Having a customizable and easy-to-use service portal has been a game changer for Ellsworth Adhesives – a global corporation that supplies a wide range of adhesives, sealants, lubricants, coatings, encapsulants, tapes, soldering products, surface preparations, specialty chemicals and dispensing equipment.
Within the IT department, the help desk used to receive about 80 percent of service requests through email, 15 percent through phone calls and walkups and only 5 percent through the service portal.
Now, 95 percent of requests come through the portal, 5 percent come through walkups and the help desk team no longer accepts email requests.
To make it as easy as possible for people to use the service portal, the IT department created an app that opens the portal automatically on employees’ desktops.
“We were getting 80 to 90 service requests per day, and the help desk team couldn’t filter and rout them all quickly enough,” Adam Crichlow, IT service desk manager, said. With the portal, however, this all happens automatically. This shift alone has cut the time it takes from creating to resolving a service ticket nearly in half.
Using TeamDynamix “has freed up staff time right away,” Crichlow said—a benefit the company realized “almost on day one” of using the system.
As other departments have seen the efficiencies that TeamDynamix has created, they’ve also adopted the ESM system. The latest department to create its own service portal using the platform is the Environmental Health and Safety team, which never used the old ticketing system for service management before.
The University of South Dakota (USD) struggled with knowledge residing in silos across various departments as well as poor communication, leading to inefficiencies when delivering service.
Katharina Wymar, head of Project Management, said “We lacked that one platform, that one mindset that allowed us to share knowledge.”
That’s when they turned to the solution of a knowledge base so that all of their information could be in a single, easily accessible location.
After building out their knowledge base and implementing KCS they quickly saw an 18% reduction in time logged to service tickets, and after six months there were 31,000 users, 262,000 page views, and 5,000 knowledge articles being included in the base.
Based on USD’s experience Wymar shared these keys to successfully implementing KCS for your ITSM platform:
- Look for executive sponsorship. “This project is going to take time to work through, and our CIO was our biggest supporter,” Wymar says.
- Find the right solution for your organization and get trained.
- Set your KCS processes and develop a communications plan to keep everyone engaged.
- Celebrate success. Reward both the quality and usage of articles. “Make sure you’re recognizing the right behaviors,” Cottrell advises. Don’t turn it into just a numbers game. Encourage people to contribute their knowledge, and reward them for their article edit requests, article usage, and the quality of their articles. Recognize team members as they move up in responsibility.
Looking for examples of stellar self-service portals? Check these out.