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Communicating the value of self-service with a side of innovation

Published: January 10 2012, 12:16 PM
by Rich Graves

During my career in the IT Service Management space I've always been very interested in how support organizations use self-service. I've blogged at length on different aspects of self-service and knowledge management and try to be a catalyst to push more companies to utilize a proven mechanism to not only reduce their costs but also improve end user satisfaction. I first gave a presentation I titled "Hang Up the Phone and Increase Customer Satisfaction" at the HDI 2008 National Conference. The attendance (200+) and questions proved to me that self-service was still in its infancy for support organizations. Today in 2011 with the push towards the consumerization of IT and even more widespread use of self-service in the consumer space I'm sad to say self-service adoption is still very poor in enterprise IT. The HDI 2011 Support Center Practices & Salary Report references how little this has changed over the last few years.

Every few months I update my "Hang Up the Phone..." presentation with the latest trends and statistics knowing that it is still relevant and without fail I'm then contacted to present it again to a different audience. So my plea to you is to look for opportunities to use self-service for your end users. It truly is a way to reduce costs and give your customer a 24x7 channel for support.

I've included the latest iteration of the "Hang Up the Phone and Increase Customer Satisfaction" presentation below using the online tool Prezi. Prezi is an innovative way to communicate your ideas where you aren't constrained to slides of a fixed size. I'll call it PowerPoint with flare. What I like about Prezi is simply that it's different and makes your presentation stand out amongst way too many other text heavy presentations. It gives me the feeling that I'm a creative artist - even though I have the artistic skills of a 6 year old.

Let me know what you think of the Prezi and how I can improve it.

 

 

By: Rich Graves
Rich Graves is a Senior Principal Product Manager at CA Technologies. Rich works on a team focused on strategy and innovation for the Service & Portfolio Management Customer Solutions Unit. During his eleven-plus years at CA, he has focused entirely on the Service Management and support market segments...
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4 people have left comments:

Hi, Rich.  I'm very interested in your Prezi presentation but cant view it, and dont know if it's working for others - or if it's just me.  

tammie.kramer@supervalu.com

Posted by: Tammie Kramer | January 19, 2012 4:39 PM

I am wondering why the MTTR would decrease in the Real World Results slide with a self service implementation.  You would typically make your solutions to 'easy' issues available to self service and people could resolve this themselves and would still call in for more complex issues which would tend to take longer to resolve.

A key metric we use that I didn't see is Tickets Avoided with Self Service.  It's a manual process, but compares documents opened by end users who then did not open a ticket.  It enables us to more accurately quantify the value of our self service implementation.

Posted by: Cindy Smith | January 20, 2012 10:56 AM

Here is the link to the presentation on the Prezi site, hopefully this will work better for you.

prezi.com/.../hang-up-the-phone-and-increase-customer-satisfaction

Posted by: Rich G | January 20, 2012 4:03 PM

Cindy- regarding MTTR, in this specific case their focus was moving away from email support to self-service support for ticket logging. They found a tremendous savings purely from analysts not having to constantly check an email inbox and manually create the tickets. These were all process efficiency gains. At the time they had yet to roll out a full knowledge base or any self resolution tools.

But I do agree- if knowledge and self-resolution tools are rolled out MTTR may have an initial decrease but become higher due only the harder questions being asked of support.

Posted by: Rich G | January 20, 2012 4:07 PM

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