Helping customers help themselves – optimising customer experience by improving search task flows

Abstract

Large consumer-facing enterprises can offer a wide range of products and services to their customers. In parallel, often the quantity of information offered online to customers to support these services is similarly large in scale–so how can an enterprise optimize online support to improve customer satisfaction and lower support costs to the business? To address this problem we have used quantitative and qualitative methods to identify the most significant topics concerning customers over a 14-week period. These analyses in turn informed our user test design, which investigated individual search-for-help behaviors. The output from these analyses was used to form recommendations for high-priority, low cost interventions in the User Interface design of the support website, so that customers are more willing and able to help themselves.