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, 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 for request forms that does 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.

To learn more about 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.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in March 2019 and has been updated with new information.