Self-Service Portal enables the users to log their tickets, track the progress of their existing tickets and search articles/solutions from the Knowledge Base, without even contacting the help desk. In simple words, it allows end users to get assistance, around the clock.

How does a Self-Service Portal merit a help desk?

Proper Documentation and Categorization of tickets

Usually when a ticket lands in a help desk through an email or a phone call, the ticket has insufficient information. The technician is most likely to call or email the end user again for relevant information and document & categorize it accordingly. Instead, if the request is raised by the end user, the user would be glad to fill in all essential details needed to resolve his issue.

Reduce Level 1 Tickets

With the Knowledge Base functionality in the Self-Service Portal, end users can search for simple trouble shooting steps/solutions before raising a ticket. They can understand more information about the existing known errors so that they don’t have to create a new ticket for it. This will reduce the number of incoming level 1 tickets and the technicians can focus more on severe incidents.

Avoid unnecessary ticket for a thread

Most end users are not patient enough to wait for a response. They either send multiple emails or make immediate calls after raising an issue. This ends in creation of more tickets for the same incident from the same user. By using Self-Service Portal, the requester can create a ticket and also notify the technician from his end or request for more information about the status of the request, again without raising individual tickets.

Offer them their Service Menu

With the Service Catalog functionality, the end user can know what services he is eligible to opt for and can request for the service right from his Self-Service Portal. This will also narrow down his expectations and approval process accordingly.?

Keep them in the loop

Timely and effective communication is always important. Self-Service Portal is a great zone to keep your end users well informed about whatever they have to know. It could be a scheduled change, already encountered problems and so on.

Here’s the hardest part:

The biggest hurdle in handling a Self-Service Portal is making the end user access it. End users have comfortably settled into the conservative methods of emailing or making phone calls to raise tickets. Pulling them out of their comfort zone and getting them to access the Self-Service Portal is tricky. Here are some tips that I suggest to my clients:

  •      One of the tips that I would always suggest is to send them links to the Knowledge Base while replying to their tickets. If they are prompted to use the Knowledge Base several times, they would sink into the routine of accessing the Portal before raising tickets.
  •      ?Direct them to the Self-Service Portal by skipping the login screen with single sign-on

Self-Service Portal is one of the building blocks for an efficient help desk that begins with proper ticket classification until help desk reporting. Always build a Self-Service Portal that is effective two ways, benefiting your help desk and your end users.

                 

  1. Hi MAS,
    Yes you can achieve this in two different ways.

    1. You can use the self service portal, where the user can login with his domain credentials if you have integrated with AD and submit a ticket.
    Or
    2. You can create web form & host it in any of your website and set up actions using API functionality in ServiceDesk Plus to automatically push those details when submitted there. For more configuration details check Admin–>General–>API

    hope this helped.

  2. MAS

    A very useful product if setup accordingly.

    I am just using the trial, is there a way in this product that an end user just browses to a URL to submit a ticket (Like a web form) ?
    can you please provide me the help page to set that up ?

    keep writing good software 🙂
    Thanks !!

  3. Roy,

    I completely agree with you that Self Service Portal is completely useless unless it is accessed by the end users. That is why I have told that the hardest part is making them use it and mentioned few tips & tricks on how it has helped in few environments to make the end user access them.

    Arvind

  4. “Making user access Self Service Portal…”
    I don’t think support people are in the business of “making users” do anything. The purpose of our jobs is to assist end-users/customers in getting back to work as rapidly as possible by solving the problem they are contacting us about.

    While I agree that a self-service portal is useless unless it is being accessed by the end-users, I thoroughly disagree with the thought of “making” them use it. A very unfortunate choice of words.