Heather Hernandez is a Customer Success Executive and a featured member of Vitally's Success Network. In this article, she offers her thoughts on creating self-service resources to answer common customer questions without any team intervention.

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I want you to drop the ball.‍

In order to drive rapid growth, SaaS startup leaders need to consider whether it’s time to “drop the ball” in order to do what is best for the company. 

I’ll explain what I mean. I’ve consulted fast-paced, high-growth companies for years, and most of them eventually hit a tipping point where leaders need to be trained on how to “drop the ball” more in order for their organization to scale effectively. 

In startup culture, the expectation is that everyone owns everything. Massive accountability is encouraged, and if you see a priority problem, you address it. This leads to a common growing pain where leaders get caught up taking on responsibilities outside of their department.

For example, I often see Customer Success leaders hanging on to support tasks that should be owned by other teams, need process improvement, or require automation. These CS leaders are sometimes reluctant to “drop the ball” for worry that others won’t do it to their caliber and their customers will suffer.

However, holding onto these tasks can have high costs (e.g., a lack of attention to strategic CS initiatives, burnout, and inefficient use of company funds when more appropriate resources could be leveraged), and there comes a point where we need to focus our best CS talent on CS strategies and revenue-driving initiatives. 

‍One of the best ways to reduce your CS team swimming outside their lane and improve the customer experience is to create customer self-service resources. That’s what I’ll dig into for the rest of this article. 

Quick Overview: What’s a Customer Self-Service Platform?

A customer self-service platform is a digital environment customers can visit to solve problems for themselves without human intervention.It can be as simple as an FAQ page, or more complex, like a searchable portal that delivers information in multiple ways or maybe even a conversational AI option. 

Self-service resources exist to help customers help themselves and ultimately:

• Speed up your average time-to-resolution (TTR): Customers can figure out solutions to their problems faster because there’s no need for the involvement of a support rep or their CSM. 
• Improve customer satisfaction (CSAT): It’s a more convenient, and done correctly, more delightful experience for the customer if they can handle their own problems.

Plus, with strong self-service options in place, CS teams can handle more complex tickets and a higher volume of accounts because there’s this efficient, effective resource that most customers will visit first to attempt to solve their problems.

4 Tips for Creating an Effective Self-Service Platform

Here are four tactical strategies for CS executives & CS teams who are looking to build and deliver excellent Self Service Platform experiences for customers: 

1. Make the Platform Hyper-Accessible Across Channels

A major challenge of implementing a customer self-service platform is letting your customers know that it exists in the first place. My recommendation? Shout about it from the digital rooftops. Your specific needs will vary across customer type and industry. Check out these recommendations and employ all that apply: 

• Place this resource inside your product, maybe as a navigation tab or chatbot.
• Link this resource in your web content
• Make this resource accessible via desktop and mobile devices (or wherever your customer uses your product)
• Consider having this resource available publicly on your marketing website. If it needs to be gated, make sure your login and password reset procedures are not a headache for customers. 
• Ensure your CSMs constantly refer to this resource on calls and in emails. 

In short, it should be everywhere your customers are.

2. Measure the Helpfulness of Your Self-Service Options 

Having customers regularly visit your self-service platform is a monumental first step, but the second step is just as important: You have to optimize it. A support article with “Last updated in 2017” at the top doesn’t give you a lot of confidence, does it? 

Be sure that you keep all collateral up-to-date and routinely track what your most-accessed help articles or most-asked chatbot questions are over time. Prioritize creating an excellent experience on those frequently visited resources.

One other thing here: Measure how much customer effort it takes to navigate your portal. How many customers are engaging with your portal? How many clicks does it take them to get where they want to go? Are you asking them if they found what they needed to solve their problem with quick “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” surveys? Are you monitoring the duration of time customers spend in your platform? Are you measuring CSAT after portal interactions? Do you have a method for tracking deflection rate from your CS team? 

You ideally want your customers to be going in, quickly finding answers, and saying, "Wow, that took basically no effort, and I found what I needed. Super helpful." Track these things so you can ensure your portal is optimized and serves the business. 

3. Intentionally Delight Your Customers

When customers visit a self-service support platform, they’re there to solve a problem. Your job as the brand is to make it as easy and enjoyable as possible to solve that problem.

Personally, I enjoy Chip and Dan Heath’s EPIC model, which I first learned about in their book, The Power of Moments. EPIC stands for:

• Elevation: People want above-and-beyond, sensory experiences.
• Pride: People want to feel recognized for their achievements.
• Insight: People want to learn something new.
• Connection: People want to bond with family, friends, and colleagues.

So in building or refining your self-service offerings, think about things like: 

• What insight could I share with my customer that would help them grow? 
• How can I foster community within this portal?
• Is there something I can say or do to make this customer feel recognized?

There are some easy ways to do this digitally. For example, you can express your gratitude for your client's engagement and feedback with a personal, automated note from their CSM a day after they access the portal. Another example: You can highlight your long-standing partnership with certain customers so every time they log in to the portal, it says, "Jen, you’re a gold-level client. Thanks for your 5+ years of business. How can we help you today?"

I also love it when brands use playful sensory experiences in their self-service portals. Vanta, a buttoned-up security and compliance software, does this well. When you finish a task within their platform, they display an on-brand celebration llama graphic. It’s simple, ever-so-slightly silly, and it enhances the sensory experience digitally. 

Think about this in your own self-service portal: Could you play a short sound, or make a little confetti GIF when a customer takes a certain, positive action? Could you show a personal pop-up message that would make their moment more delightful?

This thoughtfulness separates the good self-service portals I’ve seen from the great ones.

4. Personalize, Personalize, Personalize

When I log into a support chat and have to enter my name… and membership ID… and date of birth… and then I get transferred to another agent and have to do it all over again, I feel frustrated as a customer, and I bet you do, too. This experience always feels like the company isn't respecting your time and gives you that, “It’s 2024, aren’t we past this?” thought. 

As a Customer Success leader, ruthlessly prioritize making these repetitive, generic experiences a thing of the past. Between the excellent customer management software and AI options on the market, there’s no excuse not to recognize customers and use the information they’ve already shared in the past to give them a more unified, smooth experience. 

For example, to ensure your team is tooled up to personalize and problem-solve, ensure your platform leverages disclosed identification information. Additionally ensure your platform + service reps can see recent activity and recent tickets. 

The Future Is Digital — And Human, Too

I’ll wrap up with a final thought that’s been bouncing around in my mind as I’ve written this: What do customers actually want: human or digital interactions? 

I’ve looked into this because why should anyone build great self-service options if that’s not the market’s preference? The data is all over the place for now, but most of what I’ve read says consumers prefer interacting with an AI-powered customer portal — but only if it can provide an excellent experience.

It's really frustrating to interact with a half-helpful AI chatbot or phone logic tree. No one likes how it feels to find yourself in a question loop saying “Representative” over and over into the phone as you try to refill a prescription or check the status of an insurance claim. In the same way, no one likes clunky, not-helpful self-service offerings. 

But the experience of returning something on Zappos? Where you chat with a bot that asks you why you’re returning, sends you a shipping label, and issues a refund instantly — all without human intervention? That’s amazing. Conversational AI is useful and delightful when it works. Work to get your organization to that place.

That’s what I’ve got for you today. Best of luck shoring up your self-service offerings to boost CSAT and TTR (and free up your team’s bandwidth).

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