Samantha Rohn
19 Best Customer Self-Service Software (2024)
- Published: June 13, 2023
- Updated: April 8, 2024
Empowering customers with the tools and information they need to help themselves transforms how businesses deliver services.
The shift towards a customer self-service support model marks a significant move in how companies approach customer care, placing a wealth of resources at users’ fingertips. From FAQs and how-to guides to user documentation and beyond, these on-demand materials are designed to tackle common issues head-on, offering straightforward solutions around the clock.
This approach not only streamlines the support process, but also enhances the overall customer experience. By integrating resources like searchable content libraries, chatbots, and pre-recorded demos into their support strategy, businesses can offer immediate answers to customer inquiries. The beauty of self-service support lies in its efficiency: a single solution can be shared across countless users, reducing the need for repeated individual assistance and dramatically cutting down the support queue.
This article will help you understand why you need a customer-driven support infrastructure and how it will help you reduce your ticket backlog, increase customer satisfaction, and build customer loyalty.
What are the best customer self-service software providers?
- Whatfix
- Gorgias
- Intercom
- Tidio
- Zendesk
- DeepConverse
- Document360
- Hubspot Service
- Help Scout
- Zoho Desk
- Gladly
- CommBox
- GrooveHQ
- Richpanel
- Enchant
- Stonly
- Gallabox
- Crisp
- TOPdesk
What Is Customer Self-Service Software?
Customer self-service software refers to the infrastructure that makes it possible to empower users to resolve their own issues using support resources designed to help them understand & fix known problems your customers face.
69%
of customers who try to resolve their issues independently before contacting support.
7 Benefits of Using Customer Self-Service Software
Here are seven benefits of enabling your customers with self-service software solutions.
1. Enhanced customer satisfaction and loyalty
According to Microsoft’s 2018 State of Global Customer Service survey, 95% of respondents indicated that the quality of support a brand offers influences whether they stay loyal to it (or not).
So, what’s the most significant factor influencing the relative quality of your company’s customer support? This poll of 5K respondents by Statista shows that a third (33%) of customers globally agree that getting their issues resolved in a single interaction is the most critical aspect of a good customer service experience, while 60% of customers feel that long holds and wait times are the most frustrating part of the service experience.
Self-service customer support puts the tools your customers need to fix basic issues at their disposal & eliminates the need to contact support, wait on hold aimlessly, have drawn-out conversations before tickets are closed, and get shuffled between poorly-trained or confused reps who can’t pinpoint how to help.
2. Increased efficiency and productivity for customer support teams
The biggest advantage of self-service software is the scale factor – a customer agent can draft answers to FAQs, record an explainer video with Loom, or write a step-by-step guide to resetting your account, changing your password, etc.
From that moment on, millions of users can successfully fix issues by reusing the offered directions and resources until your product’s architecture is changed. Even in that case, you can update your help library & it’s good to go again.
Self-service support software makes it possible to create a single (or more) product resource & reuse it infinitely as long as your product stays the same.
Above: Example of contextual help and user support built with a Digital Adoption Platform.
Whatfix’s Self-Help overlays on to any web application, desktop application, mobile app, or website. It provides contextual help to users and integrates with your FAQs, support center, LMS, user documentation, and more. Users are presented with common issues and help content for their contextual area in the application, or they can use an open-ended search to find the specific help content they’re looking for. These help support cards often prompt in-app guidance, walking users through the specific workflow they need help on.
3. Reduced workload on support staff
According to benchmarks (collected from their customers’ data) published by helpdesk software maker Jitbit, on average, it takes seven hours and four minutes before a customer gets the first response to a support ticket, while tickets take three days and 10 hours (i.e., 82 hours) to close.
Not surprisingly, a majority of these tickets will be repetitive questions asked with a different slant— these can be conveniently handled by if-then chatbot sequences or by pointing your customers to a searchable content library where they can browse product docs, pre-recorded video explainers and answers to FAQs, enriched with images & GIF illustrations. By deflecting support tickets, your customer-facing teams can spend more time on critical, complex support issues and provide more comprehensive and responsive support.
4. Cost savings by reducing the need for additional support staff
Glassdoor data suggests that the average customer support rep earns $38,113 annually as of May 2023. That’s before you factor in customer service training, ramp time (i.e., time-to-proficiency) & replacement costs, given that support roles see an unusual amount of turnover that can touch 45% annually.
Self-service software reduces the headcount you need to run a tight ship by tackling basic customer queries so that your customer support team can focus on wildcard scenarios where there’s no known fix or other out-of-the-way issues that require more technical tinkering to resolve.
5. Improved customer engagement and retention
Most brands often assume by default that going above & beyond to “wow” customers is the sure way to secure their loyalty and guarantee return purchases. On the surface level, it seems almost flawless— but upon a closer look, there’s a stronger correlation between customer loyalty & effortless experiences.
Back in 2013, executives at Gartner conducted a study (of customer support organizations + 97K customers) to understand how customer experience affects brand loyalty & how organizations can leverage it as a customer retention tactic.
Their research revealed that by far, the single most significant factor influencing loyalty is customer effort—not satisfaction—and having to do more work to resolve an issue makes customers more likely to become disloyal to a brand. Whether they’re trying to upgrade to a pricier tier, change their password, or learn more about a product, customers are turned off when they have to contact support more than once or repeat information.
“We found that the majority of customers, notably 96%, who had high-effort experiences reported being disloyal, compared to only 9% of customers with low-effort experience.”
Nick Toman
Self-service customer service tools simplify support experiences so customers can solve their own issues without reaching out to support, opening multiple tickets, waiting on hold, and being passed between agents.
6. Accessible and convenient service
Chances are that your company hasn’t grown to the scale at which you can afford 24/7 support. As a result, customers will often have to wait until normal working hours before support agents can get back to the ticket queue. Likewise, if you have international customers, you’ll need to hire agents distributed globally to ensure your customers always have a live support line at all times.
Self-service software is always on and available on-demand, and users can access it no matter where they’re located on their preferred devices and at their own convenience – providing organizations with a stellar solution to one of the most difficult customer support challenges for growing products and services.
7. Valuable insights and analytics on customer behavior and needs
Judging by the number of tickets they process daily, it’s impractical to ask your support agents to manually log customer experience metrics for each ticket they close, including KPIs such as CSAT, customer effort score (CES), CRR, time-to-resolution, average handle time (AHT), NPS, etc. On the other hand, self-service platforms can help you automatically capture and track customer engagement metrics for your content library, such as page views, scroll depth, time spent on-screen, NPS scores, etc.
These insights can be valuable resources as you build out call center scripts for your customer service agents.
19 Best Customer Self-Service Software
Depending on your organization, you’ll need specific self-service software, solutions, feature sets, etc.
We’ve compiled a list of the best customer self-service software vendors and researched why each solution can help provide self-help support to your customers, on-demand, 24/7, and at the moment of need.
We’ve also broken out providers into four self-service software categories:
Best In-App Guidance and Support Platforms
To start, here are the best digital adoption platforms that provide customer success and product teams with a no-code editor to create in-app guided experiences that enable customers with assistance, guidance, and support at the moment of need.
1. Whatfix
G2 Rating: 4.6 out of 5 stars
Pricing: Contact for pricing
Whatfix is an excellent self-service solution that provides 24/7 contextual help and support to customers when and where they need it. Whatfix is a digital adoption platform and user behavior analytics software that enables customer and product teams to:
- Utilize Whatfix’s Self Help to provide customers and users with a 24/7 self-help solution that overlays onto your website or application.
- Guide and coach users through your product to better understand how it works, driving adoption and building expertise,
- Nudging end-users to adopt the best user flows and practices that drive productivity and business outcomes.
- Understand how your customers interact with your digital assets, products, website, in-app guidance, and more using Whatfix’s behavioral analytics.
Using Whatfix, you can embed a self-help widget right inside your product’s UX to make it easy for customers to search for self-help resources without leaving the product experience or browsing dozens of helpdesk articles.
This Self Help integrates with your FAQs, knowledge base, product documentation, release notes, support community, video tutorials, and any other product support-related content you may want to include in your Self Help. The Self Help widget prompts users with contextual support and help resources depending on where they are within your product or website. Users can also search for any contextual issues they’re experiencing.
These Self Help entries are also attached to in-app guided Flows, which are prompted when a user clicks on a support entry. This provides contextual learning to customers at the moment of need.
Marketboomer, a SaaS and digital transformation hospitality platform, utilized Whatfix to provide in-app guidance and self-help support to its customers and end-users. With Whatfix, Marketboomer deflected over 3,000 support tickets each quarter, and 98% of all customer support questions were successfully answered with its new, embedded Self Help wiki.
Create contextual user onboarding flows, drive adoption of new features, and make in-app announcements with Whatfix
Whatfix is a no-code digital adoption platform that enables product managers to create contextual in-app guidance, product-led user onboarding, and self-help user support – all without engineering dependencies. With Whatfix, create branded product tours, user onboarding checklists, interactive walkthroughs, pop-ups, smart tips, and more – all enabling customers and users with contextual guidance at the moment need. With Whatfix, analyze, build, and deliver better user experiences.
2. Gorgias
G2 Rating: 4.6 out of 5 stars
Pricing: $10 for Starter plan, $50 for Basic plan, $300 for Pro plan, $750 for Advanced plan, contact for Enterprise plan
Gorgias’ mirrors most of the features of the mainstream support software platforms like Intercom and HubSpot, except that they’re niched down to serve specifically e-commerce businesses.
Beyond that filter, it’s an equally powerful product that helps e-commerce support teams reduce their ticket backlog with instant answers, offer customized support with sentiment detection, and automate repetitive tasks like canceling orders, changing customers’ passwords, etc.
Key Features:
- Integrates with e-commerce platforms for personalized customer support tickets
- Automates responses to common questions using machine learning
- Centralizes customer interactions from email, chat, and social media
3. Intercom
G2 Rating: 4.5 out of 4 stars
Pricing: $39/seat/month for Essential plan, $99/seat/month for Advanced plan, $139/seat/month for Expert plan
Intercom helps Internet businesses resolve issues quickly and boost satisfaction with a self-service approach to support that makes it possible for customers to resolve issues with self-help resources, such as Fin, their GPT-4-powered chatbot, article suggestions, and if-then workflows that are programmed to take specific actions, depending on the current circumstances.
Key Features:
- Offers customizable chatbots for automated customer support.
- Provides in-app and website messaging for real-time assistance.
- Utilizes customer data to personalize interactions and support.
Best Customer Support Chatbot Builders
Explore the best AI-powered and IF/THEN branching chatbot builders to enable customers with an on-demand virtual assistant to guide them based on their contextual needs.
4. Tidio
G2 Rating: 4.7 out of 5 stars
Pricing: Free plan available, $29/month for Customer Service plan, $29/month for Flows, $39/month for Lyro AI Chatbot plan,
Tidio is a multichannel support platform designed to help you engage your customers wherever they are, with features such as:
- Live chat: Engage users who’re browsing your website & application with live conversations where your agents can provide context with attachments, canned responses, custom messages, and post-chat surveys that gauge your customers’ satisfaction.
- A powerful chatbot builder you can use to create if-then sequences that answer your customer’s questions without a human in the loop.
- Support analytics that break down your performance by agents, channel, and per conversation with customer experience metrics that show where you can improve.
Tidio is infinitely customizable and integrates with hundreds of third-party applications.
5. Zendesk
G2 Rating: 4.3 out of 5 stars
Pricing: $19/user/month for Support Only (Team) plan, $55/user/month for Support Only (Pro) plan, $115/user/month for Support Only (Enterprise) plan
Zendesk makes it easy to engage customers and help them resolve issues preemptively without contracting support. And, for those edge cases where they can’t, your customers can escalate to human agents in a few clicks.
To make it possible, Zendesk Support offers a powerful messaging center where you can automatically engage customers with AI-powered chatbots and a smart knowledge base you can use to deflect tickets and empower customers to fix issues on their own terms.
Key Features:
- Features an AI-powered assistant for automated customer responses
- Provides a unified agent workspace for managing conversations across channels
- Offers a customizable self-service help center and community forums
6. DeepConverse
G2 Rating: 4.9 out of 5 stars
Pricing: Contact for pricing
DeepConverse promises to help you automate your support processes with AI-powered chatbots that integrate with your backend, share relevant helpdesk articles and external links, and know when to hand over tickets to human agents when necessary.
DeepConverse also uses interactive walkthroughs to guide customers through onboarding, navigating your product’s UX, and troubleshooting known issues.
Key Features:
- Specializes in advanced AI chatbots for complex support scenarios
- Offers natural language understanding for better customer interactions
- Features deep integration capabilities with existing systems and workflows
Best Knowledge Base Builders
Explore the best knowledge base software to create a hub of knowledge articles to enable your customers with self-help content.
7. Document360
G2 Rating: 4.7 out of 5 stars
Pricing: Contact for pricing
Unlike most of the support platforms (we’ve featured) that focus on being an all-in-one customer service solution, Document360 is exclusively a knowledge management platform that promises to help you scale up customer support cheaply. Using D360, you can create how-to guides, tutorials, changelogs, and SOPs, both for internal and external use.
Key Features:
- Provides a scalable knowledge base that’s easy to navigate
- Features a powerful search engine for finding information quickly
- Offers version control and analytics to improve content over time
8. HubSpot Service
G2 Rating: 4.4 out of 5 stars
Pricing: Free Service Hub plan, $18/2 seats/month for Service Hub Starter plan, $450/5 seats/month for Service Hub Professional plan, $1,200/10 seats/month for Service Hub Enterprise plan
HubSpot Service ranks alongside Zendesk, Intercom, and Freshworks in their approach to building an all-in-one customer support suite that includes self-service knowledge bases, customer portals, and omnichannel access so that customers can reference helpful information quickly and via social media, live chat, etc.
Key Features:
- Includes a knowledge base tool that integrates with CRM data for personalized help
- Offers ticketing and automation workflows to streamline customer support
- Features customer feedback tools to gather insights and improve service
9. Help Scout
G2 Rating: 4.4 out of 5 stars
Pricing: $20 for Standard plan, $40 for Plus plan, $65 for Pro plan
HelpScout uses AI-powered chatbots to answer brief queries, suggest helpful support articles, and only escalate requests if customers still need a human in the loop.
Key Features:
- Offers an intuitive knowledge base platform for self-service
- Features shared inboxes for team collaboration on support issues
- Provides reporting and analytics to monitor customer service performance
Best Customer Help Desks Systems
Explore the best help desk software for customers to receive self-service tech support.
10. Zoho Desk
G2 Rating: 4.4 out of 5 stars
Pricing: Free trial available, $7 Express plan, $14 Standard plan, $23 Professional plan, $40 Enterprise plan
Zoho Desk simplifies customer service ops for growing teams. It makes it easy to engage customers across channels, reassign tickets between support agents, track your KPIs at a glance, and extend your support capabilities by integrating with Zapier, Slack, etc.
Key Features:
- Features a customizable self-service portal for ticket management
- Offers AI-powered assistance to help customers find solutions
- Integrates with Zoho CRM for a unified customer view
11. Gladly
G2 Rating: 4.7 out of 5 stars
Pricing: $180/month for Hero Package, $210.month for Superhero Package
Gladly combines a self-help model and a multichannel approach to assisting customers with its contact center as a service (CCaaS). The support platform offers automated channels such as IVR, chatbot, and knowledge bases, as well as localized replies that show customers different info depending on their location and language preferences.
Key Features:
- Provides a customer-centric platform that unifies all communication channels
- Offers personalized customer support by keeping a history of past interactions
- Features real-time analytics and reporting for service optimization
12. CommBox
G2 Rating: 4.7 out of 5 stars
Pricing: Contact for pricing
CommBox’s approach to self-help focuses on automating repetitive support tasks, suggesting helpful resources for fixing known issues, and guiding customers through them step-by-step.
Key Features:
- Delivers an omnichannel platform for managing customer interactions
- Automates customer service processes with smart bots
- Offers personalized customer engagement through AI-driven insights
13. GrooveHQ
G2 Rating: 4.6 out of 5 stars
Pricing: $15/user/month for Starter plan, $25/user/month for Plus plan, $40/user/month for Pro plan, contact for Enterprise plan
GrooveHQ markets itself as a simple yet powerful Zendesk alternative that combines shared inboxes, knowledge bases, live chat, and multichannel support into one product. Their platform’s self-help angle focuses mainly on providing 24/7 support via knowledge bases that can be embedded on any page and unlimited integrations that enable your customers to get assistance wherever they are.
Key Features:
- Simplifies support with an easy-to-use ticketing system
- Offers a customizable self-service knowledge base
- Features insights and reports on customer support metrics
14. Richpanel
G2 Rating: 4.6 out of 5 stars
Pricing: $29/user/month for Starter plan, $49/user/month for Regular plan, $99/user/month for Pro plan
Founded in 2020, Richpanel is another micro-scale support platform that closely mirrors products like Zendesk, Gorgias, and Freshdesk. But it aims to complement and not replace them. Richpanel sits on top of your support platforms and allows customers to manage orders, subscriptions, returns, and exchanges without human intervention, while also providing a branded help center.
Key Features:
- Automates customer service for e-commerce with self-service options
- Features a customer support CRM for personalized service
- Offers real-time analytics for tracking support performance
15. Enchant
G2 Rating: 4.8 out of 5 stars
Pricing: $15/user/month
Compared to the general customer support software landscape, Enchant is an older product (founded in 2012). Still, its features are nearly identical to those of its peers, including a strong focus on live chat, reporting, a searchable self-help library, and integrations that enable you to connect it with the rest of your stack.
Key Features:
- Offers a ticket-based customer support system with a simple interface.
- Provides a customer self-service portal for tracking and managing inquiries.
- Features comprehensive reporting tools for support analysis.
16. Stonly
G2 Rating: 4.8 out of 5 stars
Pricing: Free Basic trial plan, $124/month for Starter plan, $249/month for Business plan, contact for Enterprise plan
Stonly helps you build interactive walkthroughs and guide docs for navigating products, troubleshooting common help desk tickets, and onboarding new customers, right where your customers are. You can embed Stonly’s step-by-step guides on your web pages and applications and serve them across multiple platforms (e.g., mobile, desktop, etc.).
Key Features:
- Enables the creation of interactive guides and tutorials for self-service
- Offers knowledge base integration for easy access to support content
- Features analytics to track guide effectiveness and user engagement
17. Gallabox
G2 Rating: 4.6 out of 5 stars
Pricing: $99/6 users/month for Growth plan, $149/6 users/month for Scale plan, $249/6 users/month for Pro plan
Gallabox is designed for businesses that communicate with customers exclusively via WhatsApp. The platform allows customers to open tickets, make orders, report issues, and get redirected to helpful resources through IF/THEN messaging sequences that narrow down queries to determine exactly what a customer needs.
Key Features:
- Facilitates customer support via WhatsApp and other messaging channels
- Offers automated responses and chatbots for instant customer service
- Provides tools for personalized and targeted customer communication
18. Crisp
G2 Rating: 4.6 out of 5 stars
Pricing: Free Basic plan, $25/month for Pro plan, $95/month for Unlimited plan, contact for Enterprise plan
Crisp combines a customer support CRM and email marketing suite, along with DIY support tools designed for self-help assistance—to offer a no-code chatbot builder you can customize with conditional logic and use to point users to an all-in-one content library hosted on Crisp.
Key Features:
- Unifies messaging across website, email, and social media for consistent support
- Features a knowledge base for self-service support
- Offers chatbots for automated customer interactions
19. TOPdesk
G2 Rating: 4.1 out of 5 stars
Pricing: Contact for pricing
TOPdesk ranks alongside Zendesk and Freshdesk, offering an all-in-one help desk software that includes a full suite of support management, 100+ integrations, and detailed reporting. What makes them stand out is their affordability, no coding required implementation, and a guaranteed ROI within six months. With transparent, straightforward pricing based on a tiered feature selection, it’s designed to maximize affordability and function while growing with your team.
Despite being a full-service desk solution, they win on self-service functionalities. As a knowledge base, customer portal, and service catalog in one, customers easily find what they need without ever contacting a support agent.
Key Features:
- Specializes in IT and facility service management through a centralized portal
- Offers self-service options for ticket submissions and tracking
- Features knowledge management tools to aid in self-resolution of issues
How to Evaluate Customer Self-Service Software
Selecting the right customer self-service software goes beyond identifying a solution; it’s about ensuring a perfect fit for your organization’s specific needs and customer expectations. Understanding key factors is crucial for making an informed decision that not only enhances customer satisfaction but also aligns with your business strategy and growth.
Let’s dive into the critical aspects you need to consider to pinpoint the best customer self-service software that promises to deliver value to your customers and your organization alike.
1. Ease of use and navigation
Your rating criteria for customer self-service software should start with usability:
- How many steps do users need to take to complete a simple action?
- Does it (e.g., a chatbot) recommend probable actions or options for users to choose from?
- Is it searchable—can a new user cycle through resources without having to browse page after page?
- Is it accessible—does the platform provide captions and transcripts for videos, localize content in different languages, or offer a high-contrast UI option for visually impaired readers?
2. Customization and branding options
Whether it’s a help center, a chatbot, or an FAQ gallery, can you insert your logo & customize the experience with your brand colors? Is it limited to a certain pricing tier?
3. Integration capabilities with other systems and software
Ideally, a customer self-service suite should support integrations with the rest of your customer experience stack; if it doesn’t, it should have an open ecosystem so that you can build custom integrations or write simple scripts to automate repetitive tasks, customize the product, or add new functionality to it.
For instance, you can embed Intercom’s help center articles, build your own chatbots, or integrate data sources like Redshift by writing custom scripts or building schemas.
4. Accessibility across multiple devices and platforms
Can users interact with the prospective self-help tool on Android, iOS, or Windows? If you’re marketing to a technical audience (e.g., developers), you’ll probably need to account for Linux. Is it mobile-friendly or just a scaled-down version of the desktop experience?
Here, you need to examine your customers’ demographics to determine how they access your websites and applications so you can ensure the self-help platforms you’re considering can offer them a native experience.
5. Analytics and reporting capabilities
User & behavioral analytics turns self-service into a powerful tool for understanding your users better. Out of the box, a self-help platform should be able to help you track page visits and time spent on-page, and to use heatmaps to see where users interact with your resources the most.
If not, you need to ensure you can integrate the platform in question with third-party behavioral analytics that’ll help you collect, segment, and use that data to refine your customer engagement strategy.
6. Security and data privacy features
There are several questions that’ll help you cut through the marketing hype and understand the quality of security a customer service software can offer when handling your customers’ data:
- How much uptime can they guarantee? If they depend on cloud computing platforms like AWS or Azure, is their data backed up across different regional data centers to ensure their services will stay online if one of those goes offline?
- Ensure all customer interactions are encrypted in transit with at least 128-bit encryption. Do they regularly test their systems for vulnerabilities?
- Review their technical security certifications, such as ISO 270001, ISO 27018, HIPAA, CSA, etc.
7. Pricing and scalability options
How does their pricing scale up as your team grows? If a particular pricing tier serves your organization’s needs well, can you add more users instead of bumping into a costlier plan? Factor in what you can expect to pay as your team scales up to avoid having to switch to a new platform halfway down the line.
7 Tips for Implementing Customer Self-Service Software
Implementing customer self-service software is a strategic move that can transform your customer support framework, making it more efficient and responsive. However, the transition to a new system, or optimizing an existing one, requires careful planning, execution, and continuous improvement to reap its full benefits. This section offers practical tips and insights to ensure a smooth implementation process.
With these tips, you’ll be well-equipped to overcome common challenges and leverage self-service technology to its fullest potential, enhancing customer satisfaction and driving your business forward.
1. Define your self-service goals and requirements
These goals will double as benchmarks that measure the effectiveness of your self-help program and will help you track how much your customers are using them & whether they’re contributing to an improved customer experience.
- Resolve at least 80% of customer queries using self-help resources (e.g., chatbot, help center articles, etc.)
- Increase customer experience KPIs like your customer satisfaction score, customer effort score, and retention rate, which measure the effectiveness of your support program & how much work users need to do to get their issues resolved
- Reduce average handle time & time-to-resolution—since your agents now have to handle fewer conversations, they can dedicate more attention to more pressing issues
2. Choose software with an intuitive user experience and easy navigation
Effective design is built on the mantra that “less is more.” Your goal should be to gently coach your customers to figure things out themselves with as little disruption as possible. To achieve that, you can:
- Aggregate your content library—including videos, articles, and FAQs into a searchable hub
- Opt for self-help platforms that use the minimum viable UX elements, with few bells and whistles—think Craigslist & Wikipedia-style
- Use a digital adoption platform to offer contextual support; tools like hotspots, tooltips, and highlights can be used to inject prompts & cues into your product that’ll explain how different features work when a user tries interacting with them
3. Look for software with customizable branding and design options
Opt for self-help platforms that can be customized to suit your branding & design choices so you can maintain a consistent brand image across all channels.
4. Consider integration capabilities with your existing systems and software
What integrations does the self-support software suite offer out of the box? Your support stack needs to be interoperable so that you can build workflows that automate repetitive tasks & route customer suggestions, ratings, and inquiries to the right person if your DIY resources don’t solve their issues.
- Enable customers to rate help center articles and route their replies to a human team so that a rep can reach out if a resource still doesn’t answer a customer’s question
- Use tools like Zapier & RESTful APIs to automate workflows between your support stack. For example, when users rate a support article poorly, you can program a trigger that sends updates to a Slack channel.
5. Evaluate the level of support and resources provided by the vendor
Do you have to pay an additional support fee, or is it included with your product’s license? Talk to their existing customers, browse reviews on G2 & Capterra, and try to paint a picture of what their support reliability looks like on average. Do they have an ecosystem of third-party technicians that can assist you? How much do their services cost?
6. Test the software with a small group of users before launch
Conduct a sandboxed rollout with a small chunk of your users to understand:
- How effective they think your self-service model is
- How you can better synchronize your self-service & real-time support
- Where you can reduce cycling back and forth between self-service resources & human agents
7. Promote the self-service option to customers and encourage adoption
Here’s where you need to be extremely transparent: on the one hand, you need to make your customers understand that you have limited support resources & it might take a while before a human agent fixes their issues; on the other, they can try out your DIY resources to resolve their issues themselves, especially if theirs is a problem that has a known fix.
Your communication needs to reassure users that self-help will actually work and that they’ll be connected with a human agent if they can’t figure out a problem on their own.
Enable your customers with Whatfix’s in-app guidance and self-help support
Zendesk’s 2020 Customer Experience Trends Report shows that 69% of customers try to resolve their issues independently before contacting support. Sadly, less than a third of companies offer self-service customer help resources like knowledge bases, despite customers’ clear preference for figuring out issues on their own whenever it’s an option.
On the one hand, you need a combination of self-help resources—FAQ hubs, knowledge bases, and chatbots that can guide users step-by-step to resolve their issues. On the other, you can take it a step further with contextual support that highlights helpful tips and unused features without disrupting your customers’ experience.
Whatfix is an in-app guidance & self-help platform designed to serve as a second brain for your customers—our platform makes it easy for users to find self-help resources and fully interact with your product using:
- A search widget embedded in your product, where they can browse your knowledge base & find helpful resources with a click
- Tooltips, hotspots, and beacons that expand to offer more details on specific buttons & UI elements
- Product analytics that shows you which features your customers are interacting with
Learn how Whatfix can transform your customer experience by putting the resources your customers need to resolve their issues at their disposal.
Dive deeper with more customer support content.
Are you looking to become a more data-driven product manager? Explore our product analytic-centric content now.
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- How to Create a Knowledge Base in 2023
- 16 Best Knowledge Base Software in 2023
- 13 Customer Support Trends To Watch In 2023
- Customer Self-Service: The Self-Help Support Model (2023)
- 25 Best Examples of Helpful FAQ Pages (+How to Create Your Own)
What Is Whatfix?
Whatfix is a digital adoption platform that provides organizations with a no-code editor to create in-app guidance on any application that looks 100% native. With Whatfix, create interactive walkthroughs, product tours, task lists, smart tips, field validation, self-help wikis, hotspots, and more. Understand how users are engaging with your applications with advanced product analytics.
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Whatfix's digital adoption platform empowers your employees, customers, and end-users with in-app guidance, reinforcement learning, and contextual self-help support to find maximum value from software.
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