Step-by-step process and practical advice to build Self-Service

Advances and innovations in both service management and communication technologies now offer service desks the opportunity to quickly and cost-effectively streamline their customer & user support.

This article incorporates best practices from the Service Desk Institute (SDI) and proposes 10 key enablers for organizations to build a better service desk with self-service.

1. Shift Left
   1. Move support structure as close to the customer as possible.
   2. Reduces costs and meets user & customer needs more readily.
   3. Eliminate/ reduce calls to help desk through self-service, live chat, email and community support.
   4. Shift from highly expensive interaction to cheapest forms of resolving issues.
   5. Validate the success through performance data and metrics such as
      1. First contact resolution, knowledge base utilization, customer satisfaction and call volume.
2. Constructive Call avoidance
   1. Focus on technologies and processes that remove the need for end users to contact the service desk.
   2. Minimize the most time consuming and expensive communication channels, especially telephone contact.
   3. Ensure that this approach does not detract from relationships; user satisfaction remains a central consideration.
3. Lean IT
   1. Focus on customer centricity and value recognition. Value is only what the user thinks it is.
   2. Reduce/ eliminate any activity that does not add value across the entire value chain.
   3. Maximize relationships, processes, practices, activities between IT and the rest of the business as well within the IT organization.
   4. Avoid large transformation projects, but rather focus on short data-driven, incremental improvements
   5. Ideally focus on satisfying fully the needs of a particular user group, then scale.
4. Use live chat rather than phone conversations
   1. Live chat today is an established support communication channel and part of the customer service journey.
   2. It is popular with customers and significantly reduces costs compared to phone activities.
      1. Indicative industry feedback suggests a 33% time saving of support analyst’s time.
   3. Depending on the purpose of the user, chat enjoys high adoption rates in remote support, linking to and from the service desk, etc.
5. Self-service
   1. Use of self-service facilities has spiked from 50% in 2007 to 70% in 2013.
   2. Nuance Technologies’ research reveals that 75% of surveyed believed that self-service to be a convenient way to resolve customer issues.
   3. The Better Connected SOCITM report published in 2012 estimated the average channel cost as follow: face-to-face £8.63, telephone £2.83 and £0.15 via the Web
   4. However, corporate IT service desks do not achieve the same rates of self-service utilization.
   5. True measure of self-service success is the call avoidance
   6. Some companies take radical steps and make self-service the only channel on particular days.
   7. Important to gain top-level management engaged in self-service and then cascade down.
   8. It also requires a comprehensive marketing program to support self-service efforts.
   9. Consider and try different innovative ways to increase self-service use.
6. Self-Help
   1. Self-help follows a similar trend as self-service
   2. Different kinds of self-help
      1. Provision of knowledge through blogs, FAQs, forums, shared documents
      2. Tasks that the user wants to accomplish (password reset, Allowing Users to log a call and see the status of their call, etc.)
   3. It is not about the technology, but what comes from the productive use of the technology.
   4. It is the end user that ultimate decides on the value.
7. Super users
   1. Their role is broader than that of a technology user expert:
      1. The Technology user expert adds to the support structure, influences strategic decisions for service desk, filters requests and issues on behalf of the user community, provides business knowledge & insight on evaluation of processes and services.
8. Social IT
   1. Through community based support companies have been able to shift their support structure and put peer-to-peer support at the center.
   2. The impact of social media is staggering. Facebook and Twitter have had massive impact on how people communicate as a starting point.
   3. Social media has removed the need for telephone calls and emails especially for young people.
   4. Unfortunately Social Media has not been adopted much by IT service desk industry.
   5. The adoption rate between 2009 and 2013 has only experienced a few percent rise, except of Twitter (which is due to higher uptake of higher education organizations and their service desks).
9. Use of knowledge
   1. The ROI on knowledge articles and other efforts is difficult to measure.
   2. Knowledge can be explicit (written down or tangible) or tacit (intangible, gleaned through experience and interaction, thus unseen until shared).
   3. Xerox claims that through it Eureka database and communicating copier repair tips among technicians it could cut costs by about 10%.
   4. Knowledge to be effective must carry a number of key attributes.
      1. Accessible
         1. It is all about the search function. Without good search function people will not be able to locate information in reasonable time frame.
      2. Concise
         1. Articles are to be brief and focused.
         2. Important points must not be buried inside a long report.
      3. Up to date
         1. Update articles as technology, processes or other factors change.
      4. Trustworthy
         1. Accuracy must protect the reputation of the KM system.
         2. Establish a virtual team of moderators to review articles and ensure consistently high quality.
10. Integrate and automate technologies & systems
    1. Technology based challenges with systems struggling to communicate with each other require unnecessary manual intervention and processing. It adversely affects the service desk’s ability to innovate and streamline operations.
    2. Overcoming these challenges helps the integration of systems and automation of processes.
    3. Leverage APIs to integrate tools and technologies.
    4. Move step by step. Integrate specific technology groups or work toward a defined outcome.
    5. Focus on all tasks that are highly manual labor intensive and time consuming. Automatize as much as feasible.
       1. Set up systems to automatically assign priorities based on SLAs.

 

For more insight and best practices for service desk and self-service/ self-help, please refer to my other related blogs