The Essential Guide to
Digital Self Service
Customers are ready to take matters into their own hands—and they can’t do it without you.
Introduction
“If you want a thing done well, do it yourself.” Napoleon Bonaparte made that statement in the late 18th century, but he could have just as easily been describing today.
Thanks to technology, people now have the power to manage many aspects of their personal and professional lives without human contact—and they’re loving it. According to the Harvard Business Review, 81% of people try to resolve issues on their own before contacting customer service. And a survey from Zendesk found that 67% of users prefer self-service over human interaction.
This new self-service reality has major implications for the world of business. In the context of SaaS, self-service refers to tools, systems, and other resources that allow customers to independently access information, perform tasks, and resolve issues without the need for direct interaction with customer-facing teams—think Support Reps and Customer Success Managers (CSMs). Customer communities, learning management systems (LMS), and in-app engagements are all examples of self-service tools. SaaS customers not only want these tools to be available, they expect them to be.
For Customer Success, Support, and other customer-facing teams, these new customer expectations can seem like just another pain point in an already tough environment. As technology companies have shifted away from a grow-at-any-cost model fueled by easy money, post-sales professionals are under pressure to maintain revenue growth while budgets remain stagnant.
But that view is short-sighted.
The truth is that self-service kills two birds with one stone, allowing companies to deliver a better customer experience while simultaneously making their teams more productive and efficient—all without increasing the cost-to-serve
This guide provides a comprehensive blueprint for companies looking to implement digital self-service strategies. It offers best practices, actionable steps, and the guidance you need to confidently launch initiatives that deliver quick, tangible results for your business.
Let’s get started.
Chapter 1
Essential Components of Digital Self-Service
Digital self-service strategies are built with technologies that place the power in the hands of customers. These tools enable customers to take charge of their journeys to achieve product value. While online education, in-app engagement and communities each approach self-service in slightly different ways, they all optimize and automate customer touchpoints so that direct person-to-person contact isn’t a must.
Online Customer Communities: More Than a Message Board
An online customer community is a dedicated space where customers, users, internal stakeholders, partners, and others meet to discuss and share experiences related to a company’s offerings. Users may visit a community to troubleshoot, find product news, discover new use cases, or simply to interact with other like-minded individuals. Because community is often the first place customers go when interacting with a company, it’s a natural place to start when developing a self-service strategy.
Self-service customer support via community is a common use case because many communities actually start as support hubs. By optimizing communities for peer-to-peer support and support resources, organizations can empower customers to resolve issues indpendently—and more quickly—while reducing the workload on Support and Customer Success teams.
But community self-service goes beyond troubleshooting. When users become active members of a community, they become more invested in your product and your company. As their engagement increases, their renewal rates do, too. Intriguingly, community self-service can also be a useful tool in the pre-sales motion, allowing prospects to explore a product on their own as they make the decision to buy.
Our community allows our users to take care of immediate needs with self-service, but also give them a path toward higher-touch interactions. Self-service also allows our direct, “white glove” touchpoints to have a higher impact.
Self-Service Spotlight: The Unqork Community
Unqork scaled their Community Hub using Gainsight Customer Communities (CC), achieving remarkable results and setting a benchmark for self-service through community engagement.
Key outcomes include:
- 75%+ answer rates and 99%+ reply rates in Q&A discussions.
- A 45% increase in user-generated answers, reducing internal workload.
- 200% growth in super users through gamified incentives and a self-serve SME app used over 2,500 times.
How they did it:
- Automated “Featured Questions” flagged unanswered posts after 72 hours, boosting visibility and engagement.
- Gamified Q&A participation with leaderboards and points to drive community activity.
- Created a self-serve SME app, enabling users to track their progress toward becoming subject matter experts.
Unqork’s community self-service strategy, driven by automation, demonstrates how a scalable, innovative approach delivers value at scale.
Learn more about Unqork’s self-service strategy here.
What to Look for in a Community Platform
There are many community platforms available on the market. So, when evaluating community platforms to support your self-service strategy, consider these out-of-the-box capabilities:
- Content creation tools: Self-service requires the ability to quickly and easily create and deploy content—and also make it easy for your users to find it.
- Integrations: Integration between the community and other systems, like your Customer Success platform (CSP), CRM, and the support ticketing system, will enrich the customer experience and facilitate data flows.
- Engagement tools: Look for features like gamification, user groups and events, and badges and leaderboards to drive user engagement and foster a sense of community.
Data analytics: Seek real-time insights into customer satisfaction, self-service resolution, engagement, and other important metrics will enable you to optimize self-service and track performance.
In-app Engagements: Helping Customers at the Right Place and Time
In-app engagements—such as tips, tutorials, and proactive support—integrate self-service directly into your product, offering immediate assistance at points of confusion.
Well-designed in-app engagements anticipate the needs of users and help them overcome challenges with timely aid exactly where and when it’s needed. The goal is to drive customer satisfaction through a frictionless customer experience, while also building a better customer relationship by helping the customer achieve value with the product.
From the company’s perspective, in-app self-service helps achieve key milestones like onboarding and adoption, which ultimately supports business objectives like renewal. This tool also eases the burden on customer-facing teams by reducing the need for actions like person-to-person training or handling support tickets.
In-product engagements also provide reliable data on customer behavior and health. Customer actions can be tracked in real time, and sentiment can be assessed when the customer’s opinions on the product are top of mind.
We have seen a pretty significant increase in the response rate to NPS from when we migrated it from email to in-app survey. That in itself has been very helpful because we’ve expanded the amount of data we’re capturing, which is better for getting signals.
Self-Service Spotlight: Dealerware In-app Engagements
Fleet management company Dealerware transformed their Customer Success approach to scale efficiently with Gainsight CS and PX. Rapid customer growth—expanding from 3 to over 1,000 customers—demanded solutions that could optimize onboarding and drive customer engagement without increasing staff. Gainsight CS streamlined implementation, while PX delivered actionable product usage data and enhanced feedback collection.
Key Outcomes Include:
- Time-to-value accelerated with in-product onboarding and walkthroughs.
- Improved NPS response rates through in-app surveys.
- Scalable support, with two account managers handling over 1,000 customers.
- Enhanced cross-functional collaboration, refining product releases and customer engagement strategies.
How they did it:
- Implemented Gainsight CS to manage onboarding, risk, and customer health from start to finish.
- Leveraged in-product walkthroughs to improve onboarding time-to-value and reduce reliance on high-touch processes.
- Established biweekly cross-functional meetings based on Gainsight feedback to address bugs, churn, and product improvements.
Dealerware’s use of Gainsight’s tools has driven operational efficiency, improved customer satisfaction, and set the stage for future growth.
You can learn more about Dealerware’s self-service strategy here.
What to Look For in In-App Engagement Software
Dedicated in-app engagement tools can help build a digital self-service strategy if it has the right capabilities—here are some features to look for:
- Personalized customer guidance: Choose a solution that helps you tailor content based on persona, customer health, and usage data to effectively influence user behavior.
- Customer usage analytics: Go with analytics capabilities that accurately anticipate customer needs and identify potential frictions.
- Knowledge base chatbot: Opt for an AI-powered chatbot that integrates content like FAQs, peer-to-peer support, and other essential resources into customer workflows is essential for digital self-service.
- Connectors: Seek out tools that easily integrate in-app engagements with community-based content,customer education materials, and other internal resources, to create a richer experience.
Education: The Path to Customer Self-Sufficiency
Customer education is the practice of empowering users to unlock value from a product or service through thoughtfully designed courses and learning paths.
These resources provide customers with the flexibility to learn at their own pace whenever and wherever they choose. Because they help customers learn independently, customer education programs are a perfect fit for a digital self-service strategy.
Using an LMS to power your customer education program reduces the need for live training sessions and allows users to revisit materials as needed, which enhances product understanding and usage without ongoing human intervention. An educated customer is an empowered customer who is in control of their own customer journey and thus has much higher rates of customer satisfaction. Not only is their experience better, they are also more likely to achieve their own business goals using the product, which means they are more likely to renew.
For companies, self-service customer education lightens the load on customer-facing teams that are typically responsible for training, webinars, and other direct-contact educational channels.
We chose Gainsight’s CE—after vetting several other vendors—because it’s unmatched from a security and integration perspective and it’s accessible across all devices.
Self-Service Spotlight: Updater Digital Customer Education
Updater transformed military relocation operations by launching a secure, scalable digital customer education program using Gainsight Customer Education (CE). This program dramatically expanded the network of authorized movers and reduced support burdens. Key results include:
- 10x increase in the number of trained and authorized providers.
- 55% training completion rate, over 3x the industry standard.
- Significant reduction in training-related support tickets.
How they did it:
- Introduced the “HomeSafe Connect Academy,” a phased, modular training program.
- Leveraged Gainsight CE for secure, bite-sized, self-paced learning paths.
- Automated training invitations and follow-ups to boost engagement.
Updater’s methodical “Crawl, Walk, Run, Fly” strategy and Gainsight CE’s advanced features enabled compliance with military standards while scaling operations efficiently.
Learn more about Updater’s self-service strategy here.
What to Look for in an LMS
- Content creation tools: Choose an LMS that streamlines content creation and make it easy to structure it into courses.
- Branding and customization: Ensure the platform allows you to implement brand standards without the need for specialized design or development resources.
- Customized learning paths: Look for an LMS that makes it easy to group learners along designated learning paths that motivate them to advance toward proficiency.
- Data analytics: Select a platform that tracks and measures learning’s impact on key customer outcomes.
By integrating these core components of self-service, organizations can empower their customers with the tools they need to resolve issues independently, improving their overall experience and satisfaction while optimizing operational efficiency.
Signs That You Might Want to Consider Digital Self-Service
- Lack of Scale: Growth is a good thing, but the downside can be that it strains existing resources—and it is not always realistic or prudent to try to hire your way to scalability. When support demands grow faster than your resources, it is time to explore the potential of self-service.
- Internal Inefficiency: When customer-facing teams are spending excessive time on tasks that could be automated—like customer support questions that have already been answered 100 times—self-service may be the solution.
- Budget & Resource Constraints: When budgets won’t allow for more headcount, self-service may be a way to increase a team’s reach at a much lower price point.
- Team Attrition: Team turnover may be inevitable, but disruptions to customer relationships are never acceptable. Self-service can provide a backstop that maintains customer support when personal contact is not possible.
- Extended Response Times: Check your response times—are they unacceptably slow, frustrating customers and decreasing satisfaction? Digital self-service provides solutions at the speed of the customer.
- High Volume of Support Tickets: High ticket volumes overwhelm customer-facing teams, creating delays and hindering their ability to provide timely, quality assistance.
- Inconsistent Coverage: Inconsistent support availability across regions or time zones leaves some customers without the help they need. Digital self-service is always on, whenever customers need it.
Chapter 2
Making the Business Case for Digital Self-Service: 6 Measurable Outcomes
Every business has different challenges and opportunities. Digital self-service strategies can be used to achieve various objectives with measurable results.
Here are six common use cases for digital self-service:
#1: Support Tickets
Support tickets are a fact of life. Driven by technical issues, insufficient user training, and gaps in product design, you are probably never going to eliminate them entirely. But self-service strategies can attack support tickets from two sides: resolving issues quickly when they occur, while also preventing them from happening in the first place.
Online customer communities, working in tandem with in-app engagements, can transform your customer support function. An intuitive, well-organized and easy-to-use community will become a go-to resource for customers who need help, cutting down on the number of support tickets. Meanwhile, in-app engagements can serve support content within the product, while also being fully connected to community and educational resources.
Tracking metrics like the ticket deflection rate and the total ticket volume will give you a sense of how well a digital self-service strategy is working to reduce support tickets.
#2: Account Coverage
Every Customer Success team manages their accounts differently. Whether they divide responsibilities based on company size, revenue, or product usage, it is never easy to make sure that every account is receiving the amount of attention it deserves. That becomes a problem when customers start to feel neglected—and start down the path toward churn. Self-service can help you give all your customers equal access to crucial support and guidance.
Digital self-service strategies enable customer-facing teams to scale without directly increasing headcount. Customer communities and education programs deliver tons of “consultation” and advice through rich content, helping customers move along the customer journey from onboarding to adoption and beyond without direct help from CSMs or other account managers. Likewise, in-app engagements anticipate pain points and proactively guide customers to progress independently in the product. Every success that a customer achieves on their own leaves space for a CSM to devote their attention somewhere else.
The number of accounts per CSM is a great way to measure the success of account coverage use cases.
Case Study: Zapier
With more than 2.2 million business customers, Zapier’s Community team faced the challenge of supporting customers at scale. They implemented a self-service support strategy that ensures 100% of user questions are answered within 6 hours.
Key Results:
- 100% response rate to user questions within 6 hours.
- 10x efficiency, enabling a 3-person team to handle the workload of a 30-person team.
- Significantly reduced dependency on traditional support channels through strategic automation and community engagement.
You can learn more about Zapier’s self-service strategy here.
#3: Customer Satisfaction
Sometimes, quality responses take time to formulate, especially when one CSM or Support agent has to manage a large volume of requests. The problem is that no matter how great the solution is, if it takes too long to deliver, the customer will be dissatisfied. Long wait times aren’t just annoying—they’re detrimental to customer retention and satisfaction.
Community, in-app engagements, and customer education are always “on” and thus always providing answers. These self-service tools mean that customers don’t have to wait for a human to resolve their issues quickly. The result is a more positive experience with higher satisfaction levels.
Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) and Net Promoter Score (NPS) are great ways to measure the effectiveness of this strategy.
#4: Product Adoption
Product adoption can be a difficult challenge for CS teams to manage. After onboarding, true adoption can be hard to predict and CSMs often have little contact with end users. Self-service strategies can be invaluable because they put tools in the hands of users that operate without the need for direct CSM involvement.
Resources like knowledge bases, in-app guidance, and on-demand learning drive deeper product engagement and feature adoption without the need for hand-holding by a CSM. As customers learn and explore product features on their own, they become more proficient and invested users.
Monitoring key adoption metrics like feature adoption rate, daily/weekly/monthly active users and license utilization will provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of self-service in driving product engagement.
Case Study: Uptick
Uptick launched Uptick Academy, transforming its customer onboarding process to address the complexity of its fire inspection software. By implementing structured and scalable training programs using Gainsight Customer Education (CE), Uptick streamlined onboarding and enhanced user engagement.
Key results:
- 75%-80% reduction in repetitive training tasks for the onboarding team.
- 500% increase in course completion rates, boosting adoption and confidence.
- Condensed onboarding from nine hours over three weeks to just three 90-minute sessions.
Learn more about Uptick’s self-service strategy here.
#5: Team Productivity
CSMs have a lot on their plates, from running client meetings and writing reports to performing customer health analysis. But how much of their work is truly productive and strategic vs manual busywork? Self-service strategies can help customer-facing teams extract the most value from their time.
By automating tasks like customer support, training, and onboarding, self-service strategies give time back to customer-facing teams so they can direct their focus toward strategic activities like account expansion or proactive outreach. The result is a more productive team that is more focused on developing customer relationships.
CSM time spent on complex issues and number of contacts; you can also track classic metrics like upsells, cross-sells, and retention rates.
Case Study: Bonfire Customer Education
Operating in the challenging government procurement sector, Bonfire’s customer base required extensive support from their customer-facing team. To address this, Bonfire launched a customer education academy, enabling users to train independently and at their own pace.
Key Results:
- 2,000 hours saved annually by eliminating 1:1 training sessions.
- Increased scalability and efficiency of customer education.
- Empowered users to achieve greater self-sufficiency through on-demand training.
Learn more about Bonfire’s self-service strategy here.
#6: Operational costs
In SaaS, no one is a stranger to tight budgets. The days of zero-interest rate, venture capital-driven growth-at-any-cost are behind us. Customer success teams have to make every dollar count as they drive revenue from customer relationships. Self-service strategies can help companies cut operational costs through automation and more efficient use of existing resources.
Digital self-services strategies attack costs from multiple directions. Communities and in-app engagements reduce the cost per support interaction, as customers find answers themselves without involving customer-facing teams. An LMS reduces the costs of live training, whether it is in-person or online, while AI-powered features make it cheaper and faster to create educational content.
Ticket deflection and decreases in overhead are good ways to measure operational savings.
Case Study: CData
CData transformed their customer community into a powerful self-service engine, leveraging contributions from teams across the organization to provide a steady stream of user-support content.
Key Results:
- $650,000+ saved annually in support costs through community-driven case deflection.
- Improved scalability and efficiency of support operations.
- Enhanced user satisfaction with readily available, self-service resources.
Learn more about CData’s self-service strategy here.
Chapter 3
Building the Self-Service Experience
Once you have decided to move forward with a digital self-service strategy, how do you actually implement it?
Executing on core aspects of the strategy is key for a successful rollout. The most important principle is that the customer comes first. They are driving the experience, so everything should be designed with the customer’s perspective in mind.
Map the Customer Journey
You probably already have a solid understanding of the primary customer journeys within your product from a business perspective. For example, you have probably calculated the optimal time for onboarding; you identified the most important adoption milestones; and you know how long before renewal you need to begin outreach.
With that map in mind, you need to then determine at which point of the journey self-service touchpoints will be the most impactful. Consider each phase of the customer journey from the perspective of the user.
When is a user most likely to turn to the community for help? When would it be more effective to serve up information with in-app engagements? It is important not to over-rely on one channel.
Personalize the Experience
Higher-touch, direct interactions with customers are inherently personalized, relying on the personal skills of your customer-facing team members. With self-service, you need to work harder to make sure that these non-personal, digital communications feel personal to the user.
User segmentation and behavioral data analysis can help determine the right way to communicate with different users. The goal should be to deliver relevant self-service options based on roles, needs, and/or product usage.
Streamline Content Creation
Content is your primary means of communicating with self-service customers, so content creation will become a core competency. Not only do you need a lot of content, you need to be nimble in order to react quickly as customer needs and the marketplace changes. Your content creation process needs to be tight and efficient—if it takes six months to produce a new course , that’s a problem.
A large volume of content also makes it more difficult to have a consistent voice, so the various content-producing teams—think Product, Support, and CS teams—need to be collaborating closely to cover a wide range of use cases and ensure accuracy.
Focus on an Intuitive UX
It may seem obvious, but because users are self-navigating, the UX in your self-service channels needs to be flawless.
Here are some key principles to keep in mind:
- Write for Accessibility: Use simple language, concise formats, and visuals to improve comprehension.
- Optimize for Searchability: Use proven search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to make sure users can navigate your knowledge base and self-service portal. Examples include keyword-rich titles, clear headings, and metadata, all which help your knowledge base rank higher in search engines and improve user navigation.
- Create for Different User Levels: Based on the customer journey, develop guidance that’s tailored to users at every stage of experience.
Promote Self-Service at Key Touchpoints
Make full use of your self-service channels wherever it makes sense, and make sure all your channels are working together to aid the user.
- Onboarding: Typically covered by a combination of customer education and in-app engagements (walkthroughs)
- Adoption: In-app engagements and community take the lead here as users self-navigate.
- Engagement: As users become truly invested in the platform, use self-service channels to educate them about new products and features or perhaps recruit them into groups and events.
Build in Continuous Improvement
Digital self-service is not set-it-and-forget-it; it needs to constantly adapt as the business, the user, and the marketplace change. How does this become scalable or self-constructing?
To make sure the strategy remains scalable and flexible, you need a structured approach that evolves with customer needs and technological advancements:
- It starts with a good tech stack that has built-in flexibility and room for innovation.
- Make sure you have a continuous stream of good customer data to inform every decision.
- Automate wherever possible to keep the resource burden manageable.
- Track usage metrics like search queries, article views, chatbot interactions, and abandonment rates and then use predictive analytics to anticipate customer needs and proactively update content.
Cross-Functional Team Alignment
Internal collaboration among customer-facing teams is an important aspect of launching a self-service strategy. Customer Success, Support, Product, Marketing, Sales, and others will all have important contributions to make, so establishing a process up front will ensure that the rollout—and ongoing engagement—is smooth and efficient.
- Roles and Responsibilities: Determine how each team will contribute to self-service success, including content updates, feedback monitoring, and strategy decisions.
- Communication Practices: Create a regular, realistic cadence for meetings, status update emails, and other milestones to ensure that all stakeholders remain aligned.
- Feedback Loop: Go beyond periodic check-ins and establish a continuous feedback loop that collects insights directly from users, support teams, and data analytics and then transforms that information into actions.
Chapter 4
Pitfalls to Avoid
No implementation plan is complete without an idea of the possible risks. Here are some common mistakes that are made when launching self-service:
Neglecting Content Updates
Your product, customers, and market are always evolving. Self-service strategies require your content ecosystem to constantly grow and adapt.
Quick fix: Schedule regular reviews and updates of content to ensure accuracy and relevance, especially when new products or features are launched.
Overreliance on Automation
Automation is the engine that makes self-service run, but there are moments when you need to hit the brakes.
Quick fix: Make sure that every touchpoint has an “escape hatch” that customers can use to access human help.
Ignoring Feedback
Digital self-service is not a one way street; it is a conversation between the customer and the company that is mediated by technology. As such, any effective self-service strategy will have a built-in feedback loop that incorporates new information from customers and turns it into actionable insights.
Quick fix: Regularly collect feedback on self-service content and analyze usage patterns to identify areas for improvement.
Treating Self-Service as a “Set-and-Forget” Solution
Once you have your self-service strategy in place, it may be tempting to think of it as complete. After all, your customers should be able to use it without any additional help from your team. The truth is actually the opposite: self-service is a continuous process.
Quick fix: Assign a dedicated team or role focused on maintaining, optimizing, and expanding self-service resources.
Failing to Measure Impact and Adjust Strategies:
Data is the foundation of any self-service strategy. You should have clear visibility into your customer data (think: dashboards) and a plan in place to respond to new information.
Quick fix: Define success metrics up front and check them often, making data-driven adjustments as needed.
Not Integrating Self-Service Channels
Customers don’t make a distinction between the various touchpoints you use to communicate with them. Whether it’s your support staff or your community or the product itself, for the customer, it is all one experience. Treating each self-service channel as a separate entity will lead to a disjointed customer experience.
Quick Fix: Create a cadence of regular check-ins between the teams who operate the different channels of your self-service strategy.
Chapter 5
AI and Automation
Artificial intelligence (AI) and AI-powered automation can be force multipliers for any digital self-service strategy. AI does critical work on both sides of the self-service relationship, helping customers manage their own journey with the product, as well as helping customer-facing teams manage the customer experience in a scalable, flexible way.
AI tools like chatbots, virtual assistants, and smarter search help customers to explore your product and resolve issues independently through access to community and product content.
Predictive assistance can also anticipate customer needs and offer proactive support. For example, sentiment analysis can monitor customer sentiment during self-service interactions and then use those insights to adjust responses or escalate dissatisfied users to human agents.
For customer-facing teams, AI enables fast and accurate data analysis to drive better decision-making around the self-service strategy. For example, AI can detect patterns in support tickets that direct customer success teams to update the knowledge base appropriately.
By thoughtfully integrating AI into your self-service strategy, you can create a more efficient, engaging, and adaptive customer experience.
Chapter 6
Getting Started With the Self-Service Transformation
Launching self-service is going to look different for every company. A lot depends on which tools you already have in place (for example, an existing customer community or customer education program), and how their current goals are aligned with customer success.
Most companies will have at least a few of the necessary elements in place to get started. Here’s a list of simple first steps you can take to get started:
- Start Small and Prioritize High-Impact Areas: Identify your company’s greatest need. Is your volume of support tickets too high? Maybe your onboarding process needs some work. Demonstrating the value of self-service in the context of a high-profile challenge will help gain buy-in within the organization.
- Leverage Existing Customer Data: Many companies fail to make use of the data they already have. Put those customer insights to work—leverage analytics and customer feedback to create your initial self-service content and then make data-driven adjustments as you grow.
- Set Clear Success Metrics from Day One: Once you have identified the high-impact areas that you are going to tackle first with self-service, define core metrics that will define progress against your goals. For example, if support tickets are the challenge, focus on deflections rate and satisfaction score to track your progress.
- Iterate and Scale Over Time: We said it earlier, but it bears repeating: self-service strategies need to constantly evolve in order to remain relevant and effective. Plan to be scalable, flexible, and innovative right from the start so that you can adapt as circumstances change over time.
Final Thoughts
Community, education, and in-app engagements are channels that empower customers to navigate their own customer journeys. But even though customers are driving themselves, they can’t do it without the planning, insights, and skills that customer-facing teams provide. It’s only through your diligence that these strategies will succeed.
Just don’t forget that digital self-service doesn’t only empower customers—it also empowers you to extend your reach and deliver a better customer experience than you could have imagined was possible. We hope this ebook has opened your mind to all the possibilities that you can unlock.