A survey by Zendesk highlighted that before reaching out to support channels, 81% of respondents try to take care of their problem. Self-service portals empower businesses to be where their end users are, whether that is employees onsite, located across the globe, or customers, so they can resolve their issues, improving end-user and agent satisfaction all round.
Industry leaders realize that quality self-service isn’t just an excellent option to offer— it’s a critical one, providing instant 24/7 tier-1 support, happier end-users, and a service desk team that is no longer overworked.
Here are five ways in which self-service portals improve the service desk process.
Employee fulfilment and enrichment
A successful self-service portal strengthens the service desk’s reputation by creating positive employee interactions. With a 24/7 self-service portal, employees can resolve issues in their own time and only need to contact the service desk with issues that require actual engineering expertise.
In turn, this frees up helpdesk agents to focus on more significant, financially beneficial tasks and issues, alleviating agents from the monotony of mundane, time consuming tier-1 problems that are neither challenging nor exciting to do.
Empowering end-users anywhere
Even before COVID-19, we knew customers wanted to self-serve. Now, in the face of so much uncertainty, self-service is not only practical, but it can also be empowering.
Customers have enough to worry about right now without trying to carve out the time to talk or chat with a support agent. Self-service can empower customers to help themselves on their own time – whether they are in the office, at home, or anywhere in between.
By embracing self-service platforms, IT leaders adopt a proven practical scaling strategy, enabling the business to grow while managing costs.
Password reset empowerment
The most significant benefit of self-service portals is empowering users to safely and securely reset their passwords without any service or helpdesk involvement. Combined with secure multi-factor authentication ensures that not only are end-users resolving their issue but doing so securely.
Gartner reports that between 20% and 50% of all IT service desk tickets are password-related tickets; automating and enabling end-users and customers to self-manage these issues results in considerable reductions in load for the helpdesk service desk teams.
Integrating multi-factor authentication, mobile apps, and biometrics can also significantly add a high-level of security to both user and business.
The process of password resetting is simple, but this core feature of any self-service portal is the most significant benefit of all, saving time, money, and offering greater convenience. Users can benefit further by synchronizing password resets across connected directories to keep all passwords in sync. Integrating the process with an operating system’s login screen can help streamline the process by eliminating the need for end-users to navigate away from their workspace.
End-to-end password management
Extending password reset capabilities to include password management ensures that everyone in your workplace keeps their accounts secure. It offers strong management of passwords to privileged accounts, keeps login details hidden behind encrypted storage, and secures business web-apps behind multi-factor authentication, not to mention the end-user convenience of automatically filling in login forms without needing to remember any credentials.
Self-service portals with built-in password management capabilities allow businesses to collaborate and securely share data effectively.
Proactive management
Rather than waiting for passwords to expire, businesses need to encourage users to change their passwords regularly to instil good security behaviours actively. It is easier said than done, but solutions like LogonBox actively remind users ahead of time to change their passwords – and staying inline with NIST standards, any password is checked against a database of weak passwords to ensure passwords are less likely to be guessed.
Automatic notifications
A good self-service platform can offer automated actions such as simple reporting, notifications, and more powerful task execution based on the platform’s events. For example, having an HR system interface with a self-service portal to create a user in the right Active Directory group and then send the user an email is a great time saver.
Conclusion
A great self-service experience can boost customer and end-user satisfaction, reduce tickets, support costs, and increase internal agent engagement.
Self-service offers the least amount of interaction friction, is the new baseline for IT support, and is key to your business’s scalability without the cost.
Take the first step; self-service works best when incorporated into your overall support experience. Download the LogonBox self-service portal on-premise instance or trial a cloud tenant and experience the most powerful self-service portal in your environment.
Learn more
To learn more about building a better, proactive and scalable service desk, check out, “The 5 Key Elements of a Scalable Proactive Service Desk” whitepaper and set your IT service desk on the right course for success. To see if LogonBox is the right solution for you to help reduce IT support tickets and reduce load on your helpdesk team, get a free evaluation here.
