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Coffee Chat: Building a Self-Service Portal  ☕

akshara.sruthi
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Hey everyone! Thank you for showing support to this post by hitting Subscribe to my previous post.

We realized that July 7 is right after a good long weekend for most of us, so we’ve decided to host this coffee chat next week.

So our new date is July 14, 11:00 am EST. Please block your calendars for about 45 minutes to answer five questions. To keep this session as engaging as possible, I’ve chosen a topic that’s one of our favorite. 

The topic of discussion is: Building a Self-Service Portal 
 

Q1. How many of you use self-service. Why do you use or why don’t you use. 

Q2. What are the challenges you encountered while coming up with a self-service portal

Q3. What are the common mistakes you see while people implement self-service

Q4. How do you measure the effectiveness of your self-service portal

Q5. What do you think is the future of self-service?

@Bethany Wesley, @zachary.king, @manns, @chianne.shepherd - I look forward to hearing your thoughts. 

86 replies

akshara.sruthi
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Hi everyone! 

Six important things to know before we get started on our coffee chat :coffee:

  1. To answer a question, tag the answer with the corresponding number. For example, if you are answering the first question Q1, start your answer with A1.

  2. If you cannot make it at 11:00 am EST or even if you’re past time, you can still post your answer to a particular question.

  3. You can reply to each others threads/posts to keep the conversation going.

  4. Be polite and respectful of other people’s opinions.

  5. Most importantly, have a great time here!

  6. Lastly, I will make sure to engage with all of you to make this interesting! 

akshara.sruthi
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@Jeff.blain: You have to participate here. And I’ve posted the rules above. Looking forward to your answers :) 

Romik
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Hi @akshara.sruthi thank you for the invitation. Regarding the questions, I am not sure if I know about Self-Service portal.

B
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Hi @akshara.sruthi,

We’ve setup a basic Knowledge Base for Level 0 or Self Service support. Is there any way to get some user analytics from the site? We are using a Sprout Plan.

 

S
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Hello, we’re working on our internal knowledge base now. Does anybody have tips on how to drive usage of this?

S
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We've utilised the Freshdesk portal pages in solutions to create a Customer facing FAQ page as well as an internal Knowledge base. Does anybody have any tips on how to drive engagement? In particular for Customers as for many years we've completed the administration tasks for them however they are now able to do this themselves which we have detailed in articles.

S
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Hi @akshara.sruthi,

We’ve setup a basic Knowledge Base for Level 0 or Self Service support. Is there any way to get some user analytics from the site? We are using a Sprout Plan.

 

I’ve found this article but unfortunately doesn’t look like it’s available on sprout plan https://support.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/50000002846-understanding-the-curated-knowledge-base-reports?source=forum

FrankPMCtire
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Hello @akshara.sruthi, I did not get an invite for the Coffee Chat of this morning.

Looking forward to be able to join :)

Thanks,

rashmi.nag
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Hi @FrankPMCtire. The Coffee Chat is in a written format and we will all be engaging right here in this discussion thread. So all of us can drop in our comments, responses and answers to the above mentioned questions.

Cheers, Rashmi || Team Refresh Community
manns
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A1. I find that I use different service and support channels for different needs, with this also factoring in different service provider strengths. So, if the self-service capability isn’t easy to use, then I’ll call up or use chat, say.

Cheers, Stephen || https://ITSM.tools
pkleshick
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how do I join?

akshara.sruthi
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Hey everyone! Welcome to our first coffee chat :coffee:

The topic of discussion today is: Building a Self-Service Portal

A few things to keep in mind and how you can participate in the coffee chat: 

  1. After I share the prompt, feel free to respond. You can post your answers and thoughts and share your own experiences as well.

  2. To answer a question, tag the answer with the corresponding number. For example, if you are answering the first question Q1, start your answer with A1.

  3. You can reply to each others threads/posts to keep the conversation going.

  4. Be polite and respectful of other people’s opinions.

  5. Most importantly, have a great time here!

  6. Lastly, I will make sure to engage with all of you to make this interesting! 
     

manns
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@pkleshick I’ve assumed that you just post in this thread. I might be wrong but I’ve started that way :)

Cheers, Stephen || https://ITSM.tools
akshara.sruthi
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First question for today is here below. To answer a question, tag the answer with the corresponding number. For example, if you are answering this question Q1, start your answer with A1.


Q1: How many of you use self-service. Why do you use or why don’t you use. 

A
Userlevel 5
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how do I join?


Hi @pkleshick This is the discussion thread where we will be engaging. So all of us can drop in our comments, responses and answers to questions posted by @akshara.sruthi above. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts :)

 

Cheers,

Arvind

Team Refresh Community

Warden Brown
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A1. We are implementing the Solutions module in FreshService for self-service. We’re hoping that our customers will be better served when they can find their own answers quickly.

D
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We are just starting to explore the concept of a self -service portal.  We currently are able to supply most of the information customers need through reports from our ERP system.

 

epetrutis
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A2”​​​​​: time to build portal - gathering information

@Bethany Wesley, @zachary.king, @manns, @chianne.shepherd - I look forward to hearing your thoughts. 

 

Bex
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Q1. How many of you use self-service. Why do you use or why don’t you use. 
A1. We are using the self service portal for the first time, and the take up has been amazing, in the 1st quarter of the year, we have a 50% of our tickets being via the portal. Which is amazing.

Q2. What are the challenges you encountered while coming up with a self-service portal

A2. Ours is still in its infancy, and we are still working on it.  The service requests were the biggest challenge for us, as before Freshservice incidents and requests were all created via incidents.

Q3. What are the common mistakes you see while people implement self-service

A3. They try to do too much too soon.  It is an iterative process, and making small changes and additions to the self service portal, makes it easier for the customers to adapt to the changes and buy in to what you are trying to do

Q4. How do you measure the effectiveness of your self-service portal

A4. So far we are measuring it via the number of tickets and Service Requests that we receive with the source of portal. As we progress the portal and incorporate the service catalogue we are hoping that this will allow us to make better metrics.

Q5. What do you think is the future of self-service?

A5. I think that this is something that can only get bigger and reach further, with chat bots, instant messaging and solutions access, can only make the customer journey a lot more user friendly and pleasant

A
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Q1: How many of you use self-service. Why do you use or why don’t you use. 

 

A1: I certainly use self service - I believe that in today’s day and age, we want to minimise the number of conversations we have with service providers to keep it as seamless as possible. With a few key inputs, a lot of our queries tend to get solved. It’s also extremely likely that the very query has been asked before by another user so it only makes sense to leverage that!

J
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A1. The portal is the most used way to create a ticket. We are actively encouraging our user to use the portal rather than phone or walk-up.

A3. When setting it up, people not seeing the system from a user-perspective but rather from their own perspective. 

akshara.sruthi
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@pkleshick: The Coffee Chat happens here. All of us can drop in our comments, responses and answers as I prompt the question. To answer a question, tag the answer with the corresponding number. For example, if you are answering this question Q1, start your answer with A1.

@manns you are spot on with your answer as always! 

L
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Hi @akshara.sruthi,

We’ve setup a basic Knowledge Base for Level 0 or Self Service support. Is there any way to get some user analytics from the site? We are using a Sprout Plan.

 

I’ve found this article but unfortunately doesn’t look like it’s available on sprout plan https://support.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/50000002846-understanding-the-curated-knowledge-base-reports?source=forum

Beside the suggested article you can also use Google Analytics. 

manns
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First question for today is here below. To answer a question, tag the answer with the corresponding number. For example, if you are answering this question Q1, start your answer with A1.


Q1: How many of you use self-service. Why do you use or why don’t you use. 

A1. In addition to my earlier more personal response on self-service use. Even going back three or so years, circa 80% of IT departments had introduced some form of self-service/help capability/technology. The more important percentage, however, was how many employees were repeatedly using those capabilities.

Cheers, Stephen || https://ITSM.tools
epetrutis
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A1: We do not use a self-portal yet. Employees are at maximum workload.

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