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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5 steps to improve your employee experience for happier customers

Studies show that there’s an undeniable link between employee experience and customer experience. According to Forrester, companies with highly engaged employees score 81% higher in terms of customer satisfaction than their competitors. And new data shows that combining employee experience with customer experience can increase revenue by up to 50%.

Learn how to start improving your employee experience for a better customer experience with these 5 steps:

1. Give employees room to grow

There’s nothing less motivating than doing a job that’s too easy. Bore-outs are real, and if an employee doesn’t find the challenge they’re looking for within your organization, they’ll start searching elsewhere sooner or later.

Make sure that your employees reach their full potential by staying one step ahead and keeping them in the loop when new opportunities arise.

2. Don’t micromanage

Unhappy, unmotivated employees don’t deliver strong customer experiences. At TOPdesk, we are big on trust, freedom, and responsibility. We trust our employees to come up with cool initiatives and ideas. And they always have the freedom to tackle their tasks whichever way they want, as long as they take responsibility for their work.

By taking a step back and empowering your employees to make the right decisions, you’ll motivate them to take initiative and help customers, without fear of failure. Make employee wellbeing part of your organization’s DNA – not just an issue for HR.

3. Listen to your team

An engaging work environment looks different for every organization. Rather than relying on your assumptions, speak to your employees to find out what they need in order to feel happy and motivated at work. Nobody can provide better insights into your team’s needs than your team themselves – and you might be surprised at what you discover.

4. Highlight employee wellbeing

Make sure to consider your employees’ wellbeing in all aspects of your business operations. Remember: our working lives are influenced by numerous factors inside and outside of the office, including social interactions, community, and physical and mental health, so it’s crucial to make employee wellbeing part of your organization’s DNA – not just an issue for HR. In doing so, you’ll be much better positioned to create an outstanding employee experience.

Read about the ingredients of a successful organizational culture.

5. Focus on people before tools

Employees who use well-designed technology at work are 5.6 times more likely to report their company “has experienced extreme revenue growth” the past year. But with such an abundance of tools out there, it’s important to find tech that actually fits your people and makes their work easier. It might sound obvious, but lots of companies make the mistake of investing in flashy new tools, which employees have to work around, rather than choosing technology that supports their organizational needs.

Discover the 5 top things to consider when selecting an ITSM solution.

Want to take your employee experience to the next level?

Our workforce enablement e-book provides you with practical tips and strategies for getting started with employee experience and creating an engaging, flexible work environment for your team.

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As opposed to ITIL, agile service management doesn’t provide you with extensive process descriptions you can implement in detail. Agile is a philosophy and based on it you determine how you want to set up your work. There is of course much to learn from other organizations. According to the agile service management principles by Dolf van der Haven, I’ll give you 6 practical examples on how to make your service management more agile.

1. Make sure everything you do adds value for the customer

IT departments too often put a lot of work into things that have little value for their customers. I recently visited an organization where the IT department had written an extensive manual for a new smartphone they offered. Sounds useful, but most of this information was already available on the internet. And the next OS update is going to make their manual outdated.

A more agile way of documenting is to keep the information in your manual limited to what is strictly necessary and first give these instructions to a small test group. Only describe company-specific information, like how to synchronize your work email with the new smartphone. Do you receive questions from your test group? Update the documentation before you officially start supplying the smartphone.

2. Always work closely with your customers

When designing services or processes, service organizations make a lot of assumptions about the needs of their customers. An example: for years, a facilities organization encouraged their customers to log a call when something was wrong with in the office building. They recently discovered their customers found it quite annoying to receive five to six status update emails after they logged a call. That was the reason many customers decided to stop logging calls altogether.

In agile service management, you involve your customers often and as soon as possible with everything you do. This way, you avoid working based on assumptions. The organization from the example has come up with a solution together with their customers. When customers log a call, they can tick a box saying they want to receive status updates. One question and a single checkbox could have spared five years of frustration.

3. The right people in the right place

Many IT organizations lean heavily on processes. The goal of working with processes is to guarantee a consistent quality of services, no matter who supplies the service. Sounds good in theory. In practice, it does matter who supplies the service. An unmotivated service desk employee probably leaves a less positive impression on the customer than a happy, motivated employee. You can’t cover this difference with a process.

An important part of the agile mindset is having enough time and attention for your team members. Your team only functions well with people who are good at the work they do, and when the work they do makes them happy. Is a team member no longer motivated? Talk to him or her. Maybe they’re happier in a different role.

4. Make your processes as flexible as possible

ITIL processes are usually not flexible. Take change management. A Request for Change needs to go through a set number of predefined steps. The only choice you have in the process is approve or decline. There is no room to change plans. If you want to change them, you need to stop the process, make a new plan and get approval.

Make sure that the processes you design are flexible enough to deal with ever-changing demands. This however doesn’t mean you need to implement every single change during the process. It does mean that you leave room for your team to deal with the processes as they see fit.

5. Design, implement and improve your services step by step

New software or services implementations can take up months, years even. When the implementation is finally done, you’ve gained so many new insights you probably want to change everything. But by that time there’s no more budget left, the project team members have moved on and it’s up to the application manager to process all the feedback on her or his own. Delivering new services in an agile way means you deliver something workable as soon as possible, collect feedback, and use this feedback to improve the product.

At TOPdesk we do software implementations step by step. We first set up a basic version of the call management process, and as soon as it’s operational, we go live. The process isn’t perfect, but we’re okay with that. While we continue working on the next process, we receive feedback to improve call management.

6. Keep your services and operations straightforward

Request process often contain a lot of unnecessary management authorizations. The IT department assumes that management wants control over every individual request. Or the IT department doesn’t carry any responsibility. This makes for a process full of authorizations and a manager who gets loads of emails with authorization requests.

The process shouldn’t be this cumbersome. It works better when the IT department asks the managers how much control they really want or need. They usually don’t really want to receive all those emails. An alternative solution: requests don’t need to be authorized, and managers receives a monthly overview of the costs. This way, the manager still has control over and an overview of the costs, but he or she doesn’t have to process a lot of emails. And the employee is helped quicker.

Tip: just get started and keep it small

I sometimes get the question: where do I need to start when I want to work more agile?

To be honest, that differs per organization. Take a close look at your current services and compare this with the agile principles. Where’s the friction? And what improvements are easy to implement? Start there. Make a small improvement. Ask for feedback. And move on to the next improvement. And read our Agile e-book

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In today’s competitive landscape, organizations are realizing that the success of their customer service hinges on the happiness and engagement of their employees.

What is employee experience?

Employee experience encompasses every aspect of an employee’s journey within an organization, from the initial recruitment process to their day-to-day work environment, growth opportunities, and overall well-being. It goes beyond just job satisfaction and delves into creating a positive and fulfilling workplace culture that fosters productivity, collaboration, and innovation.

So why should service departments care about employee experience? Well, it’s simple – happy employees lead to happy customers.

Employee experience vs customer experience

Speaking of similar concepts – isn’t employee experience just customer experience (CX) for your colleagues? Well, yes and no. Yes, because, if you’re an internal service department, your colleagues are your customers. And no, because of one crucial difference: when it comes to improving your employees’ experience at work, you can have a far greater impact.

Let me explain. If you order something from an online shop, that retailer needs to make that ordering experience as smooth as possible. That’s an experience of no more than a few minutes, with only a few touchpoints.

As a service department aiming to improve employee experience, you can influence every minute of your colleagues’ working lives. From the drive to work in their company car, the coffee they sip when they arrive, to the programs and laptop they work with.

Customer experience is about optimizing the interactions your customer has with you when they are actively in contact with you. That’s important, too. But employee experience requires a more holistic approach.

Isn’t employee experience something for HR to worry about?

Well, yes, HR should also be thinking about employee experience. Engaging employees is one of the main challenges for any HR team. But improving employee experience is about more than drafting HR policies.

Just look at the examples mentioned earlier. Is your colleague comfortable in the company car you offer, or are they sweating because the air conditioning broke down 3 months ago? Do they like the coffee you’re serving or are they drinking it only because it’s free and there’s no Starbucks nearby? Can they work efficiently on their laptop, or do they have to wait 20 minutes for it to boot?

In order to answer these questions, service departments need to work together – from IT and Facilities to Finance and yes, HR.

The key to improving employee experience? Enterprise Service Management

Realizing that all service departments need to collaborate to deliver a great employee experience is the first step towards improving it: This is called Enterprise Service Management.

At most organizations, each individual department is pretty good at servicing their own customers. It’s only when a call or request has to be handled by more than one team or department that things tend to get murky. These teams often function as silos. Calls are being ping-ponged between teams, or get lost in service desk limbo. Not exactly a great employee experience.

So if you want to improve employee experience, start by actively collaborating with colleagues from Facilities, HR or IT. You don’t speak that often? Grab a cup of coffee. You already work together regularly? Sit with the other team for a day – you’ll learn a lot.

Employee journey mapping

Another thing that helps you improve employee experience is employee journey mapping. This is the same as customer journey mapping, only for your colleagues. It might be a bit harder to decide which part of your employees’ journey you want to map, since there are so many touchpoints, but just pick a part that you feel needs improving. Your onboarding, perhaps? Or the process of logging a request at your service desk?

When you map your employees journey, the pain-points of using your services will become more visible. And the suggestions for improvement will come to you in no time.

Towards employee engagement

If you offer a consistently good employee experience, you’ll end up with the holy grail of the modern organization: engaged employees. As this infographic shows, companies with highly engaged employees perform better on various levels. They’re more profitable, get higher customer satisfaction scores, and generally outperform their competitors.

Take your employee experience to the next level

Want to know more about employee experience, a.k.a. workforce enablement? Check out this e-book for some background information and tips on how to get started.

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These are just a few examples of amazing personalized customer experiences in the world of B2C (business-to-consumer) organizations

But why should you care? IT departments have nothing in common with B2C organizations, right? Think again.

Customer is king (and they have increased expectations)

At first sight, your IT department’s customer service may seem miles away from an average B2C organization. But they’re more alike than you think.

Think about it: every single one of your customers is also a B2C customer. They’ve all had great B2C customer experiences. It’s no surprise that they have come to expect the same seamless, personalized experience from your services. As customer experience improves in the B2C world, customer expectations of IT services rise as well.

The solution? IT departments have to think more like B2C organizations. Here’s how:

1. Provide omnichannel support

How can your customers contact your IT department? Do they have to email or phone you? Or even walk up to the IT service desk to get help? This will no longer do.

Customers are used to interacting with B2C organizations across several platforms, including the organization’s website, social media, chat, and email. And they expect the same from your IT department.

With omnichannel support, your customers can reach out to your department how and when it’s right for them. Whether they use WhatsApp, Skype, Microsoft Teams or prefer email or chat, all of their problems and questions can be handled in one place, creating a seamless omnichannel customer experience just like the B2C ones they’re used to.

2. Start customer journey mapping

“Know thy customer” is the number one rule of B2C marketing. And for good reason. But researching your customers shouldn’t be limited to B2C organizations alone.

When you develop a deep understanding of your customers, you can create a customer experience that’s tailored to their specific wants, needs, and problems. The more relevant you make your services, the more your customers will use and appreciate them.

But how do you get to know your customer?

Start customer journey mapping.

Customer journey mapping lets you step into your customers’ shoes and see what they experience when they request a service from your department. How easy is it to request a new laptop, for example? What are your customers’ interactions with your department like? When they pick up their laptop, is everything set up and ready to go? And how easily can customers reach your department when they have questions?

Customer journey mapping answers these questions and gives you insight into the biggest improvements and easiest quick wins when it comes to customer experience. As customer experience improves in the B2C world, customer expectations of IT services rise as well.

3. Invest in self-service

Your customers are busier than ever. And B2C organizations know this: that’s why they design customer experiences that enable their customers to make decisions on their own schedule. (Think, for example, of customers being able to choose their own time slot for a delivery.)

Your IT department can do the same with self-service. A self-service portal gives your customers the power to find their own answers in their own time – whether that’s during or outside office hours.

This makes life a lot easier for your customers. In fact, 67% of consumers say they prefer self-service over speaking to a company representative.

Start by making the answers to frequently asked questions such as “How do I log onto the company WiFi?”, “How do I set an automatic out-of-office reply?” and “How do I connect my laptop to a printer?” readily available for your customers.

Make your IT department truly customer-focused

Want to learn more about improving your customer experience? We wrote the book on it! Download our customer-centricity e-book for invaluable tips and tricks that make your services stand out.

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Level 1: Letting go of the hand-holders

Oh, we get by with a little help from our friends… Or from the HR department. Whenever anyone in the business has a general question, who do they turn to? HR.

This is usually fine – after all, it’s part of your job to point your colleagues in the right direction, even if their questions sometimes stray away from serious queries and more into the “When’s the next national holiday?” category. But when you have remote working en masse (due to the current pandemic, for example), this all changes.

Your inbox and Slack are bombarded by the same questions from different sources. People somehow seem to think of the HR team as the ultimate fixer who can solve any problem under the sun. Not only is responding to every individual request unbelievably time-consuming, but it’s also incredibly tiresome. If only there were a central repository full of everything that employees need to know.

Solution: But wait, there is – provided that you implement a self-service portal filled with FAQs, supporting information, and any other pieces of key knowledge that your colleagues need.

Self-service portals with strong knowledge management components drastically reduce resolution times: you can simply redirect serial questioners and carry on with your work. Of course, there may well be the odd question that you need to answer, but that’s far better than having to be the point-person for anything and everything.

This doesn’t just apply to HR teams – any supporting department can benefit from implementing a self-service portal. And if the same issue pops up again and again, consider adding the answer to your self-service portal. Employ a solve and evolve approach: making your knowledge management stronger each day.

Level 2: Waving goodbye (to their responsibilities)

Colleagues come and colleagues go – that’s just part of business. But the offboarding process is trickier than it looks. When one of your employees leaves, all you want to do is revisit funny anecdotes, listen to their goodbye speech, and head out for drinks. But when you return on Monday morning, a thought pops into your head: “Wait – did they even return their laptop?”

You quickly do the rounds and see if anyone has any information. Kate tells you to ask Dave; Dave tells you to ask Sarah; Sarah tells you to ask Brian; you discover that Brian is not in today.

Great.

So you don’t know where the laptop is, but that isn’t even your biggest problem. Can your ex-employee still access all internal documents? If they can, you need to fix this as soon as possible.

Solution: Most organizations have a flawless onboarding process. New employees are usually welcomed with a drink and a small goodie bag at the reception. Once they’re settled, their manager or team lead shows them around the office, introducing them to their new colleagues and generally welcoming them to the company.

So why don’t you have a set process in place for when one of your employees leaves?
Treat the employees who leave with as much care and thought as you show your new employees. Make sure that you schedule an exit interview to receive feedback about your organization or your department. On top of that, have a thorough (and highly repeatable) process in place to make sure laptops, keyboards, locker keys, and anything else that the company owns is returned before your employee leaves.

Consider creating a checklist of all the critical action items of your offboarding process. This’ll quickly highlight any gaps in your process so you can sort them out with immediate effect.

Level 3: The burst dam

You have a fantastic service desk system in place. Employees lodge requests via tickets and your team diligently works through these tickets. But one day this all changes. Your team’s peace is broken by the shrill sound of a phone ringing.

You cautiously pick it up before hearing a string of desperate pleas come from the other end. It’s a senior manager, and they need something fixed before an important meeting – they need it fixed right now.

Against your better judgement, you agree to see to the issue right away – just this once. Unfortunately, life at your service desk is about to be turned upside down. News of your accommodating nature has quickly spread through the organization, and people now think that the only way to get their problem sorted as quickly as possible is to call the service desk. Once the dam has burst, it’s impossible to keep any semblance of order.

Solution: How do you maintain peace, order, and your team’s sense of well-being? By not giving in. Incident management processes are the bedrock of any successful service desk team.

The fundamental idea behind incident management is that your team can swiftly work through all incidents in an efficient and effective manner: recording outstanding tasks, classifying them based on their severity and urgency, and then assigning them to the appropriate employee. If done correctly, incident management allows you to provide a continuous and consistently high level of service desk excellence.

Level 4: Data breaches

This is the ultimate nightmare for all companies. With the average global data breach now costing $3.92 million, data breaches are more than just slightly panic-inducing. The costs aren’t just financial either; organizations that suffer from data breaches face a significant loss of reputation and might even end up embroiled in legal battles.

You diligently update your security practices on a regular basis and cybersecurity has been your organization’s top priority over the past couple of years. Somehow, there’s been a breach — and nobody knows what to do. Your service desk is facing endless calls from desperate employees wondering what they can do, what they can’t do, and what’s going to happen. It’s pandemonium.

Solution: It’s your responsibility to remind employees that they should always let you know if they feel like anything has gone awry. Maybe they accidentally clicked on a dodgy link in an email, perhaps they let somebody from outside the organization use their laptop, or perhaps they lost a USB stick at a bar.

Whatever it is, it’s important to let employees know that they won’t be named and shamed or scolded – if they think they put the company at risk of a data breach, they need to let you know immediately, without fear of severe repercussions.

Time is of the essence, so it’s critical that you act to prevent data breaches as soon as possible. People often feel silly when they fall victim to phishing scams or the like, so make sure everyone knows that you are genuinely on their side.

Education is an extremely important aspect of this, especially with so many employees currently working remotely. With 90% of data breaches caused by human error, you need to make sure all your colleagues are clued up on cybersecurity best practices. After all, how do you expect them to know they’ve done something wrong if they don’t even understand cybersecurity basics?

Make panic a thing of the past

Nobody likes feeling panicked. We hope this blog has given you some food for thought on how to keep your service desk panic-free.

Did you know Enterprise Service Management (ESM) is the key to making all your supporting departments panic-proof? Working together makes your teams even more impactful, which is the key to a stress-free organization. Download our ESM e-book to reap the benefits of working together.

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Want to know how to improve the way your customers experience your services? If you don’t ask them, you’ll never know.

In order to continuously improve customer satisfaction, it is important to keep the feedback loop active. How do you get a customer to continue providing feedback?

10 creative methods of obtaining customer feedback.

1. Set up a feedback mailbox

Set up a feedback mailbox and market it to your customers. You can use posters around the office, notes in your email signatures, or even include banners in your staff portal or self-service tool. To make this work, you’ve got to treat the mailbox as a two-way communication instrument. Always remember to reply to your customers and thank them for taking their time to give feedback.

2. Use sentiment analysis

Sentiment analysis means you collect conversation data from your services and analyze key words and phrases to work out what the customer consensus is on your services. Brands often use sentiment analysis as a way of measuring their success on social media. Start by running support ticket email conversations through a free word cloud tool for a visual representation of what you and your customers are saying to each other.

3. Appoint a Customer Satisfaction Manager

Who is responsible for handling customer feedback in your organization? Do you know? Does anyone? If there isn’t a specific person who makes sure feedback is top priority in the organization, you should consider appointing a Customer Satisfaction Manager. Allowing someone to focus purely on customer satisfaction makes it much more likely you’ll see results. And while the Customer Satisfaction Manager takes the lead in handling customer feedback, the rest of the organization should of course follow suit and operate towards the same goal.

4. Broadcast surveys

One of the oldest tricks in the book: building a simple survey and publishing it as a form. You can send this form out in an email to your whole company, or to a select list of customers. Just make sure your survey is as user-friendly as possible. Take a look at these 4 steps to creating customer-centric customer satisfaction surveys.

5. Use an ‘in the moment’ approach

Apart from sending out full surveys on a regular basis, you can also ask feedback with embedded feedback tools. Such tools allow your customers to rate their experience with your services while it’s still fresh in their mind. It doesn’t get more ‘in the moment’ than this. Your customers won’t have any difficulties rating your services either: the rating process in these tools is like rating an app in the App Store or using those smiley face buttons you sometimes see at the airport.

6. Have a clear feedback process

Implement a feedback process if you want to keep the feedback loop running. Without a proper process in place, requesting and handling feedback becomes very unstructured. Is it rush hour at your service desk? Obviously, gathering feedback might not be everyone’s top priority. Your Customer Satisfaction Manager can set up a feedback process so your departments always know how and when to process feedback, even when they’re very busy.

7. Pay courtesy calls

Want to gain valuable feedback from customers that know your services well? Find out who your most frequent customers are and why they’re contacting you so often. Do this on a weekly or monthly basis: simply run a report of tickets from the past months and contact your top ten requesters. It’s quick and targeted, and word will soon get out that you’re taking a more proactive approach to feedback. A piece of advice: make sure to also seek out customers who have given negative feedback. It may sound counter-intuitive, but digging deep into those bad reviews will only help you understand your customer better. Start looking for angry customers with help of this blog on how to turn bad reviews into useful feedback.

8. Organize feedback sessions

Meeting your customers face-to-face is often the most effective way to get their opinion. Want to facilitate a platform for giving feedback? Organize a monthly workshop, an advisory board, or lunch-and-learn sessions with different sets of your customers. Make sure you invite a small, mixed group of people so none of the voices are lost and you receive the most representative feedback possible.

9. Swap jobs

Don’t judge a person until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes. Approach different people and departments in your organization and ask if you can spend some time learning about their job. This could be done in an hour, but you can also shadow a colleague for two whole days. Most people enjoy telling you about what they do – and giving you their two cents. Once you know what your customers think, you can help them become more productive, for example by removing any obstacles that are in their way.

10. Be transparent and share improvements

Sharing your feedback reports with your customers is a good way of showing your organization you value their feedback, and that you don’t shy away from being transparent about what you need to improve. Use your customers’ feedback to update your service catalogue, for example. This blog explains how your service catalogue can be key in increasing your customer satisfaction. When you show your customers you actually use their feedback to improve your services, they’ll keep you in the know. Happy customers, happy you!

Looking for more inspiration?

Encouraging feedback in the workspace leads to happier, more satisfied customers. The ultimate method of finding out what your customers really think and feel about your services is customer journey mapping. Customer journey mapping combines several of the tips above and will help you truly step into your customers’ shoes. Download our Customer Journey Mapping Toolkit to get to know your customers through and through.

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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.

The post Self-service – some common problems and questions answered appeared first on MCG - EN.

Useful, but it doesn’t tell you whether your customers are really happy. So, besides your current KPIs, consider using these 4 customer satisfaction KPIs:

KPI 1: Customer Effort Score

Are you keeping track of your Customer Effort Score (CES)? If not, well, you should be. And if you are, you know how important this metric is when it comes to safeguarding your customer-centric approach. The Customer Effort Score measures how much effort your customer had to put into contacting your service desk. The less effort, the better.

You measure how much effort your customer had to put into contacting your service desk. The less effort, the better. So why not turn CES into a KPI? Need to get some tips on receiving customer feedback?

KPI 2: First time right

What’s better than running into a problem, calling the service desk, and getting your problem solved straight away? It’s second only to not running into any problems at all.

Keep track of how often your department provides this kind of fantastic service with the first time right KPI. It monitors what percentage of calls you’re able to close during the first customer contact.

KPI 3: Self-service opportunities

Making your customers more independent is a big part of increasing customer satisfaction. So if you go through all the effort required to achieve this, you want to make sure your Service Catalogue and Knowledge Base are used.

Tracking incoming questions that customers can answer themselves can let you know whether you need to improve or promote your self-service facilities.

KPI 4: Customer satisfaction

And of course the most important KPI of all: customer satisfaction. Ask your customers what they think of your service. There are various ways to score customer satisfaction, from CSAT to NPS.

These measurements work best with regular surveys instead of annual measurements to give you more accurate and immediate insight into the results of your department’s efforts.

Download the free e-book and get customer-focused with BPSM

Using the right customer satisfaction KPIs is vital for a customer-focused service desk. Want to make customer satisfaction an essential part of your service processes? Download our Best Practice Service Management e-book and find out how you can improve your services with BPSM.

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Why should you start customer journey mapping?

A customer journey map helps you find opportunities for improvement where measurements and statistics can’t find them. Maybe you’ve got SLAs or other measurements in place to monitor the quality of your service delivery, but that doesn’t mean you always know where your opportunities for growth and improvement are. That’s where customer journey mapping comes in.

Step into your customer’s shoes and see what your customers experience when they request a service from your department. Is it easy to request a new laptop, for instance? Do customers feel informed when they talk to your service agents? And what about after they get their laptop: is everything set up and ready to go? And are your agents easy to reach for questions?

How to map your customer journeys in 10 steps

Now you know how customer journey mapping will benefit your organization, but where do you start? Before you start our interactive workshop or dive right into mapping your own customer journey, keep in mind these ten steps for an excellent customer journey map:

1. Start with one journey

Map a single customer journey at first. For instance, take a look at the steps your customers go through when they order a new laptop.

2. Engage all relevant parties

Your customer experience is a joint responsibility. Avoid creating a one-sided journey map by involving all teams that work on a specific service. Don’t map your ‘new laptop’ customer journey with just the service desk. Get the IT colleagues that prepare hardware and software to join too.

3. Determine your desired customer experience

Make sure you have an idea of what kind of experience you want and what’s realistic for your teams. Your approach to choosing improvements is different depending on whether you want to deliver a fully configured laptop that customers can use without asking more questions, or a laptop that has the basics set up but gives customers the freedom to pick more apps and settings for themselves.

4. Create a persona to start a customer journey with

Think of  the type of customer that would usually request the service you want to map. What’s their job title?  Would they prefer calling you on the phone would they rather send an email? What does your customer expect from your service? What software do they want on their laptop, and do they want to have everything pre-installed or do they want to it themselves?

Give your persona a name and make them as accurate as you can.

You may need multiple personas if your customers are very diverse, but start with just one for your first customer journey.

5. Get an idea of your current customer experience

Find customers who have recently requested the relevant service from you and interview them about their experience. Ask about their expectations and whether those expectations were met. Be sure to ask questions about different stages of the customer journey.

Find out how easy it is to request a new laptop, how well your agents answered questions after the laptop was delivered and everything in between.

A customer journey helps you find opportunities for improvement where measurements and statistics can’t find them.

6. Plot your customer journey

Give your journey a title and write down your customer’s goal and expectations. Make sure you plot the real journey based on your interviews, not the ideal situation you want to achieve.

7. Describe all touchpoints

Use the customer journey template we’ve provided to put your touchpoints on a timeline. Your touchpoints become clear from your customer interviews and include all communication during the service process, plus moments when customers feel communication is lacking.

Make sure you include the entire journey from start to finish. If you’re issuing a new laptop, your customer’s journey doesn’t end upon delivery. How do your customers feel about the aftercare you offer?

8. Link emotions to touchpoints

Use the customer journey template to put emotions under each touchpoints. Then plot a linear graph of your customers’ emotions, with positive emotions being high points, and negative emotions low.

9. Translate your insights into opportunities

The linear graph under your journey shows you which touchpoints make your customers feel satisfied or dissatisfied. This shows you where you can make improvements. Maybe your customers feel dissatisfied because of the waiting time when they request a laptop. You may not be able to speed up the process, but what if you build in a status update between request and delivery?

10. Keep improving

Now that you’ve got your customer journey ready, maintain it. Create built-in opportunities for customer feedback, so your customers can help you improve even further.

Next up: start customer journey mapping yourself

Now that you know how customer journey mapping works it’s time to get started. We’ve made customer journey mapping a piece of cake with our Customer journey map toolkit. In the toolkit you’ll find a digital workshop and all the tools and templates you’ll need to take the first step in improving your customer experience.

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