How you got buy-in from Agents

• Emphasise the benefit of reducing repetitive tasks.
  Automation can handle many regular, boring requests, giving agents more time for meaningful work.
• Highlight how automation and portal use can help demonstrate workload and make it easier to request additional resources. When agents see how their work demands are showcased, they’re more likely to support these changes.

How you engaged customers/requesters and encouraged usage

• Change your SLAs to discourage emails and encourage portal usage.
• Make the portal simple and intuitive—ease of use is critical.
• Add automation for straightforward requests so they’re completed in seconds, not hours.
• Design the portal to reflect business processes, not just IT structure. It should make sense to the users based on their perspective.
• Curate the catalog: Only show relevant options to each user. For example, hide internal IT requests from non-agents to avoid clutter.
• Leverage ServiceBot for seamless interactions.
• Invest in branding: Use consistent, branded icons to make the portal visually appealing and user-friendly.

What type of pushback was experienced

• The biggest challenge is old habits—people are often reluctant to change how they work.

Lessons Learned

• It’s a continuous process—don’t aim for perfection right away. Launch batches of requests in regular releases and improve over time.
• Be noisy about your updates. Announce every improvement on your intranet or internal comms channels:
  • “Look what IT is doing to make life easier!”
  • Share updates with fanfare to ensure people know the value IT is delivering.
• Celebrate wins publicly to gain credit and boost morale.
• Make the business case to your CFO; if we change behaviour, then we can reduce OPEX and focus resources on higher-value tasks, which are often capitalisable.

A Realistic Roadmap for a Self-Service Portal

1. Start with Why
   Understand why you're building this portal—not just for the company, but for the people who will use it. Maybe it’s to reduce wait times, make it easier for users to solve simple issues themselves, or free up agents to focus on bigger challenges. Keep these goals front and center.

2. Listen to Your People

   • Customers: What frustrates them? What do they wish they could do themselves?
   • Agents: What repetitive tasks take up most of their time? How can the portal help them?

   You’ll get some of your best ideas just by asking these questions.

3. Build for Real Life
   Make sure the portal isn’t just functional but intuitive and easy to use. People gravitate to tools that feel helpful. Focus on:

   • A clear and simple design that even non-tech-savvy users can navigate.
   • A searchable knowledge base with solutions to common problems in plain language.
   • Quick access to live support if someone gets stuck (so they don’t feel abandoned).

4. Start Small and Test It
   Don’t overwhelm yourself (or users!) by trying to launch a massive portal all at once. Pick a few key features or workflows, pilot them with a small group, and see how they respond. Their feedback will help you fine-tune before rolling it out to everyone.

5. Celebrate the Launch
   Treat the portal like a big deal—because it is! Share an announcement about how it will help users, create a quick video tutorial, and encourage people to try it. Make it clear that this is here to help them.

Lessons Learned (the Hard Way)

1. Don’t launch with an incomplete knowledge base—it’ll frustrate users and hurt trust.
2. Regular updates are non-negotiable. If the portal feels outdated, people won’t use it.
3. Celebrate small wins. Whether it’s a great adoption rate or positive feedback from a customer, share the success to keep everyone motivated.