As we have seen over the past few weeks, implementing a Self-Service portal can bring many benefits to you and your customers, but these can only be realised if they are using the portal. We know that customers don’t like change, so it is the job of the Service Desk to convince them that using Self-Service will make their work easier.
Leading UK law firm, Trowers and Hamlins, tried an effective four step approach which saw them “reduce the number of calls coming into the Service Desk by 25% in just two weeks!”
1) Choose a diverse sample of customers to test the portal – spend some time thinking about your customer base and who may make the best choices for a sample group to test the Self-Service portal. It is important to include some you know will be enthusiastic to use the portal, but also choose some that you feel may be harder to convert. This approach will allow you to get some constructive feedback across a wide variety of customers.
2) Build suspense and promote the Self-Service portal through visual aids – don’t underestimate the power of a poster campaign to create suspense and get people talking. If you have internal customers, think about leaving conversation starting posters around key meeting areas, such as the kitchen and printers with statements like “it’s coming”, followed by “a new Self-Service portal coming soon”… If your customers are external, send them the posters and back up the posters with customers newsletters and email campaigns. This will build excitement and interest and encourage engagement moving forward.
3) Highlight the advantages – continue to build interest in the Self-Service portal by highlighting the advantages to your customers via poster and email campaigns. A key advantage to encourage them to use the Self-Service portal is to offer incidents logged via the Self-Service portal a higher priority. This is very effective in helping to change their perceptions that phoning or visiting the Service Desk will result in a quicker incident resolution. Other advantages to your customers for using the Self-Service portal includes 24/7 access to incident history, access to a knowledge base they could use to self-resolve their incident and a message board for problems.
4) Publish your successes – take the opportunity to shout about your success during the pilot scheme by publishing quotes from successful customer experiences onto your email and poster campaigns e.g “it is faster”, “I prefer this to the old methods”, etc. This is an excellent way of encouraging other unconvinced customers to use the portal as we know that people now trust word of mouth above anything else.
Read more about how Trowers & Hamlins used this simple, yet effective approach to achieve Self-Service success here
