Self-Service ITSM Support: First Steps for Designing the Interface

What Is a Self-Service Interface?

With an effective self-service interface, end-users have 24/7 access to an intuitive platform for finding answers and resolving issues without the need of contacting IT support. Deploying a self-service interface makes it easy for customer- and employee-facing end-users to access organized resources and execute service requests quickly and efficiently.

With the assistance of Flycast Partners, organizations can develop a clear strategy for both the designing of the self-service interface and the upkeeping of its daily use beyond implementation. Flycast Partners has years of experience evaluating systems and identifying where self-service portals can improve the user experience. Our holistic methodology allows organizations to design and establish self-service portals enabling end-users to find answers and information easily, resolve issues quickly, and close incidents successfully without the intervention of IT.

Listen to the companion Podcast about Designing a Self-Service Interface.

To ensure long-term success, it is vital for organizations to determine where strategically deployed self-service portals will produce the most immediate impact. When addressing self-service management, the following questions must be answered:

• What are the organization’s short- and long-term IT objectives?
• What information will the self-service portals address?
• Who oversees creating the content?
• How will the self-service experience be designed, organized, and labeled?
• Who will perform maintenance for 24/7 accessibility?
• Who will add to, review, and refresh the information?
• What are the organization’s benchmarks for success?

For building an effective self-service experience, out-of-the-box and customizable templates keep the user experience straightforward and easy. If there is a routine incident to report, such as a printer issue, a slow-running PC, or a user locked out of a system and needing a password reset, end-users can access self-service portals to resolve their issues or use searchable FAQs and knowledge-based articles that provide simple steps for fixing issues and auto-closing incidents without interacting with the IT support desk

Why Design a Self-Service Interface?

When access levels change, roles modify, or users require specific needs, service request offerings provide customers with efficient ways to request a new feature or ask for something to be fixed from a single organizational source. Even if nothing is broken, service request offerings use an incident-based template to fill in all the needed fields for automating approval and fulfillment. For new hires and onboard/offboarding, service request offerings have the opportunity to be an effective technique ensuring end-users have access to the right applications, resources, and tools to accomplish their job. Typically, whoever is responsible for the IT environment from an ITIL perspective should be engaged in deciding how a given service request should be defined and architected. By automating fulfillment with service request offerings, organizations can verify the right department has performed the task, track the status of the service request’s lifecycle, and confirm approvals and fulfillments are done efficiently, accurately, and successfully.

Improving the User Experience with Self-Service 

Whether broadcasting to the whole end-user community or a given subset, alerts and announcements serve as valuable communication tools to provide a successful user experience. For customer and employee self-service, organizations can easily and effectively manage announcements covering a variety of topics, informing your end-user community of important bulletins and upcoming events. When dealing with more critical matters, alerts notify end-users of technical or service interruptions, giving organizations the capability to deliver to the right end-users impactful updates instantly.

Implementing alerts and announcements into an organization’s knowledge center allows end-users to have reliable, proactive methods to stay up to date on forthcoming events, noteworthy changes, scheduled maintenance activities, and the status of service interruptions. Long before being affected by the issue, end-users have already received a notification. Ivanti’s self-service portal experience provides three severity levels of alert notifications designed to inform end-users that support staff is aware of the larger issue.

Flycast Partners understands that every organization’s self-service needs call for unique, tailor-made design criteria. As your partner, we base our focus and design around what your end-users require, how they interact with the support desk, and the overall challenges and goals of your organization.