Getting started with self-service - Introduction: Elements of a self-service channel

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Articles in the series

If it’s your job to plan, write, and maintain the content for your knowledge base, this series of articles will help you learn how to plan and then write and review your self-service content, how to structure your content and make it available to your customers in the help center, how to promote it so that it gets used, and then what you need to do to continuously improve your knowledge base to ensure that it’s meeting your customers’ needs and is providing the highest possible customer satisfaction.

This is the first article in the series and provides an overview of the self-service channel and elements in the Zendesk that you have to work with in creating and maintaining and improving content.

Defining self-service
Making the business case for self-service
The elements of a self-service channel

Defining self-service

Self-service means that your customers are able to find the information they need to answer their questions and solve their problems without having to contact and interact with a customer service rep. To do that, they rely on the explanations and instructions you provide to them via your knowledge base articles.

The written word is the core of a self-service channel and the processes and technologies that surround it are there to help ensure that your customers are aware of the content, that they use it, and then to help you evaluate how well it’s serving both your customers and your goals of reducing their dependency on person-to-person customer service interactions.

All of these elements together (the words, the technology, your processes) make up your self-service channel and involve many steps and a number of different roles and people to make it all happen. While this guide is focused on the content creation part of the self-service channel, we provide links to more information about those other steps.

Making the business case for self-service

We assume that you’re reading this guide because you’ve been tasked with creating the content for your self-service channel. If instead, you or your company or organization are just self-service curious or are unconvinced that providing self-service is absolutely essential, the data we have about how it affects customer satisfaction should help to convince you.

69% of customers want to resolve as many issues as possible on their own and attempt to use self-service to make that happen.
61% of customers say resolving issues quickly is a top indicator of good customer experiences. If customers can quickly locate the self-service content they need, they don’t need to contact and then wait for assistance from a support agent.

This data is provided by Gartner, a leading provider of customer experience insights and data. They also tell us that of that large percentage of customers who attempt to resolve their issues on their own only about 9% succeed. This could be because either no self-service is available to them or that it’s been poorly implemented. This is especially important for SMBs because customers are 2x more likely to prefer using self-service to engage with small and medium-sized businesses versus businesses of other sizes.

That data demonstrates the value of self-service to customer satisfaction, but there’s also the cost to you as a business. A self-service transaction is a fraction of the cost of a support transaction that is handled by an agent.

There’s also the question of scalability and handling heavy ticket volumes. Self-service improves ticket deflection for many high frequency support issues, which frees up your agents to focus on the more complex issues. With a manageable ticket queue, there’s also less need to bring on more resources to handle the load.

Another point to consider is that creating knowledge base content and publishing it to the internet (if you’re providing a help center that anyone can access, versus a restricted help center - see Restricting help center access to signed-in end-users) raises awareness of your business because the content is included in internet search results. The self-service channel can help you to rank higher in search results and generate new business.

Finally, a knowledge base is as valuable to agents as it is to customers. A great knowledge base is the source of accurate and up-to-date go-to information for everyone who needs it. It’s a reference and also great training material. A new agent can be dropped into a team and they can be quickly up to speed on the products or services they’re supporting by using your knowledge base.

The elements of a self-service channel

Self-service begins with your knowledge base content. In the narrow sense, it’s the FAQs and how-to articles you create to explain how your products and services work and how to resolve common issues that arise when using them. In the broader sense, your knowledge base is also the content that is generated by your community of users and by the back-and-forth between that community and the people who are creating and supporting the knowledge base content.

When you open up your content for comments, you often get follow-on questions that point out gaps in your content and comments from users who provide further advice, best practices, and clarifications.

To begin providing self-service, you need somewhere to publish your collection of knowledge base content that is easily accessible to your end users and customers. That’s where the help center comes in. In Zendesk, you build a help center using Zendesk Guide.

With Guide, you build a self-service channel that includes the following customer-facing elements:

Knowledge Base - This is your collection of knowledge base articles, which you organize into the structure and categories and articles you need.
Knowledge Base Comments - You can allow your customers (and agents) to add comments to articles so that additional questions can be asked and answered directly in those articles, in context.
Customer Service Portal - This is where customers submit tickets if they can’t find the information they need in your knowledge base and also, in the Professional and Enterprise versions of Guide, where they can manage their tickets.
Online Community - You can also create an online community in your help center by enabling Zendesk Gather. This provides a community forum where your customers can connect and collaborate, crowdsource support, share knowledge, and provide you with feedback.

As you advance farther along with your self-service channel, you’ll discover other Zendesk features that will help you create, maintain, monitor, and improve your self-service content and its effectiveness in helping your customers succeed in resolving their own support issues.

Next steps

The following articles in this guide describe how to plan and then create, maintain, and improve your self-service content.