Are you looking at the DIY support experience?

You likely spend a lot of time and effort crafting a good self-service experience for your customers. For instance,

• You keep your KB content fresh and complete
• You maintain a beautiful support portal where users can access all they need
• You have implemented an AI-powered chatbot
• You track unsuccessful queries
• You encourage customers to comment on individual articles and you act on the feedback
• You measure customer satisfaction with support
• You maintain a dedicated team of CX specialists to refine your offerings

Even if you do all of the above perfectly (don’t worry, I won’t inspect your backlog of feedback requests!), you’re probably not looking at the other side of support, what I would call the DIY support experience: customers using third-party LLM tools to resolve their issues without starting on your beautiful portal. LLMs grab the nice, vetted information that’s available on your portal, but also information from public forums and communities, and third-party knowledge bases–all unvetted content. If you add the fact that LLMs can hallucinate and just have to give an answer, you have a recipe for very confused, and malcontent, customers.

This is not some niche phenomenon. More and more customers are using LLMs for, well, everything. And the trend is even more pronounced for younger users. Millennials and Gen Zs are expected to make up 74% of the workforce in 2030. DIY support is here to stay and grow.

So yes, you need to add overseeing the DIY experience to your list of self-service tasks. Using DIY AI tools yourself will show you the variety of other sources on the internet that are providing advice and answers related to your solutions.

You may find some unfortunate surprises, and of course you cannot control unvetted information being accessible, and you cannot control the “creative” wisdom that LLMs can dispense. But you can influence the LLMs by feeding them the right content that will guide them to provide correct answers, including when the correct answer is to contact support.

Do you conduct any testing at all for the DIY support experience? If not, it may be good to start. And what can you do to remedy the non-ideal parts of the non-DIY experience?

Let me know if I can help. We have AI-powered ways to streamline the entire process.