Consumer independence

Let’s imagine a situation most adults have experienced at least once: you need an idea of ​​what to make for food. There are several ways to deal with such a challenge. Some will reach for a thick volume of a cookbook, others will call a family or social culinary guru, and still others will start looking for inspiration, e.g. on their favorite culinary blog or among photos of dishes published by friends. Of course, some people will look in the fridge and pull out the so-called. anything. Some will also decide to buy a ready-made dish in a nearby store or order it using the application.
Although the choice of a particular path may depend on many factors, each of the listed behaviors is the result of striving to solve the problem yourself. And, although the above issue is trivial, it illustrates the common mode of responding to challenges. Simply – using various available tools (often on-line), we strive to find a satisfactory solution as soon as possible. No wonder that 65% of consumers prefer independence when solving simple matters (source: “State of Connected Customer“, Salesforce, 10.2020).

Just like enjoying a meal, the sense of satisfaction for each of us may stem from something else. Overall, coping with a challenge on your own is a source of pride and satisfaction. When implementing self-service solutions, we should strive to provide consumers with such positive emotions. Thanks to this, it will be possible to achieve one of the goals of designing experiences. The following questions will be useful when searching and selecting the optimal tools:

• what challenges do customers face?
• what information do they need?
• what content do they find valuable?
• what formats are they looking for (e.g. articles, podcasts, how-to videos)?
• what devices do they use, which ones do they prefer?
• what information do they want easy access to?
• what difficulties may they have (technical, content reception, other)?

First of all, it is worth implementing tools that respond to the aforementioned need (nearly ⅔ of consumers!) and enable them to solve simple situations on their own. This function will be performed, for example, by chatbots, forms and more complex portals for customers.

Self-service processes should reflect modern UX knowledge, provide the user with convenience and intuitiveness of the actions taken. This is extremely important because as many as 91% of consumers declare that good customer service experiences make them more likely to make another purchase in the same place. What’s more, 80% believe that the quality of service is as important as the products and services offered by the company, and at the same time, almost 60% noticed that their expectations towards companies in this area have increased due to the pandemic (according to: “State of Connected Customer ”, Salesforce, 10/2020). In the coming months, we can only expect a strengthening of this trend.

Salesforce offers a number of solutions that allow you to build and strengthen processes based on customer independence, which we will devote the next entries to.