Self-Service—Your Customer Expectation and Preference

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Self-Service—Your Customer Expectation and Preference

What can your customers do without your parental supervision? Your customer wants to be empowered to interact with your business online. Can they?

By Jennifer Matt

Wednesday, February 14, 2018

I don’t usually quote a lot of data based off surveys but I’m going to quote some statistics, so you know the opinions in this article are not just based on my personal observation but a much larger sample set. The majority of customers in the US (>75%) expect a self-service option on your website. More than 40% of customers in the US prefer self-service over human contact.

What can your customers do online with you in a self-service fashion?

If the answer is “nothing” it is time to invest. You don’t need another reason—most of your customers expect it; most of your customers prefer it. I will give you other reasons. Software is better than your employees at a lot of things. There are a lot of things that software can’t do yet that you need your employees to focus on. Think of self-service as software being a resource you deploy that enables your customers to serve themselves.

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About Jennifer Matt

Jennifer Matt is the managing editor of WhatTheyThink’s Print Software section as well as President of Web2Print Experts, Inc. a technology-independent print software consulting firm helping printers with web-to-print and print MIS solutions.

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