How to Sell the Value of a Self-Service Portal to Employees

A self-service portal can offer a wealth of benefits to organizations and their employees – whether it’s specific for IT or used by other business functions like HR, facilities, finance, legal, procurement, or other internal service providers.

You probably already know the benefits, for example self-service is a cheaper and swifter support channel for employees. But there’s so much more to go on about.

Even though the available self-service technology is very mature, we still see organizations encountering issues with employee uptake of their self-service portals. For example, the 2019 Service Desk Institute (SDI) “A View from the Frontline” survey and report highlighted that close to half of organizations still need to improve IT self-service adoption in 2020. If you’re one of those, this blog is for you.

I’ll outline the key benefits specifically for employees, and intersperse 5 employee-related self-service adoption tips to help.

This blog outlines the key benefits that a self-service portal offers employees, along with 5 employee-related self-service adoption tips to help. #selfservice Share on X

What really matters to employees (when it comes to your self-service portal)?

In the manner of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, there are several must-haves or must-dos related to self-service portals and their successful adoption by employees. Then there are the other benefits that further help to sell self-service to employees. So, let’s start with the must-haves.

Self-service needs to be easier, quicker, and a better service experience compared to calling or emailing the IT service desk, when employees need to achieve a desired support outcome.

Whether this is getting help, requesting a new service, or simply checking on the status of an existing ticket. Failing to ensure this will likely mean that employees will continue to use what they perceive to be the superior experiences of the telephone and/or email channels.

Tip #1: Design your self-service capabilities with the end user at heart. Aligning self-service capabilities to employee wants, needs, and expectations, including their ways of working and consumer-world experiences of self-service. Plus, very important – ensure that everything is in non-IT-speak, i.e. keep the language simple so everyone will understand it.

These must-haves of employee expectations provide the bedrock for self-service portal success. Because, outside of their given circumstances and perhaps personal engagement preferences, why would any employee proactively choose a service and support channel that’s inferior to others?

Your self-service capabilities need to be designed with the end user at heart. Aligned employee wants, needs, and expectations. #selfservice #servicedesk Share on X

Selling the benefits of your self-service portal to employees

Start with a self-service portal that:

• Makes it easier to access support than other service and support channels. Especially since help and service can be accessed from anywhere and via a variety of devices, including mobiles.

Tip #2: Consumer-world self-service capabilities have created a self-help high bar that your portal needs to consistently meet. Also recognize that it’s definitely not a case of “build it and they will come” – instead, self-service adoption needs to be earned by doing the things that encourage employee uptake.

• Makes it quicker to get support. And that the required resolution or provisioning is available immediately through automated delivery mechanisms or knowledge articles.There’s no waiting like in an IT service desk telephone queue or for your email to be picked up and addressed.
• Provides a superior service experience. Where speed of resolution plays a big part in the employee experience, as does the consumer-world-like experience.
• Offers a wide choice of support options for employees to use. The IT service desk started with the telephone and walk-up channels, then email was added. Now self-service, chat, and virtual assistants all add further options for contact. Be careful to allow the choice of IT support contact channel to best match the employee context and need.

Tip #3: Ensure that you sufficiently market the availability and benefits of self-service to employees. From choice, through availability, to the better service experience. This is the opportunity to really sell the benefits of self-service to employees.

Other benefits and selling points for using the self-service portal include:

• There’s improved support availability. With the self-service portal providing employees with 24/7 access to support and services outside of office hours (where the IT, or any other business function, service desk is closed until morning).
• The availability of a service request catalog helps employees to get what they actually need. And the details of the available services, in all departments, are easily accessible to employees.
• Employees are empowered via self-help. The availability of a knowledge base of helpful information and common fixes allows employees to access help on their terms and in a self-sufficient way.
• Employees are better informed on ticket progress. The self-service portal acts as a quick and convenient mechanism for checking on the progress of their incident and request tickets.
• It helps employees to traverse language barriers. Because, thanks to digital translation capabilities, employees can access support and services in their language of choice rather than being restricted to the languages spoken by service desk agents.
• It provides a consumerized service experience. Employees are bringing their personal, consumer-world expectations of service and support into the workplace. So, consumer-grade self-service capabilities, including issue logging, service request catalogs, knowledge availability, and ticket status checking for self-help are an employee expectation.
• There’s any time, any place, any device access to services, information, and help. This, of course, is part of making it easier to access support, but it also deserves its own place in an employee-benefits list. Especially for employees that predominantly work away from a desk.

Tip #4: Sufficiently invest in organizational change management tools and techniques for what’s ultimately a change to the traditional ways of working. Without this, employee buy-in will be difficult at best – slowed down or prevented by the various factors that make up resistance to change.

• Automation provides immediacy of resolution or provisioning. Whether this is a fix delivered via service orchestration or the ability to download and install required software.
• Priority is given to tickets raised via the self-service portal. While this isn’t usually the case, it can be a strategy employed to help increase self-service portal adoption versus the email channel in particular.

Want to increase self-service adoption? Sufficiently invest in organizational change management tools and techniques for what’s ultimately a change to the traditional ways of working. #selfservice #ITSM Share on X

Tip #5: Your employees will look to self-service as a way of getting a swifter service experience. Giving priority to tickets logged via the self-service portal will help to achieve this even if it’s just a short-term strategy to encourage adoption (and the move away from the telephone and email channels). Of course, once using the portal, they might also find immediate resolution through knowledge articles and the available automation capabilities.

It’s also important to understand what employees won’t be interested in

When the benefits of self-service are discussed, most of the time the advantage of cost savings comes up. But you should not focus on this when introducing your self-service portal to employees, because that’s not a selling point for them.

Instead, focus on the other motivations that would better drive employee adoption. For example, the immediacy of resolution and a better service experience. The cost reductions will come with higher levels of employee adoption.

You know what else they won’t be interested in, but is certainly a great benefit of self-service?

• Reduced service desk workloads. Because removing employee contacts – from both the telephone and email channels – through self-help and self-service can have a big effect on service desk ticket volumes.
• The better prioritization of tickets. For the telephone channel, first contact resolution means that issues and requests are often dealt with immediately rather based on priority. A self-service portal restores the ability to better prioritize logged tickets based on urgency and impact.

These factors are true and highly beneficial to organizations. But consider the employee point of view as they ponder the “What’s in it for me?” (as per Tip #4)  – if anything, these benefits will encourage employees to think that the self-service portal will provide them with an inferior, rather than superior, service experience. So, these organization-level benefits should be kept separate from  the list of employee benefits.

If you’re interested in seeing how easy it is for an end user to submit a ticket with SysAid, then please watch this: