4 Crucial Self-Service Tips

Congratulations! You’ve made the impactful decision to incorporate self-service into your company’s support model. I previously touched on the pros and cons of self service in last month’s blog, now it’s time to walk through some top strategies to consider when rolling out your self-service program. I’ve group them into the below 4 categories.

1. Make sure that your content can be consumed the same way that you consume all of your other information.
   • We use smartphones to do just about anything anymore. Ordering lunch, buying groceries, paying the mortgage, staying connected with friends and family, watching movies or tv shows, you name it. Well, guess how your employees will want to access the information you’ve provided for them? That’s right, on their smartphone!
   • This means your self-service content must be consumable on a smartphone or tablet.
   • A Yahoo! survey found that 91% of small and mid-sized business websites are not optimized for mobile. Ensuring your self-service content is mobile friendly will provide you the opportunity to stand out from your competitors!
2. Self-service should be part of your support strategy, but not your only support strategy. It’s no secret that many companies look to self-service as a surefire way to cut costs. Reducing overhead and speeding up the resolution time are yearly initiatives we are all presented with, so why not move your entire model to a self-service setup and move on to the next priority?
   • Once you’ve done the heavy lifting of developing, implementing and rolling out your self-service program, your work doesn’t end there. Ensuring your online content is up to date is an ongoing necessity, a process where you will need someone to be focusing on as frequently as technology, operating systems, policies or the needs of your employees change (which is often!).
   • To be successful, your self-service knowledge base also needs to be accessible. Wherever your employees are accessing information, the self-service content should be available. This includes your website, internal portal, applications and on every device they use.
3. Your employees are impatient. Offer your end users quick answers with minimal steps to follow.
   • As I mentioned in my previous post on self-service, the immediacy is an obvious benefit. While speed is a top priority, your content must be accurate and consistent. What good is a quick answer if it isn’t the correct answer anyways?
   • In addition to quickness, the amount of effort required of your employee is a key factor. Great self-service connects them with the answer they need fast, with the minimal number of page view and steps required.
4. Survey, survey, survey!
   • You absolutely must measure the success of your self-service program.
   • Measuring incident resolution, speed to resolution, and ticket deflection are all areas where you should be hyper-focused.
   • Quarterly surveys to those who have accessed the self-service content will provide you with unfiltered feedback that will help drive your program forward and measure end user support.