Designing a Frictionless Customer Experience

If you want to win in today's digital world, you need to cater to the needs of your website audience.

Gone are the days where businesses have complete control over the manufacturing, distribution, and advertising of their products. Customers now have resources at their disposal that they can use to gain leverage on a brand. 

The most importan resource at their disposalt? Their attention. 

Consumers no longer need to flip through the yellow pages in order to find information about your competitors. And if they can't find the information they're looking for on your website, they are–literally–seconds away from navigating to your competition's site.

If you don't hold your site visitor's attention, your consumers will. 

The Rise of the Answer Economy 

When the right elements at the right place, the right time, and under the right circumstances converge you get a PERFECT STORM. 

A perfect storm is brewing right now in marketing. 

The way consumers find information on the internet has changed dramatically over the last 10 years. 

Search began with simple keyword queries, evolved into the semantic web, and has now quickly morphed into question answering.

The Answer Economy sits at the center of the storm where the combination of changing consumer trends and technological breakthroughs are fundamentally changing the marketing landscape. 

The term Answer Economy refers to the technology-enabled transformation driven by consumer demand for real-time, on-demand, direct answers to questions.

Leading tech brands have embraced this shift by designing technology specifically designed to answer questions instantly.

But most websites haven't gotten the memo.

The #1 frustration reported by most website visitors is that they can't get answers to simple questions. 

Self-Service Answers in the Buyers Journey

There are. three main stages of the buyer's journey–Awareness, Consideration, Decision-Making– and self-service answer experiences impact all of them.

Self-service answer experiences don't just save you money and make your site visitor's lives easier. 

They increase conversion rates by removing friction from the buyer's journey.

Awareness

Driving awareness is a key top-of-funnel goal. Putting unlimited information at the fingertips of your visitors gives you an unfair advantage in this regard. It allows B2B buyers to discover and vet your service or product on their own, it allows B2C buyers to overcome objections to the purchase on their own, and it allows everyone to confirm that you offer quality customer support. 

At this stage, your visitors have questions about the capabilities of your product, your ability to get it to them, and your willingness to train them on how to use it. 

Consideration

Once your visitor confirms that you offer a solution to their problem, they move into the consideration stage. At this point, they're evaluating your product or service to see how it can fit needs compared to your competition. 

They're likely to have questions about the your product specs, the terms of your service, and price. Putting this information at their fingertips will increase the liklihood that they advance to the next stage. 

Decision-Making

The last stage of the buyer's journey is when your prospects have their most specific--and often most important--questions.

How many users can I add? What integrations are available? How do I access the API?

Making these answers easily available will help ensure your your visitors don't get tripped up right before they cross the finish line. 

Self-Service Answers in Customer Support 

According to Nuance Enterprise , 67% of customers prefer to use self-service options instead of speaking with a company representative. But if your customers don't want to talk to humans, how do you answer their questions?

Providing fast answers to support questions is a ciritical aspect of quality customer support. Most support teams evaluate themselves on how fast they can resolve a customer's problem. Despite this, many teams have not fully embraces self-service support options.

You should have the content, training, and automation available to empower your customers to find answers to questions precisely when they need them. 

There are a few keys to this: 

Analyze User Intent

Understanding what your customers are asking about will help you develop resources capable of providing answers. Some ways you can do this is to use a Frase Assistant to track the topics your visitors are asking about or analyzing search terms. These methods are critical for identifying "content gaps" that need filling. By monitoring the topics and searches that your customers are running, you can simply create content around the questions and topics that didn't return a match. 

The Business Case

An in-depth study by Forrester Research and Oracle analyzed business costs when handling support in multiple customer service channels. The results found that web self-service can reduce costs by as much as $11 per resolution. 

Providing self-service solutions for your customers isn't just good for them, it's good for you. 

With tools like Frase, you can save thousands of dollars in annual resolution costs. 

How Frase Answers Helps Remove Friction and Drive Revenue 

Frase Answers uses your existing website content to answer your visitor questions, instantly.

No complex decision trees, qualification questions, or waiting 3 days for a live chat rep to answer a question. 

Implementation only takes a few minutes, so you can have a self-service solution that drives conversion, accelerates revenue, and deflects support requests live on your site today.