5 simple self-service portal tips in Freshservice

Self-service portals don’t enjoy a lot of attention. I’ve always believed that business end users have very little motivation to log into the portal. Unless the portal is easy to access, comprehend, and navigate, your business end users will resort to the channels they know best – calling up the service desk or walking up to the IT team.

self service doesnt enjoy a lot of adoption

According to the 2017 SDI report on Realising ROI From Self-Service Technologies, 62% of the respondents cited that self-service is difficult to use and not intuitive.

sdi-report-self-service-stat

 

At Freshservice, we bake intuitiveness into our design principle. Traditionally, Freshservice customers have enjoyed high adoption rates with self-service portals.

case-study-improve-self-service

In this blog, we talk about five simple things you can do immediately with Freshservice to boost  adoption.

Change the text on your home screen

While IT terms are easy for us to comprehend, you must change your portal’s language to match your business end user’s lingo. Remember, the word “incident” means something entirely different to them.

Consider this example below:

self-service-portal

The language on the end user portal is written from an end user’s perspective and therefore it is easier for them to quickly navigate their way around.

Here’s how you can change the text:

Navigate to Admin → Helpdesk Rebranding → Customise Portal → Layout & Pages → Portal Pages → Portal Home and change the desired text

self-service-portal-change-text

Change the text on your ticket forms

If your ticket forms are ambiguous or need to be explained, then the chances are slim that your end users would actually fill it up.

Take a look at the forms below, which one are they more likely to fill out?

self-service-portal-ticket-forms

Don’t be alarmed by the long text you see on the fields. Freshservice allows you to modify the forms in a way that you can have different text for your end users and agents. This way, your agents can still see the shorter version of the field name and it makes reporting easier too!

You can configure this while setting up the forms under Admin → Form Fields → Field Name.

self-service-portal-change-texta

 

Providing placeholder/guiding texts

Sometimes, the field name in itself isn’t enough for an end user to make the right choice. The most common example in the industry is that end users always choose “High” when asked to fill in Impact and Urgency. However, have you tried really explaining to them what it means?

Consider a ticket form like the one below. If you provide them this guiding text, do you think they’ll still end up choosing “High”?

Here’s a detailed post covering set up instructions.

For service requests, you’ll be able to configure placeholder texts while setting up the forms. This is extremely useful when you want to encourage users to enter data in a certain format.

self-service-blog-service-request

When you configure a service item under Admin → Service Catalog, you will have the option to enter the placeholder text.

self-service-portal-placeholder-text

 

Add an extra icon on the end user portal

Do you have a request that you often get? End user struggling to find the password reset link? You can add easily an extra icon on the end user portal and link it to any webpage.

self-service-portal-extra-icon

Here’s how you can do this in Freshservice.

self-service-portal-add-icon

Go conversational

We’ve reimagined the self-service portal experience. We questioned the need for forms and redesigned the entire portal to be a conversational interface. You’ll be able to turn the entire self-service portal into a conversational interface.

self-service-conversational-portal

self-service-portal-conversational-try

The best part is that it only takes four clicks to enable this experience for your business end users. Don’t believe me? Here you go:

self-service-portal-enable

Once done, you can also ‘botify’ your service request experience to make it conversational. When you configure a service item under Admin → Service Catalog, you will have the option to ‘Make it bot ready’ and also specify what your bot should ask.

conversational-portal-sr

There you go – my five simple self-service portal hacks. Do you have something that I haven’t thought of?

List it down in the comments section!

Cover Image Credits – Srinivasan Dhotre