Building a Better Self-Service Experience
What to Consider With Online Customer Service Tools
By Brian Yoder (Associate Director of Product Design — redoybri)
When it comes to customer service, a rewarding experience is about more than just addressing a customer problem. It’s about engaging in a conversation with a customer and providing them with an opportunity to feel listened to, understood, and empathized with.
Providing customers with a pleasant and empathetic customer service experience may seem impossible without face-to-face interaction. At Wayfair, our Enjoy team is dedicated to making that seemingly impossible thing happen. Through research, design, and testing (both qualitative and quantitative), we work to make those online customer service experiences delightful.
How do we do this? Here are some best practices we’ve developed for making online customer service experiences as delightful as in-person ones.
Resolution: Shorten the distance
More often than not, when a customer comes to you with a problem they’re less than thrilled. They may be distraught over receiving a damaged item, or irritated that they spent hours incorrectly assembling a bookshelf because an integral piece was missing.
Those emotions — anger, frustration, confuse, remorse — all color the way we interact with people online. So, one of the first things we should consider is, “does this experience placate or aggravate the customer?”
We can answer this by asking ourselves the following questions about our current service experience:
Does it provide a clear explanation of what resolutions are available?
If a customer wants a partial reason, they should know if that option is available upfront. If they’re interested in learning more about the return policy, we should put that information where they expect to find it.
Anticipate where customers will go to get their questions answered — the footer, Help Center, FAQs, and make sure those entry points are easily accessible and provide the information they need.
Do customers want more than one resolution option?
Don’t take the one-size-fits-all approach to your solutions. Give your customers a chance to tell you what they want and make their options apparent. Talk with your customer service team to find out what options they usually offer to customers over the phone and see how you can implement the best parts of that experience online.
Find opportunities to promote popular FAQ articles and Help Center content and empower customers who aren’t interested in engaging with you to find solutions that work for them. Give them the ability to solve their problems independent of customer service.
What’s the distance between the between the start and end of your process? Is there an opportunity to reduce that distance?
If you are making your customers fill out a long form only to have to wait 2–3 business days for a response, you are not helping to placate their frustration or anger. Here at Wayfair, we recently explored how we could shorten the distance between the start and end of our online return flow. By narrowing down the steps from five to three, we increased our overall completion metric from 16 to 45%.
Recognize: Talk less, smile more
Providing a quick resolution is not enough. In talking to customer service agents at Wayfair, one of the things our team heard was that customers sometimes just wanted someone to listen to them — an opportunity to express their frustration or anger. And once they had that outlet, they were satisfied with the overall resolution that agent provided them.
So from an online perspective, it’s important to provide a clear acknowledgment that something went wrong and that you are willing to listen to their issue so that it won’t happen again. So strike a balance between saying your sorry and giving them inputs to describe their problem — whether an open text field, checkboxes of issues or even the option to upload a photo of their damaged item. The experience should diffuse their emotional state. But don’t get too wordy or apologetic — it may feel like artificial or even patronizing which can have an adverse effect: increased abandonment rates.
And finally, when they’ve completed their online experience don’t leave them at a dead end. Like in any conversation, give them the opportunity to continue the dialogue with you. Promote other channels like email and chat along with pointing them to related-FAQ content and Help Center topics to make them aware of additional resources when they have another issue. And with some options, consider feedback mechanisms like emoji meters or a post-survey to gauge their satisfaction.
Review and Refine: Don’t assume you’re done
Once the experiences are in place, continually review quantitative and qualitative feedback to see if there are any opportunities to increase satisfaction or streamline the process. Establish regular check-ins with your customer service agents to see what new issues customers are facing and how they can be emulated with your online tools.
Know what resolutions you can provide, recognize that customers and their problems and continually review and refine your approach. Even though the dialogue may not be with a customer service representative, it can provide the same level of satisfaction for the majority of your customers.
Leveraging the recommendations listed above can provide more than just a rewarding online customer experience, it can start to build loyalty and trust with your customers. So don’t discount your online customer service presence, it may open opportunities for customers to get answers to their questions without having to call.
