RightAnswers Self-Service Best Practices
RightAnswers stands at the forefront of the rapidly evolving market
for web-based tools for end-user self-service for the internal IT
Help Desk. Most support professionals are aware of the huge potential
savings a well-executed self-service strategy can deliver to an organization.
To put a number to it, at $25 per first level incident, deflecting
just ten calls per day to a Self-Service Portal will save $60,000
per year! Getting started can often be the hardest part of any new
initiative. This article highlights some of the key best practices
that we have observed in the field and hopefully you will be able
to develop your own successful strategy for self-service using this
article as a starting point.
Marketing Communications
We all know we are supposed to "market" our services but
we do not always do it. When it comes to building enthusiasm for
a self-service portal, marketing is critical. The simplest plan well
executed is better than the best plan that goes nowhere but to the
next meeting. Some ideas to help you get going:
 Put
a message on your phone system telling people that you have a new
service available.
Make
it part of the impression on new PC installs or repairs. Make the
browser default page your portal site.
Put
a signature line in all support representative emails announcing
availability and imbed the link right in the email.
Offer
expanded service through the self-service portal. i.e.: If you are
adding on-line chat, tell phone callers that web chat sessions get
responded to first. If you are not yet using Remote Control software,
add that but  only
for users who come through the self-service portal.
Stress
they are helping the company. Many associates are sensitive to the
company's costs. Marketing the fact that using the self-service portal
saves the company money is not a waste of time.
Treat your self-service portal as though it is a
product you are bringing to market. This means you have to test,
gather feedback, test again, etc. When you put a self-service portal
out to your end-users, you are really "releasing" a product to
the market. Like any technology product, there should be a beta
group to give you early input and later to serve as in-the-field
champions. Internally, one or more people must have both the
responsibility to continually monitor and improve the end-user
experience and the authority to fix things or try new things
to deliver continuous site improvement.
"Expose your wins"
Bad news travels fast, good news travels slow…but it travels.
Accelerate the good news word-of-mouth. When you have gained some
early success, update those email signatures with a quote. Put a
quote from a happy co-worker right on the self-service portal home
page. Be creative and help the good news spread! Make end-users search
before opening a ticket but also make it easy to manage an existing
one. Unlike external customer service support sites, internal customers
tend to call about a narrower range of topics and tend to have a
narrower (which is better) distribution of experience with the products
they are calling for support on. Letting your customers open tickets
directly from your self-service portal home page will be somewhat
self-defeating. Before they can open a ticket, the portal should
require that they ask a question and look at the answer. Good portals
only make them search once, in other words, make them search first,
but then allow them to open a question right from the results page.
This treats your end-user with respect, as you trust them to know
from a page of solution summaries whether or not they have found
their solution. However, if they need to manage an existing ticket,
either closed or open, let them do it right from the home page. If
someone is trying to update an existing ticket, having them re-enter
an old question just to get to the manage ticket windows will only
lead to frustration.
Focus on the 20% that Effect Most Users
Do not build a self-service strategy that turns into authoring drudgery.
Trying to author every solution that you may have to respond to
will not work in the end. You will end up with too many solutions
that get used too infrequently. Instead, start by reviewing your
call logs and doing some Root Cause Analysis or clustering. You
do not need anything other than a few hours with the raw data and
a sharp eye. If people are always asking for things (PCs, Phone,
Pagers, etc.) build those FAQs that explain policy and let people
self-qualify before submitting a request. If you are inundated
with basic "How to's" after new product roll outs (Windows
XP SP2 for instance), get yourself a knowledge base and get that
deployed.
Make Support Continuous
All good support experiences that do not end with the initial contact
must be continuous for an end-user to have a positive experience
with support services. In any context, having to re-tell your problem
to successive agents is very frustrating. With your self-service
portal, make sure that it is not only easy to search or browse
for solutions, but when a solution is not found, it is seamless
for your end-users to open a new ticket. Make sure the loop closes
by allowing end-users to manage both their Opened and Closed tickets
from the home page as well. (Remember, just because the Help Desk
closed the ticket doesn't necessarily mean the end-user will agree!)
Put Useful Content on the Home Page
We are all support cynics to some degree. Help overcome early (and
irrational) resistance to using your support portal by putting
useful information on the home page. Your top support issues, timely
announcements about outages, "account" (ticket) information.
All the answers they need in a single click.
Share the Knowledge
Make sure the knowledge base deployed in your self-service portal
is readily available to your support analysts as well. Part of
the indoctrination experience to garner end-user acceptance of
your self-service portal is the belief that the answers they are
looking for actually exist. Your support analysts need to check
the knowledge base first to see if the answers do, in fact, exist.
If it does, emailing the solution or demonstrating how the analyst
managed to find the answer when the end-user didn't (all in a positive
tone!) will help build confidence in the content of your portal.
That, in turn, will help drive end-user adoption.
"Close the Loop"
No one can truly know what an end-user will ask for in a newly deployed
self-service portal. Monitor, initially on a daily basis, the questions
that are submitted and the tickets that are opened after unsuccessful
searches. You will be amazed at how quickly you can update your
portal with information your end-users really need if you just
pay close attention to the questions. Online surveys are another
great way to make improvements.
If your support analysts cannot check and find the answers when
they do exist, uptake will be much slower.
Summary
These are some of the things we have learned along the way. Our experience
has been that internal self-service is just now beginning to achieve
popularity and we hope these concepts will be useful in your own
organization. If you have an experience that you would like to
share with us, please contact us and we will be happy to add to
this growing list of Self-Service Best Practices.
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