Hi Matt,

Personally, make the portal a compelling alternative for users - automation workflows so that a ticket isn’t even required and they get immediate feedback is a great selling point vs a drawn out interaction with potentially multiple hops through support queues. 

Have you done any user testing on users who are emailing to understand why they are choosing to email rather than try the portal to see if there are any pain points you’ve not considered? 

Encouraging self-service refers to promoting and facilitating the ability of individuals to address their own needs, questions, or issues independently, without requiring extensive assistance from others. This concept is widely applied in various contexts, including customer service, technology support, and personal development. Here are some strategies for encouraging self-service:

1. Clear Communication: Provide clear instructions, guidelines, and resources that empower individuals to find answers on their own. This could include FAQs, user manuals, video tutorials, and knowledge bases.

2. User-Friendly Interfaces: dm design user interfaces that are intuitive and easy to navigate. This applies to websites, apps, kiosks, or any platform where self-service is offered.

3. Automation: Implement automation tools such as chatbots, virtual assistants, and interactive voice response systems. These technologies can handle routine queries and guide users to relevant information.

When we converted to FreshService from our old system we configured it to not accept new tickets via email, it just auto responds to emails with a message that directs the users to the portal. We were pretty nervous about this change however it turned out to be a non-event and almost all of our tickets are submitted via the portal.

We did the same when we took on Freshservice.

• Extend the Email Response SLA:
  • Consider lengthening the Service Level Agreement (SLA) for email responses to allow for a more manageable timeframe.
• Highlight Self-Service Efficiency:
  • Extract and showcase reports demonstrating that tickets resolved through self-service are addressed more swiftly, thanks to the immediate availability of necessary information.
• Implement Automation:
  • Utilize automation to ensure user requests, especially for access permissions, are fulfilled promptly when submitted via the portal, as opposed to via email.
• Introduce an Automation Agent:
  • Previously, I employed a virtual agent named "Auto Mation" to handle certain tickets. Whenever Auto resolved a ticket, the response would inform the user about the magic of automation. This setup also facilitated reporting on the volume of tickets handled by automation versus those addressed by other agents in the group. A similar approach could be beneficial in tracking and promoting the efficiency of automated processes.

Here are some tips to encourage users to use the IT portal instead of email:

1. Communicate the benefits of using the IT portal.
2. Make it easy to use.
3. Provide incentives.
4. Promote the IT portal.
5. Provide training.
6. Make it mandatory.
7. Track usage and provide regular reports to management on usage statistics.

There are a lot of good ideas listed here and I’d encourage you to try a few. A key thing that I would recommend to customers while I was still working as a Gartner Analyst would be to take an “experience design” approach. What does that mean? Follow this outline:

Step 1: Look to your user community and identify out a handful of folks that represent the “common user” -- generally friendly towards IT, but not necessarily technical

Step 2: From this group, invite some folks to participate in a timed “usability study” (5-10 minutes, max)

Step 3: Craft a self-service scenario that you want them to “execute” (think, sit down at a device/computer and perform)

Step 4: Video the session of them using the target computer/device with someone in the room to answer questions, if any should arise.

Step 5: Thank them for participating and set up a time to review with your teammates to cull lessons learned and capture key observations

Step 6: Provide acknowledgements for the participants and share a summary of what you learned from doing these sessions on:

• Their likes/dislikes
• Common issues folks experienced
• Things that you observed that work/do not work
• Your takeaways and plan of action going forward

This should not take a long time to plan, conduct, and debrief. That’s the good news! What you learn can serve as critical inputs into how to implement this that is tailored to the unique needs of your organization and the level of capability of your user community.

If you have any questions on this, please let me know! Best of luck in your efforts to improve.

Best,

kengon

How do you do this without it actually creating a ticket? I have an automator to respond, directing them to the portal and marking the ticket as SPAM. but are there ways to do this I’m not considering? 

We use Ticket Automator:

    1. Condition: Ticket is Raised with Source does not include what we want (Phone, Portal, API)
    2. Action: Skip new ticket email notifications
    3. Action: Send email to the individual with the verbiage:

        Hi {{ticket.requester.name}}

        Thanks for reaching out to {{helpdesk_name}}

        Your ticket raised through email is closed.

        Please use the self service portal  to resolve your query

        Thanks

        {{helpdesk_name}}

    4. Action: Delete the Ticket

Thank you LewisNix, this is very similar to how I am doing it. Just wish there was a cleaner way without a ticket ever being generated in the first place. Was thinking of an Outlook mailbox rule, since we use our own mail servers to do something if the subject line is missing our ticket number identifier. 

Thanks for confirming we’re at least on the right track!