How IT Self-Service Empowers Users to Help Themselves

Last Updated: April 19, 2023

Say an employee wants to reset his password. He contacts a support agent, receives an instant reply, and gets on with his work. End of story.

If only it’s that easy. Getting support is not always a cakewalk for everyone. Having your employees rely on agents for all of their support needs will not prove effective in the long run. You need to look for solutions that can address their pain points and make their lives as easy as possible. Employee experience is important for building a mutually beneficial organizational culture.

And what better solution than self-service that can guide your employees through their everyday hiccups and roadblocks? Read the benefits of IT self-service for employees and how it empowers them to help themselves. 

Employees are the representatives of your brand who complement your journey and vision. You need to equip them with the necessary tools and resources to provide great outputs. Self-service is one such important tool that helps you achieve the following benefits.

1. Help Employees Manage their Time Effectively

If your employees still spend time waiting around for an agent’s reply, why? Self-service can help your employees get instant solutions to their issues. With the time saved, they can focus on exciting new initiatives and launches that help them broaden their expertise and skills. Self-service benefits both the support agents and end-users. Your employees reap the benefits of quick resolution times, and for your support teams, it’s the reduced workload.

2. Make Administrative Work Easy

A 2017 Mckinsey survey says that HR departments spend an average of 60% of their time on repetitive administrative tasks every day.

This could range from employees asking how to download their payslips to where to find their onboarding schedule. The mundanity of these repetitive support requests lead to inefficient use of time, decreased productivity, and not to mention grumpy employees. 

HappyFox Assist AI leverages the power of AI bots to bring IT, HR, and Ops support within the collaboration platforms your employees use every day – Slack and Microsoft Teams. The tool converts conversations into tickets and brings the solution from your internal knowledge base. Assist AI also allows your agents to handle escalations and manage support tickets within Slack. With advanced bots and tools doing the grunt work, your employees can return to their strategic objectives.

3. Improve Employee Satisfaction

By default, support channels that give instant resolution have higher satisfaction ratings than channels that don’t. Employees want to take the easy route to problem-solving. Longer response times can make them lose momentum and hinder their natural flow state. When you hand them the control over support, they can look out for their own needs.

The process of getting support has never been easier. All you have to do is equip your employees with the right tools. Knowledge Base, Assist AI, and a Self-service Portal are some of the must-have self-service tools. Self-service will improve your employee satisfaction and their happiness quotient with the work. 

4. Improve the Quality of Support

Today, most tech support teams spend their days buried in support tickets, typing the same answers repeatedly. This leaves them with less time to dissect and resolve complex problems. Over time, the quality of support can take a hit. Your employees, on the other hand, will be equally frustrated. Being rushed towards the solutions or handed with a how-to article after spending so much time for support can be exhausting for them. Self-service helps users handle common issues on their own. As a result, your agents will have lesser tickets to handle and more time to provide personalized and quality solutions.  

5. Decrease Operational Costs

Self-service aims to enhance employee productivity, reduce resolution times, and optimize the overall efficiency of support. Where does this all lead to? Decreased overall costs. Companies are actively investing in real-time support since it has a huge impact on how things get done in an organization. Inefficiency in technical support can affect the organization at large, for it brings work to a halt. Self-service will be a great investment with solid returns in the long run. Keep innovating your internal self-service and also introduce tools like automation workflows to particularly overcome the silos involved in today’s remote working environment.

HappyFox Assist AI for Slack integrates with your Service Desk, Knowledge Base, and Slack to help you manage your whole IT support within the internal channels. The benefits of Assist AI ranges from maintaining audit logs in an ad hoc messaging environment to providing support to employees in real-time. In addition, this self-learning tool can easily get better with each interaction and issue. 

Takeaway

Self-service is a must-have in a fast-moving workplace.

Even when remote working was not as common, sole reliance on human support agents or call centers was never the best way to go. Not every issue is complex. Issues that are too simple to fall in your support team’s bucket shouldn’t be allowed to do so. They can waste time, affect productivity, and lead to employees feeling grumpy and unmotivated. Self-service is the answer you need, as it can act as the first line of defense targeting repetitive, mundane queries. 

To build an efficient work environment that isn’t taken aback but thrives in the event of issues, you need to equip your employees with the right resources and skills. The first rule to solid internal support is to reduce the time and effort it takes to get support – in other words, low touch, high impact support. Having a highly equipped internal team can help, but you can’t let your whole internal support run on it. Technology can assist your employees and pitch in where humans lack. 

Your agents can face work fatigue. Self-service doesn’t. Hiring agents to work 24×7 is expensive. Chatbots are not. When the resolution is beyond self-service due to the complexity of the issue or users wanting personal support, agents will take charge. You need to strike a balanced environment where technology exists to help humans bring out the best work in them.

Conclusion

If you want to build successful user relationships and support services, start from within. Happy employees create happy customers. Tools like HappyFox Help Desk offer powerful internal self-service tools to help you transform your employee experience and make their lives much easier.  Here’s your starter pack for a powerful internal self-service:

  • HappyFox Help Desk – With this all-in-one help desk platform, you can provide faster and hassle-free employee and customer support alike. 
  • HappyFox Knowledge Base – This effective knowledge base empowers your employees to help themselves. Leverage this searchable, multilingual, and mobile-responsive knowledge base for promoting IT self-service.
  • HappyFox Assist AI – Bring support to where your employees actively communicate, collaborate, and share ideas – Slack. 

Incorporate these in your IT service management (ITSM) for best reactive and proactive self-service. Sign up for a demo to explore expert products on employee and customer experience!

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