With the growing focus on human capital management, the concept of employee experience has embedded itself into IT service management. The changing global landscape means that employees working from any remote corner of the world expect seamless service delivery irrespective of different channels, time-zones, or even devices.
Self-service technology can be a crucial solution to these challenges. Unlike popular convention, ITSM self-service is not a new concept. However, self-service portals can singlehandedly solve several operational bottlenecks for the enterprise. Such integrated portals help enhance the IT team’s productivity, make employees comfortable with the systems, reduce turnaround times for issues raised, and eventually lead to greater growth for the business.
Self-service integrated into your ITSM platform can unlock tremendous value for your business. Before you set on that journey of capital investments and resource allocation, you should have a clear roadmap for the self-service portal. This begins with understanding its benefits.
What Makes Self-Service Portal a Value-Adding Element in Your Business?
Most people are quite used to searching for information online to find resolutions to common queries. A dedicated Self-Service portal in an ITSM solution builds on this idea to support employees. It provides employees with quick access to information related to the organization as well as technology, irrespective of the time of the day or their current location, whether working in a physical office or remotely. A self-service portal not only expedites the query-resolution process for employees but also provides a positive customer experience by giving them a sense of empowerment and increasing efficiency across the board.
While the self-service platform is a great way for your employees to find solutions to common questions, it helps your IT teams focus on more strategic problems. Studies show that over 40% of an IT professional’s time goes into solving common technical challenges. A self-service portal can shoulder most of that responsibility and help your IT teams concentrate on more value-generating tasks while helping your organization save money.
While seemingly excellent at the outset, an ITSM system self-service portal has very tangible benefits for your business:
- Increased Efficiency with access to Self-Help: Your employees can access the entire knowledge-base curated by experts, IT teams, and other contributors. The information available in the format of FAQs, articles, guides, and blogs can help them find relevant information to resolve basic issues or at the least find a workaround to be able to continue working on their daily operations.
- Facility to Self-Log Issues or Requests: Even after sifting through the knowledge-base relevant information to resolve an issue is not available, employees can themselves raise a ticket through the platform. The IT support team can then help them find the resolution to their query. This creates a sense of ownership for both the employee and the IT teams. Moreover, through the self-service portal, employees can keep a track of the status of their requests.
- Better Quality of Service with Live Chat Channel: Some of the most-advanced self-service portals provide a live chat channel as the first line of engagement-based support for employees. This helps employees get fast but accurate answers directly from technicians and support staff.
How to Optimize Employee Experience with Service Desk Self-Service Portals?
It is very easy for new projects to fall into the ‘value-trap.’ Employees are usually not eager to use new technologies because new technologies mean a learning curve. Add to that a poor user experience, and organizations will see no ROI on the new tool. However, when a self-service portal is deployed keeping in mind the employees’ expectations, the portal will harvest more usage and ensure productivity at the enterprise-level which in time will lead to cost savings.
The right self-service platforms start generating value from day one of operations, as they take the redundant and operational tasks outside the IT support team’s peril. While this may seem like a way to decrease the team’s burden, it allows them to work on producing value for the business and solving more critical challenges.
There is also a tacit benefit of having a self-service portal. It puts all the control in the hands of your employee or internal customer. This way, instead of waiting for someone to solve their queries, they can go ahead and solve the queries themselves. This creates a very strong sense of ownership and empowerment in employees. The added benefit is the time saved by the employees and the increase in productivity by not having to wait around until the support team provides a resolution.
More than anything else, an effective self-service platform releases the resources within your organization that would otherwise go into solving problems that all your average employees are already equipped to solve when they have the right information available in the right format.
Understanding the efficacy of the self-service platform is just the beginning. All the value creation depends on how you optimize the self-service portal to provide a great employee experience.
- Acquaint Employees with New Onboarded Processes through systematic Change Management. People who have been writing with their right hand for a large part of their adult life cannot suddenly shift to the left hand, no matter what degree of benefits they can get out of the change. While you plan for the rollout of new processes in your self-service portal, utilize your ITSM solution’s change management process to familiarize the employees with the new technology without disrupting their daily operations.
- Enhance your Knowledge Management to promote Self-Help: Selecting the right ITSM self-service platform and integrating it into your organization is the easy part and only the first step. Once employees accept the change, the self-service technology adoption levels need to increase. Ensure a good employee experience by building and constantly updating a robust knowledge-base with relevant information for employees to access for ‘self-help’. To know more about how you can transform knowledge management using your ITSM platform, read our blog Make the most of your ITSM platform for Knowledge Management in 3 easy steps.
- Do More with Less – Use your ITSM tool’s Automation functionalities. Automate certain common resolutions with your ITSM solution’s workflow capabilities. IT personnel can configure custom workflows to automate frequent, everyday service requests like password reset, credential regeneration, and other authorization-based accesses. This helps employees access these services from the self-service portal and IT teams deliver superior and quick services at a low cost.
- Manage Notifications: Let your employees know when the system is down, or some functionalities are unavailable by broadcasting notifications on the self-service portal so that they can adjust their schedules and save invaluable person-hours.
- Scale the Benefits provided by the Self-Service Portal. One of the biggest advantages of having a system that works is that you can extract more value from it by scaling it across different business functions. Using the ITSM self-service portal to support other corporate service providers like HR, Admin, Facilities, Finance, etc. will increase cross-functional collaboration, reduce resource allocation to redundant processes, and help create a more federated management system.
Self-service is an evolutionary process. Every few years, your ITSM self-service platform will undergo an overhaul to stay in line with employee expectations. This would necessitate a feedback-driven development, update, and deployment mindset.
Instead of treading self-service as another IT project, leverage it as an agent of change used to optimize your business processes. As far as you optimize the platform for employee experience, you will keep generating value with it.
Make self-service a fundamental element of your employee experience improvement strategy with the Motadata ServiceOps ITSM platform. To match each of your employee’s needs by the beat, request a demo to see Motadata ServiceOps in action.