How to make a great IT self-service portal.

[hheimensen1]

As an ITSM consultant I have been involved with many self-service portal implementations.
I have seen a lot of good and bad examples. In this article I want to give some guidelines of what I think is important to implement a great self-service portal.

This year at the ServiceNow Knowledge 14 event in San Francisco I attended the session "Designing a Self-service Portal for Love and Money" presented by Juha Kujala from the Wärtsilä Corporation. At Wärtsilä they designed one of the best self-service portals I have seen so far. I found this session really inspiring and it made me realize how much value a good self-service portal can add for your customers. This is what inspired me to write this article.

So what can make a self-service portal great?

First of all and most important: Don't think as an IT person, think as a customer!
Make sure you know what your customers need and how they like to use a self-service portal.
This may sound simple, but I have seen many occasions where customers are forced to register data in self-service to make the life of IT and not their lives more easy. The result: Self-service will not be loved and therefore not be used. So make sure you think as a customer, talk to your customers, have workshops with your customers to find out what they need.

Second: Keep it simple.
Make sure that all the functionality you develop is as simple as possible. ServiceNow has many possibilities to do this. For example don't make separate processes for registering incidents and knowledge search, but make sure the processes are integrated. Meaning that knowledge articles are displayed real-time based on keywords in the incident description. Another example is to make choice lists as short as possible, if you want people to choose a device when registering an incident, make sure the list only display devices they own. Even better… make sure devices are displayed with pictures to make it even more user-friendly.

Third: Think social.
I know this may sound like a scary thing to do 'lots of extra (none IT) work' but IT is not only about solving issues nowadays, it's about giving the best service to your customer as possible. Using live feed and status updates to inform your customers about major incidents or problems can be a great way of communicating. Another thing to consider is giving customers the possibility to chat with IT, this may sound time consuming but it can save lots of time when registering and linking the conversation directly to the incident record. If possible use pictures in the chat function to give the customer the feeling they talk to a person and not a computer.

Fourth: Layout
Realize that look and feel is important for most customers. If the self-service portal is in the same style as the company's intranet and website, customers will be much more likely to adopt it and use it. Make sure you do it right, don't only place a logo in the right top of the page and change the color. ServiceNow Eureka release will allow you to use CMS   to design the portal, this way you can design the portal exactly according to the style of your company.

Last: Keep your customer up-to-date.
Make sure you communicate regularly about the status of incidents, problems, changes. Think about what information is valuable for customers and of course what information you want to share. If the self-service portal will provide the customers with sufficient information about the status of their requests it will result in fewer phone calls and emails to the helpdesk, which gives the helpdesk more time to use social functions 😉

Harald Heimensen.

ITSM consultant.