Step 1: Choosing goals and strategies - Seven steps to successfully implement more effective self service IT support

Introduction

Here is a blog about 7 identified steps for how to successfully implement self service IT support. Looking forward to here your comments and please give us feedback and let us know about your own experience or feel free to put a question in the blog.

The goal of many Service Desks is to increase the level of service for users and/or minimize costs in order to achieve a company’s overall goals and strategies. One effective way to achieve this is by offering a self service support system of some kind for the users. Self service systems function as filtering systems for simple and recurrent problems that would otherwise place strain on the first line, manned support system.

Statistics from the 2008 HDI (Help Desk Institute) report show that almost half (47%) of support organisations in the survey currently use a self service support system – so-called self-help tools or self service tools. A further 25 % intended to implement a self service system in the near future. The study was based on 1,000 support organisations in five countries (the majority of the organisations were in USA, but the study also included organisations from Canada, Brazil, India and Australia).

There are various kinds of self service system, for example FAQs, access to Incident Problem, access to knowledge, documentation libraries, password reset services, downloads, self-diagnostics and self-healing tools. The most common kind of support system, according to the HDI report, is some form of FAQ (49%). FAQs can be anything from simple, pre-packaged solutions, such as a page on a website with answers to the most common queries, to more advanced tools with search engines, statistics and other functions intended to ease matters for both users and support organisations.

The purpose of this blog post/white paper is to offer advice about how you can begin working with self service support systems in an effective way, and how you can ensure long-term success, both by increasing the level of service to your users, which indirectly results in financial benefits for the company, and also by creating direct financial savings through the handling of fewer cases by manned support systems.

Step 1: Choosing goals and strategies

When implementing a self service support system in an organisation it is important to decide and clarify an overall goal as early as possible that underpins the overall support goal for the support organisation. In this way one can...

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