Support Information
Service availability, known issues, outages
Technology breaks, issues occur, and outages happen. Users understand this is a normal part of using IT systems to support their business activities. Sometimes, just making them aware that an issue or outage is occurring is enough to meet their support needs. If they know you are working on the issue and they can come back to your support portal to see updated availability status when the incident is resolved, many users will shift their attention to other activities and wait to use the affected resource.
The most common way availability and outage information is presented in a self-service portal is in the form of alerts and/or banners. Users are presented with a short list of notifications that link to more detailed incident information (typically a support ticket or update feed). Color coding is also frequently used to denote service availability (Red for unavailable, yellow for degraded and green for normal system status).
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
FAQs and common tasks are one of the most important components of your self-service support portal. By bringing the most commonly searched for questions to the forefront, you eliminate the need for users to go searching for the information they are looking for. Saving a few clicks may not seem like a big deal, but when you multiply this by many users, the impact can be significant. If possible, FAQs should be self-contained and not require users to search for additional resources to answer the question or perform the desired task. From the FAQ, the user should (within a few clicks) be able to access all other resources they need to resolve their issue.
Monitoring the usefulness of FAQ content is important to getting the most value out of this feature. A common way of doing that is to embed a survey question at the end of the FAQ asking the user whether the answer fully resolved their issue. If they answer no, the user should be directed to additional support resources such as a search function or agent assisted support options. The content of your FAQs will also need to change as your IT systems evolve. New system implementations and upgrades can often generate new support topics that FAQs are ideal for addressing.
Searchable knowledge base
Almost every IT support function maintains a knowledgebase of articles, troubleshooting guides and questions & answer content that agents reference when providing support to users. Your self-service portal enables you to make some of this content available to end-users directly. There are two key factors that contribute to the value of your knowledgebase: the quality of the data and the ease by which it is accessed. Knowledge base quality is simply about making sure that information is complete, correct and current (these should be part of your knowledge management processes already).
For content presented through your self-service portal, ease of access is all about search. If your content isn’t searchable, your users aren’t likely to find it. Browsing and tree-based navigation requires a lot of effort for categorization, classification and organizing data, while search functions provide a better user experience without the overhead.
Moderated community forums
Peer and community-based support have become commonplace in modern companies. Users submit questions that are organized into discussion threads and answered by other users and IT subject matter experts. Community forums are great ways to not only enable users to share information with each other, but also a means of capturing sentiment information about how well your IT systems and services are meeting user’s needs, where feature gaps exist, and when situations are causing frustration. This information helps your IT staff improve the quality of your systems and service offerings. Support forums should be moderated by someone on your IT staff to ensure discussion stays on topic, prevent the publishing of sensitive data and correcting inaccurate guidance provided by forum contributors.
User guides & documentation
Most software and IT services come with user documentation that explains how to install, configure and use the system. Software and services delivered electronically typically provide these resources in digital forms that can be included in your self-service portal. This documentation often has a lot of valuable information that can answer many common questions but frequently users don’t know where to find user guide content, so they instead ask your IT support team. Making this information available through a self-service portal gives your IT staff the ability to manage the content and refresh it as changes are made to the system and augment it with information about customizations specific to your company’s installations. When the user needs to access the information, they know where to find it.