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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

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

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
Warden Brown
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Q1.  When it comes to my own support needs, I always prefer to use self-service whenever possible so I can find my answer as quickly as possible. Posting a question, either on a message board, or in a service ticket. is always a last resort for me because it means I have to wait for an answer. I’m not that patient. :smile:

manns
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A3. Another mistake is introducing self-service capabilities too soon. For example, without sufficient employee/customer-facing knowledge available. It means the capability is tried but it fails to deliver, with the user likely never to return. 

For this issue, there’s a technique called Level Zero Solvable which is worth reading up on if you want to ensure that your knowledge base is road-ready. 

Cheers, Stephen || https://ITSM.tools
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
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.

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. 

vishnu.selvaraj
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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?

  • Hey @Sophie Murgatroyd 

    Off the top of my head, I have a few pointers.
    1. Make your KB visually appealing - think GIFs, screenshots and short videos wherever possible.
    2. Make the text content as simple as possible. Use technical terms only when absolutely necessary.
    3. Set up a feedback channel. Place it at the end of each article to enable your customers to let you know if they found the content useful.
    4. The Launch - probably the most important part.
    Cover all bases. Emails are your best bet. Convey the value proposition of your self-service strategy. If possible, work with your marketing team to create a short video on how the self-service portal works. 

    Hope this helps.
manns
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We are almost half-way folks :custard:

To answer this question, tag the answer with the corresponding number. For example, if you are answering this question Q3, start your answer with A3 and use the Quote option.


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

A3. There are sadly so many, most of which relate to people (which is often the case with the introduction of technology). I’ve stolen this from something I’ve written previously:

  • Implementing the technology without the aforementioned investment in the OCM tools and techniques need to gain employee buy-in
  • Delivering capabilities that fall shy of their consumer-world equivalents and their associated rate of change/improvement
  • Incorrectly focusing on cost reduction as the primary driver or motivation for the self-service portal
  • Failing to focus on demand, including the fact that consumer views of portal benefits differ from those of the supplier, resulting in supply-based decisions
  • Not designing and delivering the self-service portal capabilities with the employee, and improved employee experience, at the heart (this is covered in more detail in the next section)
  • The misguided assumption that employees will automatically use corporate self-service portals because they use them in their personal lives.
Cheers, Stephen || https://ITSM.tools
Bex
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Last question for today is here :coffee:

To answer a question, tag the answer with the corresponding number. For example, if you are answering this question Q5, start your answer with A5 and use the Quote option :) 
 

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

I’m really happy that so many of you took the time to join us here. I’m taking the time to read every post to make sure I don’t miss out any of the valuable information. I’ll reply to you folks shortly. 

P.S. In a couple of days, I’ll post the summary here to make sure it serves as a recap or TLDR for those who couldn’t make it. 

Thank you for organising this, and for everyone’s input, it has been nice to see ideas and guidance from other community members as well as administrators.

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.

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

A3. The most common mistakes we see in people implementing an self-service. They forget to look at the customer journey. What does the customer need or wants? What kind of questions do they ask? What kind of knowledge articles do they need. What kind of questions need to be answered by agent and which you don't. You need a strategy for your self-service portal. :)

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

In my own organization, I see article writers use lots of acronyms and jargon, which isn’t helpful to the end user. I always tell people to write with language they’d use to communicate something technical to their grandmother.

A3. As an extension of this great point, there’s also the writers that like to show how much that know over creating KAs that consistently help people. I’ve heard the term “knowledge bites” and similar to express the need to keep KAs short and easy to consume (successfully).

Cheers, Stephen || https://ITSM.tools
akshara.sruthi
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Last question for today is here :coffee:

To answer a question, tag the answer with the corresponding number. For example, if you are answering this question Q5, start your answer with A5 and use the Quote option :) 
 

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

I’m really happy that so many of you took the time to join us here. I’m taking the time to read every post to make sure I don’t miss out any of the valuable information. I’ll reply to you folks shortly. 

P.S. In a couple of days, I’ll post the summary here to make sure it serves as a recap or TLDR for those who couldn’t make it. 

manns
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A4. That employee experience data (and this is for companies proactively improving their EX):

Taken from: https://www.happysignals.com/global-it-experience-benchmark

Cheers, Stephen || https://ITSM.tools
akshara.sruthi
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Alright folks, I had an amazing time organizing this. Thank you being a part of our coffee chat, 
@manns, @Warden Brown, @Johan L, @LeonieWagenaar, @Bex, and @epetrutis :coffee:

A huge shout out to all my co-community members aka my friends at work for helping me pull this out:  @Arvind Ramamurti, @rashmi.nag, @Divya Murthy, @vishnu.selvaraj and @prashanthini.mande  :heart_eyes:     

 See you all in the next edition of our coffee chat. Feel free to keep those conversations going

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

A1. I’ve used. A typical organization has its business processes revolving around- customers, stakeholders, employees, suppliers etc. To facilitate optimal performance of doing business, it is highly important that a common portal is implemented to serve the real time right information, at the right time to the right recipient. When visibility of information is increased, employees would become efficient which in turn would help increase customer and supplier satisfaction alike- thereby boosting organizational productivity.

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

A2. Too early to comment. Figuring things out currently with the Freshdesk self service portal.

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

A3. - Managing uncategorized bulk of tickets- causing the customer to wait for a longer period than requiredFailing to make a thorough analysis of KB and taking steps to improve it. Regular evaluation and updation is a must

  • Lack of simple navigation. Not managing the issues and appropriate solutions in proper places logically, failing use proper category names 

  • Forgetting to place a search bar is a building a failed self service all together

  • Keeping it up to date- design, categorizing, using screenshots etc

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

A4.a)Team performance KPIs- Average first time response, First response SLA%, resolution SLA%, first contact resolution%, number of resolved tickets per month

b)Customer Satisfaction KPIs- CSAT score, rating response rate, average number of customer replies, Net Promoter Score(NPS)

c)Business Level BPIs- Customer churn analysis, monthly ticket volume, peak load analysis, regional information, Customer Effort Score(CES)

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

A5. -Self service should become mandatory on days with high call volume

      - Customer support would purely become self- service

      - Knowledge management for agent is highly important for agents( especially in such pressing work from home scenarios) through FAQs to navigate useful info on processes that they might need help with on important customer calls

      - Need for powerful technology to fill the gap between what customer want and the what current state of self service has to offer

 

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?

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
Warden Brown
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Could you please define “self-service portal?” I tend to think of it as knowledge base articles, chat-bots, message boards, and any other way a user can find their own answers. Is my definition too narrow?

manns
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Re self-service challenges...

A2. The elephant in the self-service room has long been the level of uptake. That employees have avoided self-service, for a variety of reasons, in favor of the more traditional telephone and email channels. I’ll come back to those reasons later.

So, it’s important to think about the organizational change management needs – from minimizing the resistance to change to effectively communicating the “What’s in it for me?” It also needs to be a self-service capability that just works for people. After all, who want to use self-service if it’s easier and quicker to simply pick up the phone to call the service desk?

Cheers, Stephen || https://ITSM.tools
D
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Great questions, Akshara! Here are my thoughts on a few.

A1. We use a self-service portal for the same reasons that research says customers do: to make support and help more streamlined and free up time for agents to work on more complex support issues proactively.

A3. I think one thing that could improve the self-portal experience is definitely organizing all the assets in a way that’s easy for the customer to use. Having clear, demarcated sections for the FAQs, the knowledge base of support articles, blog articles, and chat/contacts would be great. It’d also be ideal to have a search bar with optimized search results, in case there are a lot of articles on the product.

A5. I believe that self-service will absolutely play a crucial role in reaching customers where they are, more and more. I think immediacy, urgency and quick gratification will be important factors for customers to consider in interacting with support. A well-made self-service portal would tick all these boxes and make for considerably quick, streamlined and successful customer support interactions.

manns
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Could you please define “self-service portal?” I tend to think of it as knowledge base articles, chat-bots, message boards, and any other way a user can find their own answers. Is my definition too narrow?

The term portal is generally used to denote a digital place that you go to access the capabilities - self-service capabilities in this case. So, it will include some or all of the things you mentioned plus potentially others. Perhaps the ability to book a walk-up support appointment, say.

Cheers, Stephen || https://ITSM.tools
Warden Brown
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Q3. What are the common mistakes you see while people implement self-service

In my own organization, I see article writers use lots of acronyms and jargon, which isn’t helpful to the end user. I always tell people to write with language they’d use to communicate something technical to their grandmother.

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