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Fine Tuning: Delivering timely support with Web Widget



Posted Jul 13, 2017

This Fine Tuning session is about the web widget, including:

  • Driving engagement with self-service
  • Personalizing the experience
  • Quantifying the impact

Zendesk's Solution Consultant Yasmeen Hyder has been with Zendesk since June 2015. She brings almost 5 years of experience in the SaaS space focusing on driving customer and employee engagement.

To find more Fine Tuning articles, see Fine tuning resources.

Part 1, 8 am: Driving engagement with self-service

Picture yourself about to complete an online purchase. As you check out, you realize you need the item by this weekend. Will two-day shipping work or do you need to overnight it? This simple question leaves you baffled. You may complete the transaction or head to the store instead.

Tweak that scenario to add assistance via chat. One’s decision is likely in favor of making the purchase as a result of a simple question answered. The retail use case is one we are all too familiar with. Extending this experience to any website, whether via realtime chat support or simply a contact form to initiate a conversation, allows you to drive engagement.

The ability to interact with a business without switching channels drives the likelihood of that contact occurring in the first place. The Zendesk Web Widget, a simple javascript widget that can be placed on any website, can be the first step towards better supporting your customers.

Extending a hand as they browse your site allows customers to bond with your brand and build trust. The Harvard Business Review reported that 57% of customers were on your website before they picked up the phone. If over half of your customers were on your site and statistically channel switching also results in lost engagement, the ability to communicate with your organization online is a must have.

 

Rewind back to the last time you picked up your phone to call support. Why did you call? Was it because you wanted to or was it the only logical option? For most individuals, it’s typically the latter. You need an answer and you would like it now. How many of the requests your organization receives, whether by phone or other channels, could easily be resolved if a user had access to the content on your site?

Most organizations will agree that it’s a substantial amount. Surprisingly enough, over 50% of users utilize 3-4 channels during a single experience (Source: Ovum). While it’s likely what they were looking for was a click away, having the right information available is only a small part of the puzzle. Driving users to it is the larger battle.

Creating a knowledge base and enabling the Help Center option within the Web Widget is one of the easiest ways to drive user behavior in the direction of self-service. Two thirds of users prefer this option if it exists. This provides the ability to search and deliver answers where your users are. Small yet powerful, the widget follows the user during their experience. Not only can a user search for content, they can also take advantage of suggested content based on the page they are on.

Ticket deflection, by way of providing embedded self-service, typically results in 10-20% fewer requests to your team. While actual deflection rates vary, continuous optimization of your Help Center will yield higher results.

The goal is to empower users to support themselves, yielding a confident consumer at a lower cost to you. Coupling self-service with the contact form or chat defines an ideal customer experience.  

In part 2, we’ll talk more about how to personalize the self-service experience. Join me in the comments section below with your thoughts around Web Widget and self-service strategies. I’ll be here throughout the day to answer your questions as well

Part 2, 11 am: Personalizing the experience

Making the decision to utilize the Web Widget for knowledge and communication is the first step. Understanding how to deliver the right experience to appropriately configure it is the next. Start out by mapping your user’s step-by-step journey. Ask yourself the following questions and start digging into the data:

  • What do your customers look for when they come to your site?
  • Where are they spending the most time?
  • What do your shopping cart abandonment rates look like? Are there questions you can answer during the checkout process to prevent this?
  • How many clicks does it take a customer to find the answers they need?
  • What are the most common search queries in your Help Center? Do you have common searches that yield no results? These are great indicators for content to create, content to improve, and pieces of the customer experience that are causing friction.

Think about the ideal experience based on the customer’s needs. While delivering self-service may make sense on most pages, direct click-to-chat may be more beneficial on others. While users may have an idea of what they want to search for, providing suggestions based on where a user is on your website as mentioned above is another way to personalize the experience.

The widget can also be customized to deliver a page specific experience. Whether a contact form or live chat is available on a page, or whether self-service is offered, can be customized using our Web Widget APIs. Further customization capabilities such as color, positioning and search capabilities limited to a specific section of content can supplement your strategy.

A question we’re asked all too often is how to select the right channels. When does it make sense to utilize chat given the resources needed to staff it appropriately? In certain situations, a contact form is all that is needed. A rule of thumb is understanding if your desired user behavior involves the need for real time communication. The retail example is a classic one where the ability to communicate with a business or brand is not enough. The difference between a real-time interaction and a follow-up makes or breaks a sale. In other situations, following up on a lead within a reasonable timeframe may be sufficient. The approach can be time-based, such as staffing chat during business hours.

Proactive chat is yet another way of guiding a user’s behavior. Do you want the widget to appear 15 seconds after someone has loaded a page as opposed to be present initially? Do you want the widget present for paid customers only? Extending a hand to support users as opposed to waiting on them to make the first move in the appropriate situation is beneficial on both fronts: driving the customer experience and driving business.

Once an interaction begins with a user, their user path is shared with the agent. This added context allows the agent to deliver a personalized experience. For ticket submissions, history 30-minutes prior to and after ticket submission are tracked. For chat conversations, this entails displaying a user’s path prior to chatting and actions in real-time as they navigate your site. The context enables faster, more accurate resolution of requests. Bear in mind, user tracking for chats holds true even if the widget is hidden which can be achieved via the API. When customers crave personalization and to an extent expect it, the Web Widget is your secret weapon.

In part 3, we’ll talk about how you can use self-service data from the Web Widget to assess your support strategy and make iterative improvements. What questions do you have about personalizing the Web Widget, and your self-service strategy, to create better customer experiences? Share them in the comments section below!

Part 3, 2 pm: Quantifying the impact

You’ve developed a self-service strategy. You’ve successfully focused on delivering personalized access to your users. After checking the boxes, how can you quantify success? The analytics Zendesk provides enable you to understand the impact of your self-service strategy and the Web Widget.

Perhaps your top 3 articles by number of views comprise the majority of activity on our knowledge base. Diving in deeper, we can see that while a page received 1000 views this week, only 45 tickets were created as a result. Taking into account the volume of deflected requests and the cost per contact to your organization, how great are the savings? With more search history, a more meaningful dataset of what users are looking for is the result. This allows you to directly refine your content strategy, the backbone of the self-service experience. Coupled with ease of access via the Web Widget, expect your deflection rates to rise and your CSAT to spike up, both of which are wins.

Understanding your tickets by channel today is key to quantifying impact. This applies whether you are adopting the Web Widget for the first time or optimizing its usage, providing insight into how we can drive efficiency. The Web Widget is considered a channel when looking at the origin of tickets. For example, after placing the Web Widget on your website, you notice 20% of your volume now funnels through this channel. How has that impacted the usage of other channels and overall volume? Are you looking to reduce call volume and shift to more cost effective web methods? As you scale, how can you be more efficient and do more with your existing resources?

Let’s switch the topic of discussion to your agents. Optimizing on your “Tier 0” is the most cost conservative strategy out there. By “Tier 0”, we mean the ability for self-service to support resolution without needing an actual agent. This allows for your customer support personnel to focus their efforts on more meaningful tasks. More fulfilling work drives employee experience and retention. Human capital is the most scarce resource in our economy today. How can we protect our most prized resources, engage our customers and drive loyalty?

Here’s your answer:

This section concludes the content for today, but my colleagues and I will still be around in the forums to answer your questions. Post in the comments section below to share your self-service strategies, best practices and thoughts with us!


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7 comments

Official

Good morning, everyone! We're now live in the forums with Part 1 of Fine Tuning on Web Widget! Yasmeen is today's author and is here to answer your questions. 

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Can you answer: How can analytics provide you with insight into what's working and areas of growth as you focus on continuous improvement?

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Hi Karis! Yasmeen will dive in with some more thoughts here momentarily, but also stay tuned for Part 3 where we'll be talking data as it relates to self-service.

Part 2 is now live in the forum!

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Hi Karis! One of the goals of self-service is to reduce the average number of requests per customer via knowledge sharing leading to a better customer experience. Understanding what content is searched for, click-through rates and ticket submissions are a few metrics that quantify the impact of self-service.  Using analytics to understand why requests are being submitted is key. Using this data to determine opportunities to develop content and identifying ways to streamline internal processes to drive faster responses are two ways to focus on improvement. Understanding your Net Promoter Score as you roll out or optimize channel offerings is another way to measure your customer's sentiment towards your brand. While the metrics that matter tend to vary slightly from organization to organization, the goal of better serving your customers while driving operational efficiency is a common theme. The capabilities of Insights reporting, coupled with a strategy in place, can help you focus on continuous improvement.

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Thanks for joining us today! Part 3 is now live. Come chat with Yasmeen about how you're measuring your self-service success!

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Hi Yasmeen

We have implemented web widget across a number of our pages. How would you recommend we align our search results (which are captured in Zendesk) to page visits (which are not).

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Hi Dan,

I would recommend measuring traffic by enabling Google Analytics first:  

https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/205402318-Enabling-Google-Analytics-for-your-Help-Center 

This article shares how you can correlate searches to traffic on the Help Center itself utilizing Google Analytics:

https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/203664146-Google-Analytics-and-Help-Center-Part-2-Measuring-the-effectiveness-of-search 

To extend this to the Web Widget, you can add GA tracking to the specific pages where the widget resides. 

 

 

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