Customer Self Service is a customer's (internal or external) ability to do things themselves and on their timeline.

Customer self service means happier customers (internal or external) serviced at a lower cost. This is especially true as customers become more tech savvy and tools become easier to use. For example, a customer might need some help initially but do they really need to wait for the office to reopen on Monday and a CSR just to reorder a 0.49 cent part?  Or does the manager / executive really wait for someone to be at the office to run a report to validate or invalidate an idea they had at 2 in the morning?

Customer self service isn’t a simple case of taking an existing application and deploying it for customer self service but it’s not as complex as would appear. It requires thoughtful planning in several key areas:

• Understanding the Process: Knowing exactly what customers want to do. To ensure a smooth experience, the self service tools need to be personalized towards what the customer wants.
• Ease of Use: The service fails if the design is so complicated or confusing that customers will get frustrated, escpically in the IT "apple-ization" era.
• Logical Organization: Group features and options to ensure that users can find what they need fast without too many steps.
• Custom Application Design: Customer Self Service should be designed for the needs of the users and not for the type of tool. The tool trap is easy to fall into.