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Self-service portals are highly personalized and interactive services on web that help your customers solve their queries with ease.
Through these portals, your customers will be able to receive answers to their questions, complete transactions and submit support issues. In earlier days, self-service portals are seen as cost-cutting tools. However, the new generation technology turned them into productive tools that generate huge revenue.

Let’s get started by knowing the definition of self-service portals.

Self-service portals are the websites that enable users to perform high value transactions. Whether it is managing support tickets or paying bills or resolving queries, customers can use self-service portals. These portals are vital elements of customer experience. Most of the customers prefer to complete transactions themselves through self-service portals rather than making a call or travel to the business location. The next generation technologies are enabling the delivery of highly personalized content such as compelling cross-sell/up-sell based on customers profile and activities. As a result of this, self-service portal are evolving as cost-cutting tools that generate true profits.

Key features of self-service portals

As said, self-service portals allow customers to receive answers to their questions in no time and perform desired operations. With an open line of communication and a broad array of self-service options, you will surely boost customer satisfaction and retain potential customers for years. Below is the list of key features of self-service portals –

• Customers can place service/support requests or solve queries just by logging into your website and accessing personalized content.
• Customers can update their profile and view older transactions, check the status of their order and do many more.
• Customized support portals provide both community and web publishing platform and gives the customers a place to interact with other customers.
• Your customers can request support using request form provided in the portal and initiate live chat session with your agent via comments given in the knowledge base articles.
• Self-service portals empower customer preference of online information before escalating the issue to the next level. These portals increase first contact resolution and customer satisfaction.
• Highlights important content based on the popularity, frequency of use and business criteria. You can slice and dice the data to optimize user experience using powerful analyzing and reporting tools.

When it comes to customer support, most of the people avoid the idea of approaching somebody else to solve their queries. The reason could be bad experience with customer support agents, lack of trust in support process or because they can’t rely on someone else. Self-help portals are attracting many customers because of the availability of plenty of resources that give your customers the power to take things into their own hands.

Self-service portals for IT help desk

When you are running an IT business, you are expected to be available for internal users. As an IT admin, you need to go through responding the same questions endlessly and fixing the same issues again and again. By entering self-service, you will have a secret weapon in hand that will make your professional life much better. Every self-service solution has a set of common questions that come back as tickets on a daily basis. Some of these questions are simple, while others require detailed instructions.

Videos and step-by-step guides are beneficial to both the customers and companies. Companies can focus more on the big picture like – profits and goals as opposed to other customer service platforms. To get all these, it may be wise to incentivize customers to submit solutions. It is also important to keep personal data safe and secured and provide appropriate assistance in case of problem.

Setting up self-service portals requires consistent development of content. As there is a growing database of FAQs that need to be answered, you can stay up-to-date on these questions through multiple customer service channels including, social media, telephone and email. Moreover, embracing self-service as a part of customer support needs constant attention and dedication. If the primary business actions taken ate online, then self-service portal is the best way to handle customer support requests.
By using self-service portals, you can bring down your support volume significantly and save a lot of time and money. You can also create a comprehensive self-service guide for your business by adding a new solution in your knowledge base. Your agents will create solutions on the fly whenever they work on a ticket and make sure that everyone across the web can see the answer. Your help desk software will give right answer, when somebody has the same question.

Vision Helpdesk solutions help you set up a beautifully designed self-service portal that help your customers dive in and start looking for answers without standing in queue. This way, they can discover the solution without waiting for somebody from your team to get back.