What's in this Success Playbook

This Success Playbook will help you build smart, effective approaches to the design, implementation, and maintenance of your self-service channels. You’ll learn how to:

• Target the right opportunities for self-service improvement
• Design an effortless self-service experience
• Make self-service success an organizational priority
• Build momentum for self-service adoption    

Key takeaways

The most important things to know

• Make the self-service user experience effortless. Focus on a small number of key interactions in the user journey where user experience is won or lost.
• Prioritize self-service improvement and maintenance. Define measurable goals for self-service, and make it a priority for your service teams.
• Nudge users to adopt self-service. Help users overcome change inertia through a variety of tactics, from branding to the use of key influencers.

The payoff of getting this right

A typical self-service interaction can be 98% less expensive than a phone- or email-based interaction—meaning that your organization can save millions of dollars by moving more support requests to self-service.

Steps covered

Step 1: Assess your opportunities for self-service improvement

• Create a small set of metrics to objectively define your self-service goals.
• Use interviews to find the pain points in your service consumers’ key interactions with request fulfillment.
• Visually analyze potential self-service use cases based on their value to the business and to the service consumer, complexity, and cost of setting informed priorities.

Step 2: Design for an effortless self-service experience    

• Focus on making self-service effortless instead of on consumer delight.
• Take a mobile-first approach when designing the user interface.
• Build in advanced search capabilities to help users find what they need faster.
• Use in-context personalization to highlight relevant needs.

Step 3: Make improving self-service an organizational priority

• Make self-service and organizational priority by clarifying how employees will drive self-service success and aligning their performance incentives with self-service goals.
• Create knowledge management practices so everyone can easily solicit, share, modify, and consume knowledge.

Step 4: Build momentum for self-service adoption    

• Build momentum for self-service adoption with pull marketing techniques, including targeted branding, referrals, and peer-to-peer coaching. 
• Highlight the immediate benefits consumers get from using self-service.