2022 B2B Self-Service Experience Report ⟶

How complete self-service models improve CX, boost revenue per customer and deliver on personalization

Zoomin improves self-service portals for enterprises with complex products

With over 130 million live answers served and counting, Zoomin is trusted by many accomplished brands worldwide to deliver stellar product content experiences

Customer Self-Service Portal

When a customer needs help, they have a number of options to resolve their issue. They can call a customer service hotline, get in touch with a live agent via chat, or browse online forums to see if other users have experienced the same problem and what they did to fix things. However, as products become more complex and a CI/CD development style means that each product is constantly evolving, it’s become difficult for teams to keep up with answering the same basic, avoidable questions again and again. At the end of the day, customers don’t enjoy dealing with support either, and that’s where self-serve comes into play. But what is customer self-service? Customer self-service options, typically offered through a customer self service portal, make it possible for customers to find solutions without having to speak directly with a customer service agent. A customer self-service portal is a website or platform containing the necessary resources for customers to help themselves. Customer self-service statistics illustrate the importance of allowing customers to serve themselves. With 86% of users preferring to self-serve, it may be more important than ever to create a digital-first support culture that allows customers to readily find the answers they need in a quick, efficient manner. The Zoomin platform allows users to create data-driven intuitive product content experiences. Zoomin improves the customer experience for enterprise companies with complex products, empowering customers to not only resolve their questions independently but also discover new, valuable ways to use products. This helps establish a new standard in enterprise user experience. Zoomin’s platform can help you publish consistent information about your product, even as that information changes. It can also help you analyze the current customer experience and improve how customers learn about your product to improve the overall customer experience. This can be incredibly helpful when trying to design quality self-service portal options for your customers.

Self-Service Portals 

Self-service portals provide information to help customers resolve issues and find answers to their questions. In some cases, customers may need to use a self service portal login to access features, but most of the time they can simply visit the website and find what they need without having to sign up for an account. A self service customer portal should be easy to access and navigate. Zoomin allows users to deliver quality, effective self-service portal options to customers through data-driven intuitive product content experiences. With Zoomin you can make it ridiculously easy for customers to adopt and resolve product issues on their own with personalized product answers everywhere. Further, Zoomin is powered by actionable insights, enabling users to analyze their content performance to unveil blind spots in the customer journey and continuously improve how customers self-serve. 
Platforms like Zoomin are transforming self-service portals, thanks to its self service software install portal. As more customers turn online for help, they are in need of fast and easy ways to get support. They don’t want to wait in line on the phone for several minutes, nor do they have the time to wait for an email response. This is why self-service portals are so important in today’s digital climate.

Customer Self-Service Portal Examples

There are many different types of customer self-service portal examples. For instance, Bosch Smart Home has an excellent portal in which customers can handle returns, process warranties, and access a self-service chat. With VMware’s self-service portal, users can manage product license keys and support and access self-service downloads. These are just two self-service portal examples, but there are many others you can view for inspiration, depending on your industry and what type of portal you’re hoping to create.
Customer self-service examples can give you an idea of just how useful self-serve portals can be. The best web portal examples are easy to use and direct customers to the appropriate page to receive support for whatever it is they need. Those that have never designed a self-service portal before can benefit from using successful portals created by others, as this can give them a better understanding of what a quality portal looks like.

Content experiences matter

Deliver a self-service experience customers will love you for

40%
of the time customers looking to self-serve find irrelevant or outdated content
52%
of support cases can be deflected by better content experiences, say customers
84%
of users say content frustration would lead them to switch brands

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Customer Self-Service Software

The best web portals utilize customer self-service software to deliver a smooth experience for users. Customer portal software can be accessed a number of ways—most commonly through a software provider—and is extremely helpful in terms of content design and user experience. Your self-service software portal should enable easy access for customers and provide answers to their questions quickly and efficiently. The best customer self-service software for your business should be compatible with your existing systems and work to provide support that’s uniquely tailored to your company. A web portal website should make customers’ lives easier, not more stressful, so you should look for software that gets the job done, but that is also mindful of customer needs. Zoomin connects to the tools and formats you already use to ingest all your company’s technical content. With Zoomin, you can proactively offer personalized product answers tailored to the unique needs of every customer, as well as surface your content within a unified experience at every customer channel. You can continuously optimize the self-service experience with unique insights into how customers are seeking help. Customer self-service software should aim to do just this—identify customer needs and work to find better solutions to meet those needs.

Benefits of Self-Service

There are many benefits of customer self-service. First and most importantly, self-service options enable customers to seek support on their own time. Rather than waiting to speak with a live service agent, they can simply hop onto the portal and find what they’re looking for. Of course, not all customer concerns can or should be addressed through an online portal, but common questions and problems can usually be resolved via self-service.When considering the benefits of self-service, it’s also important to remember that different businesses in different industries serve different types of customers. This means that, while some self-service portals may work for one business, they aren’t necessarily going to be compatible with another. Using the right tools and software to connect with your customers is absolutely crucial to ensuring the success of your portal. The last thing you want is for customers to leave the site feeling more frustrated and confused than they were before visiting. It can be good to view self-service from the customer angle to get a better idea of what’s useful and what isn’t. Self-service benefits to customers are practically endless, but if you don’t properly optimize your platform for your specific customer base, it can cause more trouble than it’s worth. To take full advantage of self-service portal benefits, it’s best to keep the customer front of mind and try to understand how easy—or difficult—portal access might be from their perspective.

Digital Self-Service

Digital self-service has become an essential component of the customer experience. With more and more people turning to the internet for help rather than phoning support or driving to a store, businesses should constantly be on the lookout for new, improved ways to deliver self-service customer service. A self-service strategy can offer direction on how to design your self-service portal for maximum efficiency. Whatever your self-service model of choice, you can benefit from going in with a strategy centered around your specific business and customer needs. Zoomin offers universal integration, connecting to all your authoring tools, content management systems, and publishing platforms so that your team can keep using the tools that work best for them. Zoomin automates the publishing process so even minor changes to content are immediately reflected wherever users look for it with no IT resources required. Data insights provided by Zoomin allow users to monitor content performance, critical KPIs, and identify content gaps so they can continuously improve their content experience. Users can access relevant, contextual, and personalized search results via Zoomin’s powerful engine. Zoomin’s platform automatically centralizes your documentation across all stakeholder channels, creating consistent, unified sources of user guidance. These features are critical to producing and maintaining digital self-service tools for customers.

Insights to inspire a new approach to self-service

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