4 reasons why Tooltips are a great customer success tool

At Tooltip.io we like tooltips. So much that we have the word in the name. Tooltips get a bad rap these days, mostly due to misuse (see Why tutorials don’t work for user onboarding), but they are a great tool for customer success.

There are two types of tooltips — tooltips and hotspots (question marks). Essentially they’re the same, with only a slight difference in appearance.

A hotspot can be placed on the screen and serve to call out a tooltip. These two are pretty common on the web, and for a good reason. Four good reasons, actually.

Inline placement

Tooltips display right on the page. This is important, because you can quickly provide help to users, right on the spot. And that’s a big user experience win.

You save your users a detour to an FAQ page or Help section, and possibly acustomer support query. To use professional jargon, you eliminate points of friction — a place where users have to stop and ponder: Hmm, what does this mean?

A tooltip can help answer a common user question or decode a complex term. This way you keep your user on track. They get the help they need and move on quickly.

Relevance

Since tooltips display right on the page, they are highly relevant to the task at hand. Relevance is the key to an effective customer support. You can only help your user if she is in need of help. Otherwise your help message will be dismissed at first sight. With tooltip it’s relatively easy to serve pertinent, bite-size help tips in context of the page or task at hand.

Automation

Tooltips are a great way to automate customer support. Over 62% of users never contact human customer support. With tooltips you can easily answer frequent questions right on the spot, in context of the page, automatically. Your users get to quickly find help they need and move through the product faster on their own. At the same time, your customer support has more time to deal with important issues that need a human touch.

At Tooltip.io we’ve taken tooltips to a whole new level with custom triggers. For example, you can show a tooltip when user reaches a particular section on the page to help avoid errors.

Another example is to show a tooltip as soon as the page loads to highlight an important element or point user in the right direction.

Subtlety

Finally, tooltips are subtle. They don’t overload the page with content, yet it’s readily available for the user.

So there you have it. These are 4 users why we love tooltips. Give them a try.

This post was originally published in Tooltip.io Blog