As both a professor and chief scientist at AnswerDash, I spend time around two groups of people that couldn’t be more different:
Enterprise marketing, sales, and customer experience executives
Nineteen year-old college students
The first group loses sleep over rising costs, whereas the second just loses sleep.
But these two groups have more in common than you think:
Both have highly fragmented time.
Both spend more time on their smartphone than they’d like to admit.
Both are constantly searching for new applications that will save them time.
This last point is key: the moment your customer gets stuck and frustrated, there’s bound to be a newer more polished competitor they’re itching to switch to. Millennials or executives alike, both are screaming at your business “don’t make me wait!”
SEE ALSO: DOES YOUR SITE MEET THE ULTRA-HIGH EXPECTATIONS OF MILLENNIALS?
How Can You Stop A Customer From Bailing?
First, recognize that answers have to be instant. The moment a customer has a question, they need an answer. And if they don’t see a way to get an answer right where they are, they’re going to search the web and either fail to find their answer or, worse yet, end up on a competitor’s site. In fact, 57% of users abandon a site if they can’t find an answer.
When I Say Instant, I Mean Instant
Don’t be fooled by the promise of traditional self-service solutions like knowledge bases and static FAQs. Both are “help islands” and they don’t work. They require your customers to interrupt their task, find the tiny help link on your site, know exactly the right words to search for, and—if they’ve made it this far—read an article completely out of context for their task and somehow find their way back to where they were. If you look closely at your knowledge base traffic, don’t be surprised to find out that fewer than 1% of your customers ever reach your knowledge base, let alone find content it in. All of that hard work at creating content is moot if no one finds it.
There Are Better Ways
Contextual self-service — the idea of placing knowledge base content directly on every screen of your application—is the future. Many customer self-service companies are offering this basic functionality now, basically placing a search box behind a floating tab or help button. These can work better, but only if you use the right words in your content: if you title your help article “How to update your security credentials” and your customer is searching for “password change”, they’re not going to find your answer. The problem is, finding the right words for every article can be extremely costly and training your customers to know the right words is downright impossible.
At AnswerDash, we’ve overcome these terminology problems in multiple ways:
We use predictive analytics to determine the most likely relevant questions. As soon as a customer accesses AnswerDash, one of the top popular questions is probably the question they have.
We allow customers to browse Q&A in-context. This allows them to just recognize the relevant questions, rather than having to choose words to represent their question.
We allow customers to click or tap the content they have a question about using our patented object-search. This allows them to just point to express their question.
Because these features are so good at instantly finding the content a customer needs, we find that most customers never need to search.
Don’t make your customers wait! Adopt a contextual self-service solution today and watch your support tickets drop and your sales increase.
Give Your Customer Instant Answers with AnswerDash
AnswerDash contextual self-service support is proven to create a frictionless way for customers to help themselves on the web and in mobile Apps. Research has proven that old school, static FAQs and KBs cause site abandonment, drive up support calls and frustrate customers. With AnswerDash, your customers get smart self-service that is relevant and personalized right at the point of action, without having to leave the page or type to search. By improving the “Help UX,” AnswerDash customers are reducing customer friction and achieving a 30% - 50% reduction in support tickets and cost. What is good for your customers is great for your business. Learn more at www.answerdash.com.