Every digital brand and technology that consumers interact with continuously shapes and evolves digital behavior. Brands such as Amazon, Uber, and Doordash have successfully made customer self-service the default choice for interacting with consumer brands.
While customer behavior is driving more and more brands to adopt self-service, it is becoming a significant efficiency driver for customer service teams. Richpanel customers see up to 60-65% of their customer queries not requiring an agent to step in. Beyond saving hiring costs, it also helps their agents focus on complex queries and power through them in a shorter time as they are now distraction-free.
There is no better time to test the efficacy of self-service than the holiday season. While most brands agree with the sentiment, they often find themselves stuck in inertia and continue to stick to their status quo of more live chats and email conversations. We have compiled the must-have self-scenarios for this holiday season which will reduce your support queries by up to 50%.
If you are using Richpanel, setting up these scenarios takes a few minutes. If you would like to try Richpanel self-service, our implementation team would be happy to set it up for you.
1. Where is My Order?
Let’s get the obvious one out of the way. WISMO (Where is my order) takes between 20-40% of E-commerce support tickets based on how well your post-purchase communication is set up.
Consumers are used to the pampering of Amazon. Convenience trumps everything for a consumer. Expecting consumers to wait on a live chat or send in an email ticket to understand the status of orders is akin to shooting yourself in the foot.
2. Return Requests
The holiday season gives consumers more leverage, and they will maximize the same. So expect a flurry of returns. The information gathering behind every return request is just way too tedious. Agents are expected to ask the reason, check for the validity of the reasoning, then cross-verify if the return can be processed based on the policies of that particular order/ product.
Simplifying it for everyone involved by creating a self-service flow to process returns. Implement a neat flow incorporating multiple scenarios using decision trees.
You could also connect your returns portal to this self-service flow and completely automate the end-end scenarios without human intervention. Richpanel integrates seamlessly with Loop Returns and Returnly.
3. Exchange and Refund Requests
Similar to returns, exchanges would be a regular support fixture. Simplify your exchange policy and make it easily accessible through contextual FAQs. To expand on that, one shouldn’t have a global exchange policy and then restrict that for specific products. Let customers access the exchange policy for their purchase and enable them to raise an exchange request.
The agent will just need to approve and can instantly create a new order for the customer or issue a refund in no time
4. Forgot coupon code
Discounts and coupon codes will be the order of the day, come BFCM. With that, you should also expect a surge in tickets where customers want to edit their orders with a forgotten discount code or have chanced upon a new and better one (your marketing team is at it!)
Some brands ask customers to cancel the previous order and place a new order with the discount code applied. But they overlook the logistics mess that this would create. Instead, simplify it for end customers to edit their order and update it with their discount code. You could also stipulate a time window within which this could be applicable.
5. Damage Claims
Damage requests are another category of query where the information gathering for an agent is quite a lot. Create a seamless flow where the customers can upload pictures of the damaged order, choose from a list of reasons on what kind of damage/ fault they are displeased with, and direct it to your support/ claims department only to approve and proceed with the claim.
You can also provide multiple scenarios on their preferred next steps.
- Process a refund
- Issue a credit
- Ship a replacement
- Shop a similar product
6. Account updates
The number of first-time customers of your brand will massively spike, and many of your infrequent shoppers will also come back for your deep discounts and new product ranges. Save your agents time for complex scenarios and revenue-driving conversations. Eliminate mundane account update requests such as changing billing/shipping addresses, changing communication coordinates, or updating passwords.
A simpler self-serviceable ‘My account’ section should be able to handle these scenarios and spare your agents' bandwidth.
7. Guided Selling flows
With the expected traffic increase, your support team will not only face post-purchase queries. They will be expected to help customers choose the right product, guide them with discount related queries, and several other pre-purchase scenarios might pop-up.
It is quite impractical to train support agents on every single product information. But it is possible to do this at scale through pre-purchase self-service flows. It could be in the form of guide selling flows or product discovery quizzes.
8. Unboxing/ Implementation/ Set-up helps
Pre-empt the typical implementation, setup, and how-to-use questions that might come in from your customers for your products. Create easy-to-consume guides and offer them as quick links on your customer self-service portal.
You could also invest in creating video demos of your products or common troubleshooting scenarios based on your product and the YouTube links in the self-service portal.
