The best customer self-service portals

Customers like solving their own problems. It’s easier than reaching out to a customer service agent, and it gives them independence. However, implementing a cohesive self-service system into your customer support operations can be a challenge.

To navigate this transition successfully, you need to understand the technology that powers customer self-service portals and the strategies that make them effective. Whether you're considering adopting a self-service strategy or optimizing your existing portal, this guide will provide valuable insights to help you satisfy customers.

More in this guide:

• What is a customer self-service portal?
• Why use self-service portals: 5 benefits
• Types of customer self-service portal tools
• The 10 best customer self-service portals
• How to choose the right customer self-service platform
• How to make a self-service portal
• Frequently asked questions
• Ready to try an AI-powered customer self-service portal for free?

A customer self-service portal is a tool that lets customers search for answers to their questions without having to reach out to an agent. It offers a knowledge base, allows users to manage community contributions, and tracks support interactions—all in one personalized hub. The portal organizes information for easy searching and clear understanding of solutions.

Customer self-service platforms are simple tools with big benefits. With the right solution, you’ll start noticing the following improvements in your organization:

• Increased customer satisfaction: Having customer self-service options is a good way to reduce many of the frustrations customers experience when using a new product or encountering an issue. If customers can solve their problems quickly and with minimal effort, they’re frustration won’t have time to fester and grow. If anything, their annoyance will transform into satisfaction when they see how easy you’ve made it for them to solve their own problems.
• Improved customer onboarding and product adoption: Self-service software portals offer a wealth of resources to help new customers get the most out of your product or service. Portals can contain guides, FAQs, and a community forum where customers can share experiences and learn from others.
• Faster reply times: If a customer can answer a question with a quick search, there’s no reason to make that person wait for hours for a simple two-minute conversation. Effective self-service portals minimize wait times for those who do need to talk to a human and boost your company’s ability to provide fast, responsive customer care.
• Boosted agent productivity and reduced ticket volume: Letting customers solve their own problems reduces your reps’ workload, allowing them to spend more time on the harder-to-solve issues. Rather than constantly contacting your representatives for updates, customers can check the status of their support tickets on their self-service portal so they know exactly when you will resolve their issue.
• Reduced costs and greater scalability: Since self-service portals significantly reduce the number of support tickets, leaner service teams’ workloads stay manageable during peak times or seasons. So, you can avoid hiring and training temp agents during those surges while maintaining department efficiency.

Customer self-service portals offer a win-win solution for customers and businesses, delight customers with 24/7 support while boosting efficiency and lowering costs.

Self-service tools are incredibly useful, but they shouldn’t exist in isolation. For a truly impactful strategy, it’s essential to take a broader approach, implementing a variety of tools that work together seamlessly, such as:

• Knowledge bases are libraries of resources within customer self-service portals that cover the full range of a business’s services and products. Your knowledge base should include a searchable collection of FAQs, tutorials, how-to articles, and other resources your customers can reference.
• Community forums allow customers to connect and answer each other’s questions. Customers understand each other’s needs better than anyone, and a community forum is a fantastic way to provide peer-to-peer support by sharing their experiences and tips.
• AI agents are the next generation of customer service bots. Along with handling all of the functions of their traditional counterparts, like sharing knowledge base articles and routing, they can also autonomously handle complex tasks including issuing refunds and troubleshooting more nuanced issues on their own and in a more personalized way.
• FAQ pages are collections of the most common questions customers have at any stage of the customer journey. They are typically organized by topic or category, allowing customers to quickly find information.
• AI-powered search engines provide more accurate search results, allowing customers to find answers more efficiently within your knowledge base.
• Advanced knowledge management systems, like article recommendations, proactively set customers up to find necessary information before they’re even searching for it. Team publishing helps internal members collaborate effectively to produce cohesive content.

By prioritizing these essential tools, businesses can create a robust, user-friendly self-service help desk that meets current customer needs and adapts to future demands.

Compare the way these portal providers address customer self-service needs.

1. Zendesk

Zendesk provides an AI-powered customer self-service portal as part of our comprehensive CX solution. It's user-friendly for both customers and agents, secure, and scalable.

Build a portal in record time with Generative AI tools like expand, tone shift, and simplify language. Let your ticket data guide you with AI-powered Content Cues that highlight self-service gaps based on common customer questions and flag underperforming content to keep your knowledge up to date. Advanced reporting tools provide insights into the impact of self-service efforts, enabling continuous optimization.

Our flexible architecture allows for customization and integration of additional third-party tools in the Zendesk Marketplace, ensuring you can tailor the portal to match brand aesthetics and expand functionality to meet specific business needs.

Meanwhile, AI-powered search ensures customers can quickly find the information they need with minimal effort.

Zendesk AI agents, the most autonomous bots in the industry, can leverage your knowledge to automate support for over 80 percent of customer requests. When customers need further assistance, portal-submitted requests are seamlessly routed to our industry-leading Agent Workspace, where agents can manage them alongside other channels. Customers benefit from a single interface to check the status of all their requests, regardless of the submission method.

Features:

• AI-powered knowledge creation and management tools
• AI agents
• AI-powered reporting
• Approval and publishing workflows
• Community forum software
• Robust search engine (unified, federated, semantic search)
• In-context self-service (web widget/mobile SDKs)
• Omnichannel ticketing system
• Ticket forms
• 1,700+ apps and integrations

Pricing: Plans start at $55 per agent/month, billed annually. A 14-day free trial is available.

Explore more Zendesk pricing plans.

2. Zoho Desk

Zoho Desk is a cloud-based customer self-service help desk featuring a knowledge base. Zoho’s omnichannel function allows users to converse across multiple channels, including email, phone, social media, and websites. Users can also participate in community forums to share experiences and learn from one another.

It provides workflow automations for managing cross-functional processes, letting users visually assemble sequences with its drag-and-drop blueprint builder. The portal also incorporates an AI-powered chatbot that can provide responses to common inquiries and route issues to human agents. You can customize its help center to match your brand and embed it in your app so customers can easily access all resources.

Features:

• Knowledge base
• Chatbots
• Community forum
• Customizable
• Reporting and analytics

Pricing: Paid plans start at $7 per user/month, billed annually. A free plan and a 15-day free trial are available.

Recommended reading: Learn how Zoho integrates with Zendesk and how Zendesk vs. Zoho compare.

3. HubSpot Service Hub

HubSpot Service Hub offers support features like live chat, help desks, and ticketing. The knowledge base can store answers to your customers’ most common questions and organize and tag them so they’re discoverable. Chatbots can share those articles, and conversation intelligence tools reveal insights into what the bots do right and what needs work.

Along with its customer self-service features, HubSpot Service Hub offers one-on-one video messaging tools and team management features. HubSpot also lets you create custom surveys so you can request customer feedback on current service standards.

Features:

• Knowledge base
• Chatbots
• Search engine
• Omnichannel messaging
• Customer surveys

Pricing: Paid plans start at $15 per seat/month, billed annually. A free plan is available.

Recommended reading: Learn how HubSpot integrates with Zendesk and how Zendesk vs. HubSpot compare.

4. Intercom

Intercom is a conversational relationship platform (CRP) that provides customer support through bots, personalized messaging, and chats. Intercom’s platform includes a conversational marketing feature, which incorporates customizable online chatbots that engage website visitors in real-time conversations. The chatbots can pull answers from sources like help center articles, public URLs, and PDFs.

The software also offers “product tours,” which walk customers through sign-ups. It has onboarding features like one-off messages and integrated campaigns, complete with in-product messaging and customizable banners for the top of your app or website. Businesses can add informational tips to features that provide context for using them or the next steps to take.

Features:

• Knowledge base
• Chatbots
• Customizable
• Product tours
• Automated onboarding

Pricing: Plans start at $29 per seat/month. A 14-day free trial is available.

Recommended reading: Learn how Intercom integrates with Zendesk and how Zendesk vs. Intercom compare.

5. LiveAgent

LiveAgent provides real-time chat options, a customer self-service software, and a built-in call center. Key features include a customizable knowledge base, allowing businesses to create and organize a repository of frequently asked questions, articles, and tutorials. The portal offers analytics capabilities, allowing businesses to track key metrics, measure performance, and identify areas for improvement.

The software can monitor website visitors, determine the best time to initiate a conversation, and see if a customer needs help. The customer portal allows customers to view the progress on their open tickets, removing needless follow-ups. Meanwhile, the community forum provides a space for customers to share information and help each other work through issues so they can avoid opening a support ticket.

Features:

• Knowledge base
• Chatbots
• Community forum
• Visitor monitoring
• Reporting and analytics

Pricing: Paid plans start at $9 per agent/month, billed annually. A free plan and 14- or 30-day free trials are available.

Recommended reading: Learn how Zendesk vs. LiveAgent compare.

6. Gladly

Gladly is a personal customer service platform for SMBs and large B2C companies that offers computer telephony integration and customer complaint tracking. Gladly’s platform allows for customer conversations across several channels, including text, in-app chats, IVR, and social media. Gladly’s chat widget provides automated responses to customer inquiries, giving fast answers regarding order statuses.

Users can customize the knowledge base to provide answers in multiple languages based on the customer’s location. When users make a change to an article, they can publish the update across all channels. Additionally, Gladly offers a collaborative task management feature to let team members set reminders, create and assign tasks, and get updates on the progress of open tickets.

Features:

• Multilingual knowledge base
• Multichannel publishing
• IVR
• Real-time reporting
• Task management

Pricing: Plans start at $180 per hero/month, billed annually.

Recommended reading: Learn how Zendesk vs. Gladly compare.

7. Document360

Document360 specializes in knowledge base building and management. Its knowledge base portal offers an editor and category manager for producing self-help content. With a rich text editor, markdown support, and real-time preview, users can format their content to match their brand guidelines.

Document360 provides customers and employees with a simpler knowledge base site and an optimized search engine that allows reading on any device. It also offers tools for building FAQ pages, online user guides, and employee handbooks. Users can view different versions of articles and roll back changes, if necessary, removing the danger of overwriting content.

Features:

• Rich text editor
• Article versioning
• Search engine
• FAQ pages
• Business glossary

Pricing: Plans start at $199 per project/month, billed annually. A free plan and a 14-day free trial are available.

Recommended reading: Learn how Document360 integrates with Zendesk.

8. Help Scout

Help Scout is a customer support platform with two self-service software tools. The first tool, Docs, helps businesses easily build a knowledge base that users can reference to find quick answers. Businesses can customize the platform to reflect their unique brand and organize content to suit the viewer.

Beacon, the second tool, is a help widget embedded in the knowledge base articles. It’s customized to provide answers to frequently asked questions related to the article. Beacon also tracks user activity on web pages and articles to reveal trends on which pages are linked or can be approved.

Features:

• Knowledge base
• Help widget
• Customizable
• Reporting and analytics
• HIPAA compliant

Pricing: Plans start at $22 per user/month, billed annually. A 15-day free trial is available.

Recommended reading: Learn how Zendesk vs. Help Scout compare.

9. Gorgias

Gorgias is an e-commerce help desk platform that uses automation to resolve customer issues. Its self-service software portal can automatically categorize tickets or suggest responses based on past interactions. Merchants can then provide automated answers to common questions like where orders are or how to make returns.

The service integrates with other platforms, like Shopify and Magento, to pull order information. Pre-made responses can incorporate this information to account for specific account variables. The platform also supports live chat and offers an analytics suite, allowing businesses to track performance metrics.

Features:

• Knowledge base
• Chatbots
• Reporting and analytics
• Autoresponders
• Integration with e-commerce platforms

Pricing: Plans start at $10 per month. A seven-day free trial is available.

Recommended reading: Learn how Zendesk vs. Gorgias compare.

10. Whatfix

Whatfix is a digital adoption platform that integrates with existing applications to help users learn. Its customer self-service software uses in-app walkthroughs, smart tips, and help menus to guide users.

The platform has embeddable self-help wikis that users can use to search for content, including videos, slideshows, and PDFs. It also lets businesses collect analytics regarding user behavior to identify which features customers use the most and identify weak areas within their content. Additionally, businesses can use custom or out-of-the-box surveys to gain insights directly from their customers.

Features:

• Knowledge base
• In-app walkthroughs
• No-code editor
• Guidance analytics
• Customer surveys

Pricing: Contact Whatfix for pricing.

Selecting the right customer self-service platform is crucial if you want to improve your customer experience and operational efficiency. When evaluating potential solutions, consider these key factors to make an informed decision:

• Ensure it fully integrates with your tech stack: Solid integration allows for seamless data flow between systems and prevents data silos. For example, it enables you to connect the portal to your ticketing system so customers can request support within the portal. The integration ensures the request automatically routes to the same place as your other channels. Additionally, integrations let you customize the portal to your unique needs.
• Evaluate its AI capabilities: For example, AI agents can connect to your knowledge base to increase self-service options. Understanding the full capabilities of the AI and how it is trained gives you an idea of what it will be like to incorporate it into your operations. For instance, you can deploy pre-trained AI immediately, but if it isn’t specialized in CX, you may need to dedicate more time to training it yourself.
• Prioritize ease of use: Self-service portals must be user-friendly and easy to maintain. A simple, intuitive interface encourages customers to find answers on their own, while a low-maintenance platform reduces the burden on support teams. By striking this balance, organizations can ensure their self-service portals are valuable assets that drive efficiency and improve customer satisfaction.
• Assess its total cost of ownership (TCO): A low TCO provides you with greater value over the life of using the software. Accounting for unexpected costs, like developer fees and maintenance costs, helps avoid budget overruns.

By carefully considering these aspects, you can choose a customer self-service platform that meets your immediate needs and supports your long-term growth and customer satisfaction goals.

Housing a self-service portal within your company’s help center software can improve CX and alleviate your service team, but you need to build it properly. Follow these best practices to ensure it has the most value to your customers:

• Leverage AI tools to get started fast: Use generative AI knowledge base tools to quickly draft initial content for FAQ pages, guides, and tutorials. AI-powered analytics can help you prioritize which customer issues and queries to address first.
• Tailor it to the look and feel of your brand: Use consistent colors, logos, and typography throughout the portal. Ensure the tone and language match your brand voice (generative AI tools can assist with this). Customize the user interface to reflect your brand's unique aesthetic and values.
• Keep the search bar front and center: The search bar is the ultimate tool for finding answers. As your customers look through your knowledge base and forums, their first question will likely lead to another. Every page of your portal should have a search bar so they don’t have to navigate back to the main page to enter another inquiry.
• Categorize everything clearly: Sometimes, your customers already know where their problem stems from. Giving them a categorized list of common issues or components lets them jump straight to their resolution.
• Link to related articles: Other times, your customer may not know how to search for their problem. Linking your articles together lets readers work their way down the rabbit hole, narrowing their focus until they finally arrive at the question they meant to ask in the first place.
• Provide a way to contact customer support: Even with all the help you provide, customers may sometimes give up or realize that the answer isn’t there. Providing a way to contact support on every page—with a chat widget, email address, or phone number—reminds them that someone is still around to help if they need it.
• Build processes to keep knowledge fresh: Self-service portal analytics can provide valuable insights into which resources your customers use the most. For example, Content Cues can reveal which resources your customers use the most—and least—allowing you to prioritize updates or build new content around them.

These practices help create an efficient, effective, and brand-aligned self-service experience.