IT Service Management (ITSM): Self-Service Adoption

By moving to a self-service model, you can deflect calls from your helpdesk to your portal and users can look for the answers they need whenever and as often as they need to, with much less reliance on making transactional phone calls or in-person visits to the help desk. This is especially great for high-volume help desks.

This shift not only improves customer satisfaction, but it also dramatically reduces the per-incident cost incurred by IT (from about $22 for a level 1 support call to about $2 for self-service) and the volume of issues and requests coming into the help desk, which allows IT to reallocate technicians to higher priority tasks and projects. But for this to work as intended, self-service must:

• Provide the ability to publicly access answers and services through customizable views.
• Offer access to request forms that do not require a sign-in process.
• Be easy—greatly reducing your call volume while also giving end-users what they want.
• Respond to multiple devices and support those with disabilities.
• Be easy to configure.

At North East Ohio Medical University (NEOMED), they’ve seen great success with self-service adoption following Knowledge-Centered Service (KCS)© principals.

Prior to using TeamDynamix for their ITSM needs, NEOMED students and employees had to call or email the university’s help desk to log service requests. Using TeamDynamix, the university built a comprehensive service portal with knowledge base articles explaining how users can resolve their own IT issues. If users can’t find what they’re looking for within the knowledge base, they can submit a ticket request through the service portal — and requests are routed automatically to an appropriate technician for a response, saving valuable time.

“With our client portal, we have been able to wean people off (of calling the help desk),” project manager Geri Hein said. In turn, this allows the talented IT division to focus on more resource-intensive projects. To see samples of stellar IT Service portals, click here.

In Oklahoma City, Business Systems Manager Dusty Borchardt credits well-defined processes and solid ITSM software for the city’s success in the modernization of its IT service desk.

With about 100 people providing IT services for more than 5,000 city employees, the IT department needs to work efficiently. TeamDynamix ITSM has allowed them to do so by streamlining the delivery of IT service through automated workflows.

“TeamDynamix has brought simplicity to our operations,” Borchardt said.

Using tools within the platform, Oklahoma City IT staff have created a self-service portal linked to an expanding knowledge base. City employees can find answers to common problems and frequently asked questions within the knowledge base, and if they can’t resolve their own issues, they can submit a service request through the portal.

Based on the nature of the problem they describe; their request is routed automatically to the appropriate IT team for a response. “Our goal is that use of the self-service portal will continue to grow, reducing our call volume and emails to the IT service desk,” Borchardt says.

Using TeamDynamix has helped Oklahoma City’s IT support teams realize their vision for using industry best practices to improve the delivery of IT services.

“We adopted the ITIL framework more than 15 years ago. We’ve had effective processes in place for a while, but we haven’t had a decent toolset to manage them until now,” Borchardt concludes. “This is the first IT Service Management platform we’ve implemented that everyone loves to use.”

To learn more about driving self-service adoptions with KCS, the benefits it can provide an organization and to get practical best practices, check out our blog on transforming your IT practices with KCS.

This post was originally published in March 2019 and has been updated with new information.