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Most businesses maintain some sort of customer self-service tools, whether it’s a chatbot or guide bot framework or a collection of knowledge base articles. Chances are your business maintains some sort of a self-service option, but does your business do a good job of promoting that to your customers?

Self-service provides customers the opportunity to solve a question on their own without directly involving your customer support team or help desk ticketing software. In this way, not only does self-service empower customers, but it empowers your customer service team by lessening the burden of frequent repeat tasks and questions.

A common example of self-service is the self-checkout at a grocery store, but self-service is really just like the internet in a nutshell. When your sink starts leaking, is it your first instinct to call someone to come fix it, or to fix it yourself? And if you want to fix it yourself but aren‘t too familiar with the complexities of plumbing, how are you going to figure out how to fix it?

Most people will probably Google it (or Bing it, if you’re into that sort of thing), read or watch a tutorial (thanks WikiHow) and ultimately do it themselves. This process doesn’t involve any plumbers and the customer, you, can do it on your own time – not to mention you might have learned something about the magic and/or curse of DIY projects.

However the disconnect between DIY-passion and technological-dependence here is that most people in the world today have developed an instinctual system for relying on search engines and the goodwill of WikiHow writers and YouTube samaritans. On the flip side, how do your customers know where and how to find answers or solve issues with your products?

Many businesses fail to properly promote their self-service options and so they go unused. To make it worse, if these channels appear to be useless, they might be scrapped and thus leave businesses in the digital dark ages.

                                               Don’t stay in the digital dark ages – provide easy to find and operate self-service options