Time is the most important resource of any business. Of all things that can hinder productivity and lead to poor time management, IT issues are the most common. Every time your employees want help with password reset, need to provide user access to a fellow employee or wait on a support call, their work comes to a momentary halt. How to combat these unavoidable issues and help your teams get the support they need at once?
Enter self-service.
Users don’t always want to get on a call when they need help. They prefer readily available information that can guide them towards the solutions. IT self-service can help you accomplish that.
With a self-service portal, you can enable your teams to resolve IT issues on their own by offering a curated knowledge base, troubleshooting guides, and self-help resources in a single interface. Let’s look at seven key benefits of self-service for IT support.
Benefits of Self-Service for IT Support
1. Improve Agent Productivity
Self-service enables support agents to specialize in their areas of expertise and not spend their days flooded with common, repetitive questions. Having to convey the same answers repeatedly can be exhausting and can make them feel indifferent towards their work in general. Self-service frees their time. It eliminates their need to deal with queries that don’t require human intervention and, in doing so, challenges their expertise and improves their productivity.
2. Shorten the Time Taken to Resolve Tickets
No matter how good a support team is or how well they manage their time, it is tough to resolve issues as quickly as one would expect. Who doesn’t like instant gratification? Self-service can help you achieve faster responses if not immediate. Employees can find solutions for their IT service requests and common issues at once. As a result, agents now deal with fewer tickets with a fair amount of time to work on them.
This will help you reduce your ticket resolution time by prioritizing issues that require human effort.
3. Save Costs With Increased Ticket Deflections
Saving a few calls, a few bucks, and a few hours of your employees’ time may not look like much. But when you imagine the same for hundreds of end-users and thousands of issues every single month, it can be a big deal. Operational efficiency is all about small, calculated improvements in the way your teams operate every day. For instance, if you add a real-time notification to your knowledge base regarding a service outage, you can eliminate the associated tickets and faqs coming your way.
Using self-service options like knowledge base articles, Support Widgets, and Chatbots leads to lesser incoming ticket volume and helps you drive core service delivery metrics.
4. Offer 24×7 Availability
IT issues make your teams focus their efforts and time on getting in touch or interacting with the IT department rather than their work. This clearly leads to a break in momentum. No user would want to wait until the agent is free to ask how to upgrade a software license.
When agents are pressed with ticket overload, users have to wait longer to get their questions addressed, however trivial. Hiring more agents as your ticket volume increases may not be a long-term solution either – it depends on factors such as your budget roadmap and investment strategies.
Self-service is the best way you can offer 24×7 support without increasing the staff headcount. A combination of a knowledge base, support widgets, and chatbots make up for every functionality a support team is limited in – bandwidth, availability, and sometimes speed.
5. Empower Employees to be Self-reliant
A delay in getting help can quickly translate into backlogs, over-time working, and reduced work quality. Self-service solutions assist users in taking the driver’s seat and steering towards the solutions on their own. It gives them the flexibility to search, find, grasp, and apply the solutions on their own accord rather than relying on the support team’s availability. IT Self-service improves the CSAT with employees and keeps the morale high. With your employees stuck with IT issues and agents overwhelmed with tickets, you can’t expect great results.
And self-service can help you solve both.
6. Improve Employee Engagement Within the Organization
One more reason why self-service precedes other forms of support is that it documents and centralizes every touchpoint of an employee’s query cycle. Engagement doesn’t just refer to the interactions that happen between fellow employees but also the employee – organization interactions. Self-service is interactive. It allows employees to educate themselves about the processes more rather than being handheld by the support team.
Self-service will also help you improve the employer’s NPS score, a.k.a. employee satisfaction – this indicates positive employee engagement within the organization and employees having a sense of ownership in what they do.
7. Leverage Digital Transformation in Your Business
Managing an ITIL service desk is no mean feat. Your employees and the expertise they bring to the table will help you achieve your objectives faster when combined with the right technology. Good companies don’t segregate people and digital transformation. Nor do they want to replace people with technology.
Leveraging digital transformation will help your employees realize their potential to the fullest. Tools like HappyFox knowledge base are mobile-responsive – users can avail the required support on the go and not at the disposal of support team availability. At this cusp of human expertise and valuable technologies like self-service, Workflow Automation, and Business Intelligence tools, you can achieve your vision of superior process efficiency.
Conclusion
IT issues are unavoidable. They can give rise to process inefficiencies across the organization, including functions outside of support. While facing a ticket overload or SLA breach once in a while is expected, you need a long-term solution as your business grows. Self-service is the solution and you can’t overlook it anymore.
HappyFox IT Help Desk offers easy customization and hence can be modeled easily onto your IT Service Management (ITSM) and your active directory. HappyFox knowledge base operates in 35+ languages, thus enabling globally-distributed companies to assist their users better.
HappyFox also offers user-friendly tools that can help you enhance your self-service benefits – Workflows, with which you can automate internal ticketing processes, and Asset Management, with which your support teams can manage hardware and software assets easily. There is more – Sign up for a HappyFox Help Desk demo to enhance the end-user experience and set your teams up for success with IT self-service experience!
