Customer self service is any arrangement that lets a person get what they came to you for without going through one of your people at all, so they find the answer them selves, or make the change them selves, at eleven at night or on a Sunday or whenever it happens to suit them, and your inbox never hears a word about any of it. There is nothing clever in the idea. People have been doing it to you for years without either side calling it a thing. The confusion starts with the phrase, on account of it meaning one thing in a meeting and a very different thing to the person at the other end of the wire. In a meeting it tends to mean a help centre. To your customer it nearly always means being let do the job them selves rather than having to ask you to do it for them.
Mairead was not looking for any of this when she found it. She roasts coffee outside Kilkenny with two people working for her, and most of it goes out on subscription now, a bag or two bags every fortnight to somewhere around nine hundred households. In January she was chasing a photograph that had gone slow on the shop page, and to get at it she opened the stats thing her web fella Fintan had left running the year before, which she had been into maybe twice in her life. The photograph turned out to be grand. It was the list under it that stopped her.
The most read page on her whole website for the year was not the shop, and it was not the piece about the farm in Kenya she had paid a writer good money for. It was a help article called how to skip a delivery. Eight hundred and forty odd opens. She was pleased with that for about a minute, and then she went and read the article her own self, the way a customer coming to it cold would, and the last line of it said to drop them a line before the Thursday and they would skip the week for you. So she opened the inbox and had a proper look. Skip requests were the biggest single category in there and had been all year.
Eight hundred and forty people had gone and found the answer, read it through, and then written in anyway. There was nothing the matter with the article, which is the part that took her a while to get her head round, on account of it telling them exactly what to do and the thing it told them to do being write an email to Mairead.
Where that get in touch ending actually comes from
Nobody put that ending there out of laziness, and if you trace it back it started life as a genuinely good bit of writing. Some evening in the first year Mairead answered a woman who wanted to skip a fortnight because she was away, and she wrote back four warm lines finishing with tell me which week and I will sort it out for you. That is the correct thing to put in a mail. It is friendly and it is true and the woman got what she wanted.
Then that same mail got sent forty odd times, so Mairead did the sensible thing and saved it as a template. And a year after that, when Fintan built the help section, the template got pasted in as an article, ending and all, since it was the best wording anybody had. There was no bad call made anywhere along that chain. A help section fills up with old replies, mostly, and a reply is written by somebody who is on the point of doing the work for you, so the ending gives the work back by design. Once it has a heading sitting over it and a URL under it, nobody reads that ending as an instruction any more. They read it as an article.
The rest of the section had gone the very same way. A piece about changing your delivery address ended with the address to write to. The Christmas pause one finished up by giving you a date to write in by. Fintan had done a nice job on the layout of the lot, boxes and a search bar and all, and you would not spot a thing wrong with any of it standing outside looking in, which is the difficulty with the whole of it. Nobody had ever gone and audited the endings.
Why the most read article on your site is usually the one costing you the most mail
There is a habit of reading article views as deflection, and it goes deep, since every tool that counts views for you presents them that way. A view lands in a column and the column gets read as mail avoided. For one class of article that is fair enough. For another class it is the wrong way round entirely, and this is the useful part of the whole thing, so it is worth going slow over.
What a view measures is demand, and it says nothing whatever about whether the person went away finished. An article ending in a button that does the job and an article ending in an address to write to look exactly alike in your stats, the pair of them getting the one view apiece, and only one of the two has settled anything for anybody. So the eight hundred and forty Mairead had been quietly pleased with was not a count of mail she had avoided. It was nearer to a count of the mail on its way to her, give or take the few who read the thing twice over.
Turn that round, mind you, and you get the one report on a help section that is worth the running, and hardly anybody runs it. The articles nobody opens are not the interesting end of it at all. What you want is the heavily read ones whose last paragraph goes and hands the job straight back over, since those are telling you in plain numbers how many people wanted a particular thing done this year and had no way at all of doing it them selves. That list is usually short. Truth be told you have been running that survey by accident for years already. Nobody looks at it, on account of the same list reading like a table of successes.
The difference between telling somebody a thing and letting them do it
Sort a week of incoming mail by what the person actually wanted out of it and the whole of it comes apart into two piles, though not evenly and not tidily either. The first pile is after knowing something. Whether the decaf is a Swiss water process, whether you post to the islands, why the roast date on this bag sits two days later than the last one did. Reading finishes those off completely, and a page carries them well, and when the page is written plainly the person goes off satisfied and you never hear a word about it. That much of self service everybody already has a handle on.
The second pile is a different animal and it is the one generating your mail. Somebody wants the next delivery skipped, or the card changed, or the address moved for two months while she is above in Sligo minding her mother, and no amount of good writing is going to finish off a single one of those. An article pointed at that pile can only ever be directions towards the place where the doing gets done. Where no such place exists on your site the directions have nowhere to point but back at your own inbox, and rewriting the article will not shift it, on account of the article never having been the missing part of it.
There is a trap sitting just past that one, and it catches people who have done everything else right. You go and build the place where the doing happens, and then you put it behind an account. Now a subscriber who has never once had a password, and who wants to move one delivery by a single week, has to set up a login, mind her way through a reset mail, find the right screen and then find the right order on it. Writing to you takes twenty seconds and always works. So she writes, and you have gone and built a form that sits in front of the mail rather than instead of it, which is the expensive version of the mistake because it looks finished.
What Mairead ended up with cost Fintan a day and a half in February. Every dispatch mail already carried the next delivery date in it, so he put a small link beside that date which moved the delivery on by one cycle. No password on it. The link only good for the one order and only until the Thursday. Nothing else about the site changed at all. The article stayed where it was with its last paragraph rewritten, and by the spring the skip mail had dropped to a handful a week, most of them people wanting two skips together or a different week entirely, which is a fair question and one you would want a human being answering anyway. Fintan never touched the help section again.
Where self service costs more than it saves
Fair is fair, so the other side of it. A question that arrives eleven times a year does not want an article. Writing it, editing it, keeping it true for three years and finding it has gone stale on you costs more than answering the eleven mails did, and small operations lose whole weekends to building help centres for questions nobody was asking that often. The sums are worth doing before the writing, not after.
Then there is the version where self service turns into a wall. You will know it when you meet it as a customer your own self, since it is the site where the contact address has been buried four clicks deep behind a bot and a set of articles that do not answer the thing you came about. People find the address in the end. They only arrive at it cross, and they open with a line about how hard it was to find you, and whatever was a small annoyance ten minutes ago is now the second thing they have to complain about.
And some things should never go near self service at all, no two ways about it. Anything that has already gone wrong wants a name and a person on it quickly, money especially, and breakages, and the delivery that never turned up at all. Send somebody in that state off to read an article and a bad Tuesday goes and turns into a review sitting on your listing for the next twelvemonth. Self service is for the ordinary and the dull, mostly, and the dull carries the volume anyway.
The self service examples worth copying are the ones you never notice
Ask for customer self service examples and you will be handed a roundup of help centres belonging to companies with a hundred people in support and a team who do nothing else. Not much use to a roastery with three staff. The examples worth having are the ones you used your own self in the last fortnight without ever thinking the phrase.
Mairead started noticing them once she knew what she was looking at. She had ordered a bearing for the roaster and never wrote to that supplier once, because the dispatch mail had a tracking link in it and the tracking link answered the only question she had. Her electricity crowd sends a bill with a line on it that lets her move the direct debit date, and she has moved it twice and could not tell you the name of a single person who works there. The one that stuck with her most was the ferry, where changing a sailing takes about four taps on a phone in a car park, and she remembered being surprised by how little of it there was.
None of those looked anything like a help centre. Not one of them felt like software. There was no search box in any of them and no articles either, and the whole of the work was sitting in a mail she had already been sent or on a page she was already on. That is the shape of it when it is done well. The doing gets put down beside the moment somebody wants it done, and the writing around it goes very short after that, since there is not a great deal left to explain once the button is sitting there.
For a small enough site none of this wants software at all. A dozen answers will sit happily enough on one well built page, and there is more craft in laying that page out properly than anybody expects going into it. Once each answer wants an address of its own, so that somebody on your side can fire one over as a link mid reply, and once there are enough of them that running your eye down the list stops working, what you have on your hands has gone and become a different article of furniture with different rules on it. The name changes as well. Have a read of what a knowledge base is before you go much further with it.
What we sell, and what it is traded against
There is one paragraph of selling in this piece and you are reading it, so I will keep it short. Maxdesk is a shared inbox with a help desk built on top of it, and the part of it that bears on this subject is our knowledge base software, which comes on every plan we do, the $0 one as well. It handles the telling half, and only that half. An answer gets written out properly the once and given an address of its own, and after that whoever is working the mail can paste it in as a link without leaving the reply they had open in front of them. Nobody gets a per agent bill out of any of it either, since the charge goes on the workspace rather than on heads, so a seasonal pair of hands in November comes to nothing extra.
Now the honest side of the free plan, and you would want this in front of you before signing your name to anything. There are supporting ads sitting in the workspace your team looks at. Mail going out carries Maxdesk branding on it. And the history rolls over at three months, which is the term that would have caught Mairead out, on account of the year she wanted to look back across being a good deal longer than the window she would have had to look through. Twenty dollars a month on a workspace clears the ads and the branding away and stretches the history to twelve months. Ninety nine brings in the AI layer with two years behind it. That is the lot, and we will leave the selling there.
The half of this we do not build for you
The doing half is not ours and I would rather say it straight out, in an article about self service of all things, since the strongest version of the idea is a customer changing something them selves with none of us involved at any point. That link Fintan put in the dispatch mail came out of the system that runs her shop. No support tool built it, ours would not have built it, and if what you want is a place where customers log in and move their own orders about, that belongs to whatever runs your product. We are not that and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
We are email only as well, which lands harder in this subject than it does in most. No chat, no phone, no customer portal. Somebody standing on your pricing page at half nine at night with a doubt in their head is better off with a chat box sitting on that page than with any inbox going, ours as much as anybody else’s, and small businesses leak a fair bit of money right at that spot. It is a real gap. Buy one off somebody if that sounds like your trouble. We do not sell one and I would rather tell you than let you find out.
And the exercise in the next section runs on looking backwards, so those three months on the free plan are a real cost against us for anybody with a season in their year, all the same. If a full twelve months of looking back is worth more to you than twenty dollars is, then you are reading it right and I would not try to talk you round.
Where to start, if the stats page is telling you something
Do not start by writing more articles. That is what everybody reaches for and it starts at the wrong end of the job, on account of more writing being the very thing that got most help sections into the state they are in.
Take the five most read pages in your help section and read only the last paragraph of each one. That is the entire exercise and it takes about four minutes. Any of those five whose last paragraph tells the reader to contact you is not saving you a mail, it is booking one, and the view count beside it is a rough guess at how many it booked last year. If you have no stats at all, and plenty of small sites have none, pick the five your team is sickest of instead, which will get you to nearly the same place.
Then for each one, work out what the person is actually trying to do and whether there is anywhere at all on your site they could do it them selves. A few of them will already have somewhere, and the whole job is a link and a rewritten paragraph. Others will want something built, and that is a job for whoever runs your website rather than for your support tool, and it is usually smaller than it sounds once you see it written down. And some will come back needing a person on them, which is a perfectly good answer and worth writing down as well, so you stop trying to automate the ones that were never going to go.
Mairead’s stats page had been running for two years before she ever opened it. The link that fixed the thing took a day and a half in February, and the article that started the whole business is still up there, still the most read page on the site, only the last line of it is a link now instead of an address.