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Develop an Effective Strategy for User Self-Help Portals
Too often, user self-help portals fall short in companies, but they don’t have to. By formalizing a strategy for building and maintaining self-help systems, IT and user departments can optimize self-help.
6 Min Read
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In March, customer service solutions provider Tidio published a survey on self-service in which 88% of respondents said they expected self-service portals from companies they do business with. Plus, 73% said they wanted to resolve their own issues independently.
Swamped with trouble tickets, emails, and phone calls, IT help desk staffs want to see more user self-help, too! But can they?
A myriad of software vendors provide solutions for user self-help. These systems feature searchable knowledge bases, user forums, chat services, and even the ability for users to request IT services from a menu of tasks that can easily be auto scheduled and then performed, such as the set-up of a new workstation.
In some cases, self-service software is bundled with traditional help desk software. In other cases, the self-service software is standalone but can easily be integrated with commonly used help desk software. That sounds good, but the challenge for IT and other company departments, such as HR, that want to provide self-help to employees is being able to develop information that is actionable for users.
SearchUnify, a customer service and self-help solutions provider, cites three major challenges in self-help systems: users not being able to find the information they are searching for; users not finding information that’s relevant to their issues; and IT’s failure to regularly monitor self-help systems to see how well they are working.
Let’s examine the issues and see how IT and others can address them.
Users not finding the information they want. Users can only find the information they want if the information is there.
Some vendors offer self-help libraries for their systems, but most of the time it will be up to IT and user department subject matter experts to populate the knowledge base with the information users want to know.
The first step in knowledgebase building is performing research to determine who the self-service target audience is. The next step is meeting with these users to understand the topics they need to learn about and identify the questions on any given topic that they are most likely to ask. Additional insights can be gleaned by reviewing notes and old question logs to see which questions were most commonly asked.
Once the team determines as to the types of information that the knowledge base needs, the system can be populated with that information. The content can come from documents, blogs, videos, process steps, outside information and resources, and anything else that IT and user department subject matter experts contribute.
In the case of HR, for example, a common question that the knowledge base might address is when a new employee’s 401K contribution from the company will begin to vest. An IT question that the knowledge base might answer could be what a user should do if their workstation suddenly doesn’t connect to the network.
Users being able to schedule their own IT service events. Most self-help systems come with a “self-service catalog” feature that allows IT to list an assortment of IT services for which users can schedule requests.
Examples include a user who needs a new workstation or printer configured and connected to the network; or a user who requires a company mobile device; or a security user ID-password setup. Service requests like these are easy to automate and schedule because they are straightforward tasks that IT can execute and fulfill in a timely manner.
In contrast, a user request for IT to troubleshoot a mysterious system bug that’s crashing a system requires investigation, and the timeframe for resolution is unknown. The complexities of these requests require that they be routed through the normal help desk function.
Users finding information that’s relevant. Initial information planning meetings with users help define the content of the self-help knowledgebase, but they must also take into account usability. In other words, for the topics and questions that users want to know about, can the knowledgebase quickly arrive at the “bottom lines” of these requests, so users can deftly help themselves and be on their way?
Commercial vendors build in tests for information relevancy by asking users questions after knowledge searches like, “Did you find this information helpful?”
In this way, feedback is gathered. It enables vendors -- and IT and subject matter experts -- to continually improve the quality of the knowledgebase and the self-help system functions that users experience and use.
IT’s need to regularly monitor self-help systems to see how well they are working. Some years ago, a software VP at what was then a 4GL (fourth generation) no/low code software company told me that his company regularly filmed users when they were test driving the generation of reports from data to see how well they were navigating screens and understanding how to use the software.
“We film them, observing where there is hesitance or confusion because they’re not quite sure what to do next,” he said. “We also check navigation. Can they easily go to the function they want to use? In some cases, the tool works exceptionally well, but we’ve also seen cases where we’ve had to revise the product to make it more user friendly, based upon the usability issues we observed from film.”
Software testing techniques have advanced since then, but usability is still an important goal. In the self-help environment, you want to ensure that users can easily navigate the system and swiftly get to the answers and services they need. If they can’t, they can’t help themselves. The only way you can do this is to monitor site abandonment levels, observe how often users are using the system, and continually solicit user feedback.
A need for system maintenance. Self-help systems will never find themselves on the same mission critical system list as an ERP system, but they still need to be taken seriously by IT.
To take a self-help system seriously means that it must be maintained by ensuring it’s working well for users and continuously delivering point-on, relevant information. All too often, there is a tendency to place the maintenance of self-help systems at the bottom of the IT to-do list, because these systems are “only” for internal users, and they are never classified as mission critical.
A self-help system is relevant for employees’ ability to do work on their own with optimized self-help tools and knowledge bases at their fingertips. To keep these systems running at optimum performance levels, their knowledge bases and functions must be regulatory updated. Those who own these functions and content (e.g., IT, HR, finance, and others) should build a regular system maintenance routine for self-help systems into their operational cycles.
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