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Despite numerous technological innovations, managing customer relationships is a challenging endeavor. Exceptional service promotes customer satisfaction and loyalty, and provides an avenue for marketing new products and services. The challenge lies in satisfy customers who expect, real-time service across channels that include the Web, e-mail, fax and telephone 24/7. Web-based innovations have given rise to online self-service and this is a definitive solution to improving service delivery while reducing costs. It is undoubtedly good business sense to helping customers to help themselves, especially when reallocating costly support personnel to service the most profitable business sector.

Most consumers are increasingly preferring to “help themselves” while demanding instant access to information, product data and online support. Although self-service is a part of transforming the customer experience, customer self-service initiative must integrate the right technology, business processes, and user adoption strategies, to be successful. Like a web self services that can effectively help you balance customer demands for high quality service, to easily find the information they need anywhere, anytime, without the need for knowledge management assistance. The following steps can help enhance the customer service experience.

Recognizing the User Preference
It is only by recognizing the needs of the users that the customer experience can be transformed. It may not be viable to provide a unique service experience tailored to each customer. It therefore makes more sense to have a practical and cost-effective approach by defining the various segments of customers. With this information, customers can be given information regarding the new products and services along the channel.

Evaluate Effectiveness of Channels
Evaluating the efficiency of the infrastructure that is already in place will offer a baseline for process and technology transformation. This is irrespective of whether an existing CRM solution is extended, or a web-based support portal is enhanced or a direct response campaign is being prepared. When preparing for self-service initiatives, it is vital to map the structured and unstructured data sources, and then decide where a knowledge base and/or search solution is needed to access and deliver this information directly to users.

Coordinate the Processes
There are several exercises that can provide the foundation for an optimized customer experience with an understanding of user segments and needs. One activity is to map common tasks to the preferred channel and related environments for each user type. This can focus on filling gaps such as service levels on certain channel and create incentives for one segment of users to move from an inefficient performing channel to another. With channel-specific marketing there can be incentives for change.

Design a Transition Plan
It is with a change in the management strategy that the customer experience can be optimized. Users can be moved from one channel to another for enhancing the customer experience. Organizations need to reduce escalations by optimizing self-service channels to reduce channel abandonment, using other online tools like email response or Web forms to capture problem descriptions. Providing effective Web self-service is more than just deploying a search engine.

Plan for Improvement
With a series of steps the customer support experience can be transformed. By taking one step further and merging product and user activity data with built-in business intelligence, organizations can optimize service delivery, improve the customer experience and generate better products.

Customers find Web self  service easy and convenient, and Gartner reports that customers can complete 60 to 80 percent of a simple service interaction without the assistance of a service agent. It is therefore important for the knowledge base needs to be updated regularly so that every time a customer interacts with a website or asks a question the information is readily available.