[Blog] Keys for improving the End-Users' Self-Service Experience
When a user has a problem, he doesn't want to spend hours on the phone trying to fix it.
I recently had to work from home and faced an issue with network connectivity that halted my project work. I wanted to fix the issue ASAP as I was running too close to the deadline to submit the project.
I didn’t want to reach out to the service provider which would test my patience. Immediately, I checked the service provider's online articles that helped me fix the issue in no time and I felt it was more convenient.
All of us encounter such experiences in our personal and professional lives and will look for instant help.
In organizations, today’s tech-savvy users are taking their IT issues into their own hands and looking online for answers in preference to calling or emailing the helpdesk to help them fix the issue.
Forrester Research has stated that self-service usage has increased from 67% in 2012 to 76% in 2014; and, according to a 2011 Gartner prediction, by 2020 the customer will manage 85% of the relationship with an enterprise without interacting with a human as self-service adoption continues to grow.
Most organizations know that to thrive, and perhaps survive, as an IT help desk function the deployment of self-service helps to reduce costs, speed up support, and deliver a better service to end-users. In addition, of course, it helps to reduce the pressure on overworked IT service desks.
But, there’s a huge difference between using self-service and using it well to its full potential. Here are 4 ways you can improve your end-user experience.
Build incident templates and categorize them under the appropriate category. Publish services through a self-service catalog then automate request fulfillment processes wherever possible.
This also enables end-users to reach technicians through chat for quick help.
Provide multiple ways to submit requests:
Today’s end-users access the internet in numerous ways. Ensure to provide a way for them to open requests from multiple access points. For example, not only should end-users be able to make a request for an asset by calling the helpdesk, they should be able to make the same request using their mobile device or even from other applications.
Review your Self-service data:
Every organization’s data will be changing all the time, so it’s important to schedule regular reviews, and ensure that they are completed, for continuous improvement of the self-service capability and the delivered end-user experience.
Regularly reviewing your Knowledgebase is really important for self-service. Like many things it needs attention, and resulting actions, to be the best it can be. This means that your IT helpdesk needs to consistently collect and review data to help you understand what’s working well and what’s not.
It might be that you have lots of content that no one is looking at – your review should investigate whether this needs to be retired or updated to include more relevant information. Alternatively, you might have content that’s used a lot. In these cases, see what you can learn from this and how to mirror the traction across all your knowledge articles.
Also, look for request types that are consistently being received by helpdesk and check fo the ways to handle them in self-service.
Give end-users what they need (and expect) from Self-Service:
Providing outdated self-help content or not relevant to end-user searches, it will drive end-users away from self-service and they would probably not make any efforts to use self-help again in the future.
Another possible failure of self-help content can be inaccurate content or content that cannot be easily used by users to solve their issues. Keep in mind that your end-users don’t use the same jargon as your helpdesk staff. Hence, ensure documents are written with simple words and terms.
Build your knowledge base articles with visual elements such as images, GIFs and videos. Get feedback from end-users about how helpful the article is and improve them based on the feedback.
Summary:
To deliver the best service for end-users, build an interface that is easy to navigate, provide processes that are quick and efficient, maintain an up-to-date knowledge database.