Every user experience is multifaceted. It takes organizations years to fully mature and delivers excellent results. However, you can reap significant short and long-term benefits with the best Employees Self Service practices. Let’s take a look!
10 Best Practices for a Successful Implementation
Your company can achieve this sustainable commitment through continuous refinement. Only then can you exceed the expectation of your users. Make small, incremental changes to witness larger ones.
1. Make Self-Service Easy
If users cannot locate the self-service area, does the functionality exist? Try to create a system that is accessible. Increase and encourage the use of assisted channels. Your team will be frustrated otherwise.
2. Empower Users
A company with successful implementation is the one that makes users feel confident and empowered. Therefore, usability is crucial for its success.
Once you empower your users, you will have increased adoption rates. In addition, there will be more user loyalty and word-of-mouth advertising.
Avoid displaying excessive information. You will overwhelm your users otherwise. Focus on simplicity. Add meaningful and valuable content. Remove anything that doesn’t add meaning to your platform. Hide the unimportant features.
Focus on the probabilities. Don’t offer multiple choices to your user. Instead, provide the possible decisions to help your user—incorporate images and icons for easy recognition. Most importantly, focus on functionality and device compatibility.
3. Understand Your Users’ Problems
Goals are critical when developing a self-service strategy. Organizations often misconceive the user experience. They typically want to resolve a problem but fail to do so.
Resolution rates play a huge role in an organization’s understanding of problems. Therefore, you should better know potential problems to help resolve the issues.
Here’s what you can anticipate with self-service platforms:
- The user may want to report an issue. It could also be on behalf of someone else.
- The user may need software or hardware access.
- The company’s HR personnel make requests on behalf of an employee.
- A user may request someone for assistance when self-service isn’t sufficient.
Don’t give into building a platform based on the internal workings of your department. The existing workflow may not be relevant elsewhere. Moreover, it may not match the mental model of other users or departments.
4. Provide Relatable Content
Create content that is easy to read and write. Don’t use jargon. Stick to the point. Users like skimming between pages. They don’t like heavy content. Use graphics to catch their attention. Use videos or bold texts. Make the users glance again.
More importantly, good content is crucial for an excellent user experience. You don’t have to be technical or educated to reach out to them. Make sure your content is readable. An eighth-grader should be able to read it!
These content guidelines will increase the effectiveness of your content. It will be easy to translate them too. So you can serve a multilingual customer base. The more complicated the content is, the more poorly the software will translate it.
5. Provide Multi-Channel Help Desk Choices
Offering a unified experience across multiple channels will elevate the success of self-service. Therefore, it should always be the primary and only business solution. However, uptake on this channel can be slow.
Here are some of the channels you may pick:
A. Web Self-Services
Directing interactions to web self-services will result in high success rates. Users can resolve their problems quickly and effectively. As a result, the organization can improve its user relationship while lowering costs on other channels.
B. Chat
This channel offers a powerful way to connect with users. It passively helps users engage with support issues. Real-time interactions will provide better engagement. Otherwise, users may abandon the self-service experience.
C. Phone
Phones can help users gain immediate information. This platform also offers a combination of the two services.
D. E-mail
This channel allows strong communication between the user and the organization. This channel is helpful for low-priority issues. It also enables users to respond when it’s most convenient for them.
6. Optimize User Feedback
You’ve poured blood, sweat, and tears into developing your self-service platform. You want it to be the absolute best. However, you won’t find flaws as others will. As a result, it’s easier to be biased. This gap is why you need user feedback.
You will get to know how to improve your self-service application. Use a multitude of tools and surveys to make your platform successful. Detect the changes in personality behavior and take actions accordingly.
7. Measure the Performance
Users dislike taking the path of low resistance. They don’t want a slow, awkward self-service experience. Your users will abandon the platform like this. Make sure all the graphics are optimized for websites and cellphones.
A self-service session is said to be successful if no problem is reported. FAQs or articles should resolve all issues. However, you shouldn’t focus on this. A user may have stumbled across an answer and given up in the process.
8. Offer a Personalized Experience
People seek personalized experiences. Consider the information you can already use. Retrieve data you already have access to. Personalized experiences build loyalty among users. On the other hand, people don’t like repeatedly inputting information.
Here’s what you can do:
- First, don’t force users to re-enter information. It’s aggravating and annoying.
- Automatically populate data fields. Make use of similar information. Allow users to edit and modify the content accordingly.
- Clearly label the mandatory fields. Make the forms simple so users can easily navigate them.
9. Improve Accessibility Support
The information must be accessible. Your platform should support a variety of browsers and platforms. Try incorporating assistive technology for users with disabilities. Your self-service content should have maximum reach.
Conclusion
Employee self-service platforms are crucial in today’s organization. A typical organization needs to be in a constant state of improvement.
Here are some of the basics: Don’t create content that is difficult to find. Don’t make cluttered or crowded content. Make every interaction meaningful. Make use of customer feedback. Elevate the content accordingly.
Adopting all nine practices can be intimidating at first. It’s an overwhelming process. The organization takes years to implement these practices successfully. Don’t get ahead of yourself. Move slowly and steadily. Your company will flourish in no time!