Empowering IBM End Users Through Self-Service

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Contemplating on how to make IBM End Users feel confident, assured, and empowered through self-service IT Support

End Users don’t want to learn how to use the support site, they just need to use it to resolve the issue at hand and move on. Displaying a large amount of information to End Users on the support home page will just overwhelm them and make them feel helpless. The user is more likely to try to get help by seeking an assisted support channel that is more expensive for the company

Below are few of best practices widely used in the industry….

Make it easy to find and use:
• Focus on design simplicity for your self help website
• Understand the content most often used by visitors, place this content prominently, and you’ll get a big bang for your screen real estate.
• Ensure that the knowledge in your self help website is properly optimized with updated content for easy information retrieval.
• Invest focus on search engine optimization; make sure support pages are indexed, tagged or ranked, so that support content shows up in these search results.
• Offer product images or icons as the starting point of the service experience.
• Direct users to the best content. One option is to generate a list of frequently asked questions. A second way is to build a link to the content others found useful at the bottom of individual help pages.

Understand Your User’s Issues
Most End User goals for self help can ultimately be distilled down to two objectives:
• Find information. The End User is looking for self-help service and wants to locate some information to resolve a issue
• Get help. The End User feels that the problem can’t be resolved with self-service and is seeking a knowledgeable human being for assistance.

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...example of behavior modification is the priority offering on an assisted channel such as phone support to End Users who have already visited or tried to resolve the issue. This may involve providing End Users with a reference number to enter via an automated interactive voice response system when they call for support. These End Users can then be taken to a special higher-priority queue instead of waiting in a general queue.

Conclusion:
The Web self-help content and services of today’s are in the path of continuous improvement. It may feel overwhelming to adopt all the best practices at once. It often takes years to implement all the concepts and increase the level of maturity to provide amazing End User experience. Researching and understanding the concepts is the first step in the journey of continuous improvements and Delivery Excellence in the self help space.

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