Nowadays, you don’t need human intervention to find information – and in most cases, that extra step is a hinderance on the user experience. Service desks frequently opt for Self-Service Portals (SSP’s) to provide answers for frequently asked questions and concerns.  In this article, we dive into these systems and how they redefine customer engagement and satisfaction for your company.

What are Self-Service Portals?

Self-service portals (SSP’s) are digital interfaces that allow users (typically customers or clients) to access information, perform tasks, and communicate with a company without needing direct involvement from service desk staff.

Self-Service Portals, like TOPdesk’s, typically include a knowledge base, customer portal and service catalogue, frequently with chatbot integration and automated processes for specific requests. This helps save time and provides immediate client support, greatly improving customer experiences and company efficiency in one fell swoop.

Nowadays, 88% of customers expect a company to have a self-service portal. So, if your company doesn’t have one yet, it’s high time you consider implementing one. 

How They Work

These portals are integral to many business strategies due to their efficiency and convenience. Here’s how they work and how they can boost a company’s sustainable growth:

• Access to Information: With a portal in place, your customers can access a wide range of information independently. Some of this information can include FAQs, user manuals, policy documents, and product details.
• Transaction Management: Customers can perform various transactions like placing orders, making payments, or renewing subscriptions.
• Account Management: Users can manage account details, track order history, and update personal information on self-service platforms.
• Support and Troubleshooting: Portals often include troubleshooting guides, ticketing systems for customer support, and forums for community help.
• Feedback Collection: Businesses can use portals to collect feedback, conduct surveys, and engage with users.

Self-Service Portals in Human Resource

Self-Service portals aren’t limited to client-facing interactions. Many companies use them for internal employee support, such as human resources. Your company’s SSP can be used to provide critical company information, policies, product information, and so much more.

Self-service portal’s can also positively impact employee morale. According to a recent study by Workvivo, 98% of HR professionals have felt burnt out over the last six months. With self-service portals, you can help lighten that load and allow your HR team to focus on high-value tasks like improving company culture and employee engagement through wellness programs and team-building activities.

Boosting Company Growth

Beyond internal and external people support, Self-Service Portals can benefit your company by giving you various ways to grow and scale. Here are some of the ways you can boost company growth with self-service portals set in place.

• Reduced Operational Costs: Automating routine tasks and customer interactions with self-service portals reduces the need for staff intervention. This will lower your operational costs significantly.
• 24/7 Availability: Customers appreciate the convenience and speed of resolving issues or finding information independently. This autonomy can increase satisfaction and loyalty, extend customer lifetime value, and improve referral rates.
• Enhanced Data Collection: Portals let businesses collect valuable data about user behavior, preferences, and feedback, which can be used to improve products, services, and customer experiences. Remember to follow data privacy guidelines when doing so.
• Increased Sales and Cross-selling Opportunities: Portals can directly drive sales by making it easy for customers to browse products, access detailed information, and make purchases. They also provide opportunities for presenting related products or upgrades, enhancing cross-selling and upselling.
• Faster Resolution Times: Self-service portals can significantly reduce the time to resolve customer inquiries or issues. This helps improve your customer service efficiency and your company’s reputation and credibility.
• Focus on Core Business Activities: With routine inquiries and tasks now outsourced to a self-service portal, your service desk staff can focus on more strategic and complex issues to drive more business growth and innovation.This applies to smaller companies and startups with team members who might serve in multiple roles. Let’s say you have a marketing manager who helps with customer support or a sales manager who handles existing client concerns. Now, those employees can spend more time strategizing and implementing growth activities.
• Scalability: As the business grows, self-service portals can easily scale to accommodate more users, data, and complex interactions without a proportional resource increase.

How to Create Your Own Self-Service Portal

Are you considering launching a self-service portal but unsure where to start? Here’s how you can get started:

1. Begin with Clear Objectives and User Insights: First, define what you want to achieve with your portal. Do you need automation functionality or to reduce support calls? Are you going to use the self-service portal for internal or client-facing support, or both? Having clear goals helps you better identify how to set up the portal.Equally important is understanding your users’ needs. Consider conducting surveys or interviews to gain insights into the features and information they value most.
2. Lay the Groundwork: It’s better to lay the groundwork before implementing anything. This involves assembling a project team comprising developers, UX/UI designers, and business analysts. Hiring a project manager to oversee implementation is a great start. Alternatively, you can assign someone on your team who has an online project management degree to oversee your project ad hoc.Develop a detailed project roadmap outlining key milestones like design, development, testing, and launch. Be as thorough in your planning as possible to avoid any unforeseen bottlenecks or costs when you start building your self-service portal.
3. Design Your Portal: Your self-service portal’s user experience (UX) should be your top priority. A portal that’s easy to navigate and accessible will keep users returning. If it isn’t easy to use, customers will begin bypassing your self-service portal and seeking human support, defeating the purpose of a portal.The user interface (UI) should be visually appealing and reflect your brand identity. Organize your content and features logically for easy access.
4. Choose the Right Technology: Decide whether a custom-built portal or an existing platform suits your needs. Your portal should seamlessly integrate with existing systems, such as CRM or ERP software. Take some time at this step to do some research – software like TOPdesk’s could be a good fit!
5. Develop the Portal and Your Content: This phase involves front-end and back-end development. Focus on creating an engaging user interface. Using any of the solutions above is best, so you don’t have to build the technology from scratch.Populate your portal with helpful content like FAQs and guides. Proper knowledge management comes into play here. Organize all your wikis and information in a document first. Once you’ve compiled an exhaustive list of common queries and their answers, transfer them into your self-service portal.Your portal should include account management, a robust search engine, and a ticketing system for customer support queries. Before launch, conduct comprehensive testing to ensure functionality, usability, and security. Consider getting feedback from a test group and refine your portal accordingly.
6. Launch Your System: Once your system is up and running, you’re ready to launch! Firstly, introduce your new system to your internal team. Train your staff, especially those in customer service and IT support, to ensure they are well-versed with the portal.When making your self-service portal public, begin with a soft launch to a limited audience, then roll out the portal fully. Announce the launch through various channels to reach your audience. Post-launch, continually gather user feedback and monitor performance to make improvements.

Launch Well, Grow Fast

If you plan to implement a self-service portal, you should aim for a user-friendly, secure, and well-integrated system with other business systems. Doing so lets you harness the power of self-service to improve efficiency, enhance customer experiences, and drive significant growth. 

Take your time when building your portal, and don’t be afraid to invest in a good system. Your self-service portal will serve your clients and brand well for many years to come.

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Self-service is a hot topic. And no wonder: it has great benefits for IT service desks. But will self-service take away work from the IT team? What kind of work does self-service create?

How does self-service affect IT professionals’ job satisfaction and customer experience? Let’s find out in this self-service FAQ.

Will self-service make the IT service desk redundant?

When you mention self-service, some people seem concerned that machines will be taking over all work at the IT service desk. Fear not, artificial intelligence is not taking over (yet)! Fact is, self-service doesn’t kill roles; it just redefines them to more interesting ones.

Providing your customers with a self-service portal simply means service desk operators can work more efficiently and proactively. After all, work for service desk operators doesn’t stop when they’re no longer fighting tickets. Because that’s not where they can add most value. What will actually happen is that you’ve freed up their time from menial tasks.

Thanks to self-service, the service desk can shift their attention to bigger incidents or preventative maintenance. Smaller, repetitive tasks are solved via a self-service portal by giving users the power to find their own answers.

What kind of work does self-service create?

Setting up a self-service portal is a big project in itself which requires expertise from across the IT service desk. It’s fun work though! Service desk operators get to use their common experience and expertise to work strategically and creatively and set up a great portal that is the shining centerpiece of the IT service desk.

After the portal’s been set up, continuously maintaining it and making sure that information stays up-to-date, relevant and accessible is crucial. If you have a self-service portal, your knowledge base also needs to be maintained to a high standard, which in itself is a lot of work.

Self-service doesn’t kill roles, it just redefines them to more interesting ones.

What doesn’t fit in a self-service portal?

Of course, not every type of question can be answered via a self-service portal, so there will still be requests that the IT service desk needs to resolve themselves. Use this rule of thumb to decide whether a request can be solved with self-service or not:

Is it a bigger request? Something that end users will need to speak to a service desk operator about? Then it’s better for IT to retain ownership of the request. A good example of this is a change request.

Is it a simple, recurring request, such as how to change printer paper? Place a standard solution in the self-service portal for people to refer to as and when they need it.

Essentially, if the knowledge gap between what the user needs to do and what they know how to do is small, fill it! This way, service desk employees can spend less time resolving recurring calls.

How does self-service affect employee satisfaction and customer experience?

Self-service will never mean that tickets go away completely. What self-service does mean is that the tickets that come in really require your team’s attention and expertise – and some problem solving. It simply makes work more engaging and improves employee experience.

A successful self-service portal helps increase customer experience, since end users are empowered to help themselves. And, the more positive experiences your end users have, the better job satisfaction will be for service desk operators.

Become a self-service expert

With a self-service portal, the IT service desk can greatly contribute to the efficiency of your organization, because simple, recurring requests won’t have to go through the service desk all the time.

Ready to implement self-service? Download our e-book and discover how to develop self-service in your organization.

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1. Make it a home for knowledge

The first step is to make sure your portal reflects your brand, and feels like home for your users. Little touches such as using photos in the right places of real locations within the organisation can make all the difference. It should feel less like logging into a support portal, and more like logging into the organisation’s first port of call for any services provided.

Another excellent way of achieving this is to take the time to arrange focus groups with a wide range of people who will be using the portal. Ask what they would want and expect to be delivered. This will make the portal feel like home as soon as it’s launched: it will reflect what the users have already asked for, as well as what the support teams are willing to offer. Read up for more ways of getting feedback from your customers.

2. Use your knowledge base data

The next step is to measure which FAQs and knowledge items in your knowledge base are the most popular, and which are the most highly rated as useful. Then promote them! Keep taking stock of the other items that don’t do so well, and try to work out why this is the case. If they’re incorrect then they need to be fixed. If they’re too complicated, perhaps they could be simplified.

And of course, a picture tells a thousand words; give the knowledge item as many relevant images as would help users engage with them. It could make all the difference between a user being able to self-solve an issue, and needing help from support staff.

It’s also important to ensure that keywords to these items are kept up to date, so your users can find what they’re looking for easily. This is a continuous process, since the items in your organisation’s repertoire will continue to evolve.

But Self-Service Portals are not all about knowledge articles and FAQs: they’re the most efficient way to offer services to your users. And a similar process can be applied to the services. Which are the most popular, and why? Which services are hardly used? Is it just the nature of the service or is there something more behind it?

For example, company phone requests could fit a certain business pattern, such as the majority coming when new staff are onboarded, while printer services are constant. Keep track of these seasonal patterns to keep your database as up to date as possible.

3. Think about your users

Services should be easy to find, accessible and engaging. It’s a given that some services, such as PC malfunction reporting, will be more popular than say, requesting an employment reference for the purposes of a mortgage. But both should be easy to find and use, with the relevant conditions stated clearly.

And the same CSI approach should be taken with these services on the back end. Internally, departments are always hard at work to improve the way they offer services, and this should be reflected on the portal. Once a service has been streamlined at the back end of the system, its outward-facing offering should reflect this. If that employment reference can somehow be automated, for example, then a user should only need to click a button to get that process moving.

The main lesson is to ensure that your portal doesn’t remain a static offering to your users, but rather a fluid set of offerings that constantly evolve as the processes within your organisation mature.

With these 4 tips you’ll build user-friendly forms in the Self-Service Portal.

Read more about Service Catalogues

For more information on Service Catalogues, check out our e-bundle on developing better Self-Service in your organisation. 

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What is a good Service Portal?

People these days are extremely self-sufficient. We go online to purchase products, log into accounts, book flights and find answers to questions – and often outside of normal business hours. Why would your customers expect anything less from your services? If they come looking for questions on your portal – provide it for them! Set up a self-service portal.

Essentially, it is giving power to the user and letting them do the legwork on finding out what services you offer and how and when you offer them. This frees you up from complaints about unmet expectations and clears both confusion and your schedule a bit.

However, customers can only understand your services as far as your Service Catalogue allows them to. Here is a quick checklist to make sure you manage expectations correctly:

1. Provide a clear description for each product or service

Answers to frequently asked questions regarding a product or service can help customers quickly find their own answers. Examples of common questions are: How do I set up the WiFi connection on my telephone? How do I print on both sides of the paper? How do I adjust my desk?

If questions are common, then it’s statistically probable that more customers will come on your portal looking for the same answer. Provide them a short cut!

2. Pay attention to the quality characteristics of a product or service

Make it clear which regulations apply. For instance, you could explain which meeting room can be used for which event, or which facilities are present in the meeting room. This sets expectations at the right level and ensures your users know what they logically can and cannot expect from you – and how fast.

3. Explain the ordering procedure for a product or service

A clear ordering procedure prevents customers ordering a product or service incorrectly, or them not adhering to the request’s lead time. If you have an option for ordering various services or products – manage expectations! Sometimes there is no way to get someone a new laptop after lunch. Let them know – avoid frustration!

4. Specify the terms of delivery

Also, always inform your customer about the delivery time for a product or service, and make it clear where the product ordered can be picked up. Give your customer all details they may need to not be confused about anything.

But remember to underpromise and overdeliver rather than the opposite. Better set the expectations lower than you could feasibly probably provide, than setting the bar way too high for yourself and having to play catch-up with your own SLAs. This makes it easier to achieve customer delight – which we wrote more about in this article on service excellence.

5. Communicate the service desk’s availability

Lastly, do make sure to grant your customers insight into when and how the service desk can be contacted, and when the customer can pick up their order. This will, again, help manage expectations and people will (hopefully) understand that they can’t log a huge ticket 5 minutes before end of day and expect it to be resolved in the morning.

More about Service Catalogues

For more information on Service Catalogues, check out our e-bundle on developing better Self-Service in your organisation.

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