In business, time is money. Therefore, keeping our employees happy and productive is essential for them to focus on their daily tasks. We must prevent system failures that make them waste their valuable time waiting for support help. That’s why it’s vital to bring them solutions that allow them to overcome challenges easily, such as an IT self-service portal.
Self-service allows employees to find answers to their problems without waiting hours, days, or weeks. It enables you to provide users with the information they need just when they need it most, from anywhere in the world. That’s why IT self-service is one of the most popular tools for service desks.
But firstly, you must make sure that the service desk complies with the following 5 functionalities:
#1 Robust knowledge base
Every IT self-service portal should have a good knowledge base. This ensures that employees can get answers to their issues before they create a ticket.
This is an advantage for both the employee and the IT agents. It decreases ticket creation by up to 54%, thus the workload.
The knowledge base should include content such as:
- FAQ section.
- Tutorials / Tutorial videos.
- Articles.
- Practical guides.
There are two key aspects to take care of in a knowledge base:
Quality of the information. The content should be as complete and accurate as possible, and also kept up to date. Therefore, it is necessary to periodically review the information shown.
Ease of access. Evaluate the system that best suits your content. One of the most popular is tree navigation. However, in order to take advantage of it, it is necessary to prioritize, classify and purge the information very well. That’s why we always advise working with a keyword-based navigation system.
#2 AI-based capabilities
In the new remote/hybrid workspace, AI is a great ally for business process management. In IT self-service, AI has been integrated in the form of virtual agents or chatbots.
These make it easier for users to search through a “suggestion” function that is linked to the knowledge base. There it can automatically recommend relevant content to your employees, or content that may be related to their query.
AI allows the automated assignment of tickets to appropriate agents or groups. This saves you from manually assigning tasks and saves time.
Another advantage of AI is the efficiency of employee procurement of technology devices and services. To provide services more effectively, you can automate workflows for the approval and delivery of digital services.
#3 Service Catalog
And speaking of digital services… the cornerstone of IT self-service is precisely to give the agent or end user a catalog with services available or not available at the moment.
This is a Must-Have feature in your Service Desk since it is not only useful for the customer, but also within the internal organization of your IT team.
A service catalog makes inventory so much easier. You will be able to plan purchases or allocate funds to departments based on catalog data.
Together with AI automation, you can:
- Create rules and set up workflow automation: assign agents and workflows for approval at different stages of requests.
- Keep all stakeholders informed with timely notifications that are automatically triggered based on preset rules.
- Prioritize requests and improve service delivery with SLAs that can be customized regarding the service elements available in the catalog.
#4 Customizability
Any tool that we integrate to improve the management of our services needs to be customizable. This means that it must be adaptable to the needs of your business and your employees.
Customizable tools are more efficient and provide greater control over the IT department’s processes and workflows. With a customized tool, they can set the exact parameters they need to ensure optimal department performance.
For example, platform administrators require customization in IT self-service to determine what functions and data users can and cannot access. This gives them a more consistent experience and makes it easier for them to manage the information they have at their fingertips.
#5 Multimodal support options
Finally, IT self-service is essential to decrease incoming requests to the support team. However, many times it may be necessary for an agent to intervene in order for the user to resolve their issue and continue with their workday.
When these cases occur, it is important that the portal has access to the support team in multiple ways. Because each user prefers different channels of communication. Which can be:
- Chat.
- E-mail.
- Webform.
- Phone.
- Schedule appointments for “in-person” assistance (video calls, generally).
Conclusion
In short, self-service is an essential function in IT support strategies. If you have these 5 features in place, you can be sure that you will have an efficient and well-structured self-service. This will help you lower support costs and increase employee satisfaction.
If you need to implement an IT self-service portal that has all this, you can evaluate the adoption of one of the best ITSM tools we have available: Freshservice.
Freshservice is a service desk that has a self-service system. It’s easy to implement and has all the features above-mentioned.
If you want more information about it, contact us and receive a free consultancy.
