The Self-Service Myth: Why Your Customers Don't Really Want to Help Themselves
Here's an uncomfortable truth: Your self-service portal has a 23% adoption rate, but you're celebrating it as a success because it's "above industry average."
Meanwhile, your customers are still flooding support with questions that are "clearly answered" in your documentation. Sound familiar?
Well, guess what?
Your customers don't actually want to help themselves. They want their problems solved and they want them solved fast, accurately, and with as little effort on their part as possible.
There's a big difference here, and most companies are optimizing for the wrong thing.
Here’s what most of us believe we need to do:
- Build comprehensvie self-service portals
- Make everything searchable
- Track adoption rates and time-on-page
And by doing this we think that success will equal fewer support tickets.
But great self-service doesn't reduce support tickets, it actually prevents them entirely. The best self-service is invisible because customers never realize they needed help in the first place.
What does this mean for your documentation? It means you need to rethink how you approach how you create and deliver product and technical information to your customers.
If you are only writing Word or PDF docs or publishing a huge documentation resource center on your website, you are missing huge opportunities to deliver critical content where your customers are.
It’s context. It’s personalization. It’s microcontent.
And you can’t do that well if your documentation isn’t structured and reusable.
Here’s what we suggest:
- Track what customers do after visiting your help content
- your top 10 support ticket categories
- Map these to your customer journey. Where do problems typically arise?
Now think about how you can deliver your documentation in a way that meets the customer where they are at their moment of need. Can you share information in places like in-app help? Customer success emails? Conversational chat? Personalized documentation portals or help centers?
Can you support all the ways you need to create and share your documentation today?
Rethinking your documentation strategy is an opportunity for your documentation team to expand their work across the customer lifecycle and show their value. Give them the right tools and right content strategy to do that.
