer searches to identify cues that can be used to address common issues.

2. By Reducing Support Costs For Running Contact Centers

A small business should look at all the possible ways of managing business costs while achieving the same level of productivity. Customer portals give people the option of finding the solution independently rather than having to wait for a customer care agent. This means fewer tickets for customer support agents to deal with and fewer agents needed if the portal can provide users with what they are looking for.

By cutting down support tickets and support staff, you can significantly reduce your operational costs. The investment of time can be better utilized elsewhere in the business.

3. By Reducing Customer Churn Rate

Churn rate refers to the number of customers that choose to leave your business within a specific period. It’s a good metric used to determine customer satisfaction. A higher customer churn rate indicates dissatisfaction among customers and vice versa. Therefore, your business should work to reduce the churn rate as much as possible. A customer retention strategy should be a high priority.

Most customers prefer self-service options so it’s important to be able to provide this. This will vary industry to industry and there will always be an element of some people wanting to ring and speak to someone which needs to be a consideration too. Knowing your customers and being able to offer them what they want will help you remain competitive.

4. Through Boosting Your Website Traffic

Adding a self-service solution can help increase engagements on your website as customers spend time logging in to search for solutions and services. If done well, the portals can contain solutions such as videos, blog posts, and frequently asked questions. These portals make your website an authority in the field by providing relevant and useful information of value to your customers.

You may even wish to create an online community or a peer-to-peer portal that has writers, bloggers, and clients who share information. As the self-service portal becomes a place to discuss products and solve problems, engagement gradually increases over time. Longer time spent on your website sends signals to Google that people are finding content that they like and want on your site, which leads it to gradually getting more traffic for the search terms people are using. This goes some way to helping increase the ranking and visibility of your business.

5. By Providing 24-Hour Support

Small businesses may struggle with attending to customers’ requests all the time, especially if they don’t have enough team members to handle the tickets. Queries will quickly pile up and become problematic with delayed responses being frustrating for customers.

In contrast, a self-service portal provides 24/7 support to customers, even outside business operating hours. As customers get answers whenever they want, it increases their level of satisfaction and may lead to them feeling encouraged to write positive reviews, feeding into the cycle of positive brand reinforcement.

Conclusion

As businesses strive to offer their customers an excellent experience, self-service portals can prove to be a great way to do this. These portals can have numerous benefits if done well, most notably by freeing you and your staff to work on other more productive tasks while customers can find what they need themselves. Consider the cost of this technology and investment for your business and see how it can support you to scale and grow your business.

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