As we know that an IT self service portal department is generally considered as the backbone of the entire business. For example, they provide technical and data-driven functions for supporting various operations, maintaining financial records, helping customers, enabling technical services, etc. Thus, you need to strengthen the backbone to strengthen your entire enterprise.
Tell me honestly, how long can you wait for the company’s representative to answer your simple queries as a customer/user? I am not guessing more than a minute or two. Am I right? Because why would anyone wait for a response when there are multiple options available in the market? As a company owner, competition is often challenging but there are always different ways to stand aside from the crowd and providing efficient customer service is where you should start with. Why? Because giving excellent customer service is the best key to keeping your customers loyal.
And to help you in this, you can implement self service portals. Here we will discuss more self portals, their benefits, what an ideal self portal must-have, etc. These points will help you to gain significant details about the importance of a self portal for your business.
What Is an IT Self Service Portal?
Self service is not a new concept. People like to help themselves and get what they want independently. Vending machines and ATMs are classic examples of it. Now, in your business apps and websites, too, can you provide a self service option to your customers. How? By implementing self service portals. FAQs, Chatbots, online tutorials, how-to options, etc. are great to start with.
For instance, there are multiple requests from customers for changing their password, so they can find the steps to change their password in your website’s ‘how to’ the ‘FAQs’ section. This way, they do not have to wait for your company’s representative to answer their query. On the other side, your customer service reps can invest their time in solving other major issues rather than minor ones. There are many advantages of implementing a self portal. Following are some of them:
Benefits of Self Service Portals
Improve Employee Productivity
You might be aware about how much traffic of pending requests gathered for an IT representative to solve. With a self service portal, most of the tickets can be solved by customers themselves. So, your reps can concentrate more on significant requests rather than solving the tedious requests repeatedly. This way, they can be more productive and efficient.
Reduce IT Cost
Usually hiring IT professionals costs a lot to the organization. But since you have self service portals, you can cut down on the number of IT professionals you need to hire. Customers can help themselves with many problems.
24-hour Support
Implementing Chatbots is the best way to provide 24/7 services to customers. They can just ask their queries, and the chatbot will answer them with the answers or will guide them to the relevant sections on the page that can help them. You have to fill in the questions and answers in the Chatbot software for this.
Also, when a customer asks a query of which a Chatbot does not have an answer, it will simply transfer that ticket to the relevant representative. This way, the representative can solve that query in the office hours. A chatbot will save your cost for hiring professionals for different shifts and will also provide 24/7 assistance to your customer.
Streamlined Communication
When an issue needs higher-level attention does occur, your IT self service portal can manage ticket submission, automated status updates, tracking, and centralized responses. The portal is also capable of streamlining communication and managing notifications.
Helps in Creating a Community
You can have a Q&A section on your website and form a community. You can let your customers ask questions, and other customers or your representatives can answer the questions. This way, you can increase the interaction on your website, and customers can find their answers easily. You can then monitor all the questions and include some of the common questions in your FAQ section.
Improve Customer Satisfaction
Enabling fast and easy solutions to the IT issues will not only be helpful to your staff but also to your end customers. They will feel valued, and eventually, you will have more loyal customers.
Increases Social Media Engagement
Nowadays, social media presence is a necessity for almost all businesses. You can share links on the social media accounts of the FAQs and community forums. This way even your social media audience will be able to directly navigate on the FAQ or community forum’s page.
You can also share polls and opinions from the social media audience to know what your audience wants to know about your business or products. You can then add the responses in the form of FAQs. This way, you can also make your customer’s opinions, and queries feel valued.
What to Look for in IT Self Service Portal Software
IT self-help portals need to be simple and robust. It should provide users with all the solutions they need related to IT. If you aim at increasing productivity, then you need to make sure that you choose an ideal self service portal.
The functionality of any self service portal is defined by the user’s activities. But if you want to avoid problems like poor quality of experience, lack of communication tools, slow response time, issues in managing requests, etc., then you must have a look at the curated list of features that your self service portal must have:
- A knowledge base or article library with videos (“How-to” tutorials or videos for self-discovered solutions)
- FAQ capabilities
- Easy search functionality
- Engaging and intuitive interfaces
- Easy navigation
- Community forums
- Live chat
- Ticket handling
- Searchability
- Chatbot
- One-click requests
- Multi-device accessibility
- Communication on service additions or changes
- Effective communication tools
- Business intelligence and analytics
- Ability to automatically identify user and equipment
- Self service password reset or recovery
You also need to ensure that your chosen solution is able to integrate with any tools you are currently using. Additionally, you can also opt for a custom solution providing company. With customization, you can add only necessary features and additional features that suit your niche.
Another important tip here is to make sure you do not miss the navigation part. Because slow navigation will only result in bounce rates, and you do not want that right?
Why Your Business Needs a Self service Portal?
40% of consumers prefer self service over talking to a representative. There is no question that the majority of the consumers use, appreciate, demand, and benefit from self service. Same way, every business that aims at building a great relationship with users and increasing productivity of staff needs a self service portal. I have a list of some possible reasons that alarms a need of self service portal for your business:
- your consumer base is larger than your IT support team then it becomes tough and tedious to communicate through traditional communication channels.
- If you want to automate many common and repetitive requests like error in logging in, password resets, price charts, etc.
- If you want to make your customer service available for 24/7
- you want to cut down on response and resolution time.
- If you want to drive your resources to work on business-driving initiatives rather than spending time doing repetitive tasks.
- your users are demanding self service
- you want to improve customer satisfaction
- If your users express frustration or give poor reviews for the current way of providing support
- If you are looking for ways to cut down the costs and make work more efficient
How to Monitor IT Self service Portal
Once you have implemented the self service portal, you have to work on improving it continuously. And for improving anything, you need to monitor many metrics for finding the fault or scope of improvement. Here are some of the metrics you can consider monitoring self service portals:
- Ratings of knowledge base article on your website
- Submission rate of tickets via self service method
- Resolution rate through self service
- Ratings of customers for self service
- Number of visitors using self service
- Bounce rates of self service
- Escalation rates on available topics via self service
- Comparison of self service usage with other service channel usage
Final Words
Self service is the best way to assist the demand of customers of being assisted 24/7 and getting relevant solutions. And the best part is that your customers do not need to be tech-savvy to use self service features. They can just use their voice to find any documents, products, and services. This will result in a robust ticket management system and a higher customer satisfaction rate.
Additionally, giving excellent customer service will bring you loyal customers as well as will also promote customers to do word-of-mouth marketing for you. And for employees, you can have an employee self service portal where employees can manage the tickets. This way, their productivity will increase, and work quality will also enhance because they do not need to deal with repetitive tasks.
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