Improve User Adoption

User self-help portal and desktop application are few of the main components of Anakage platform. While others components work silently in background without user noticing anything, Self-Help needs user intervention and participation to make it work. Historically many user self-service initiatives fail as people think that their job ends when a new system is rolled out. In fact, lot of things needs to be done to improve user adoption. You can take below approaches to make this work in your organization after roll out –

Agents make the transition smoother for users

In normal scenario it is the agents who are first res-ponders to any user issues. Users reach them through phone calls, chat systems, e-mails and the agent resolve their issues through guiding on phone, chat or remote connection. Change the process to –

A – Agent gets call / ticket

B – He finds if self-help app has solution available for user issue. If yes, he guides(or run it themselves) users to use it to resolve their issues. This helps in early testing of self-help solutions – if any issue is found it can be reported back to the automation team which can resolve before next set of user faces it. User will also notice that the solutions are available for him also and they can use when they face problem next time.

C – He reports it while closing the ticket – Is the solution available in self-help (Yes/No), Was it resolved using self-help (Yes/No). This will give insights for continuous improvements. Automation team will discover new issues that can be handled through self-help, and if some tweaks is needed, they can be done quickly.

Why it is in for agents, why should they use self-help solutions on user machines –

1 – They can handle more calls in given time. It saves their time. Most of self-help solutions takes less than a minute to complete. For fixes that takes longer time – they can start the solution and contact user after it ends.

2 – It standardizes the process. A new agent can get productive very early . Lot of time can be saved on training.

3 – Agents are helpful in most of the organization because user does not have administrator rights on their machine. The offline self-help app can handle steps needing administrator rights also.

4 – They can free themselves from doing routine and mundane tasks and focus on doing deeper technical issues.

Deflect users to self-service when they log ticket

This is most effective way of improving user adoption. Put the self-help portal between users and ticketing tool –

A – User clicks on “Log a ticket”

B – User is redirected to “Self-Help” portal

C – User finds relevant solutions – he uses it. In case it does not solves his issue then he is allowed to create the ticket

D – User does not find relevant solution – He is shown create ticket option

In nutshell make IT team difficult to reach. How much difficult you can experiment based on your service agreements, relationship with the users/clients and various other factors. A VIP user would not like to get help from self-help portal but other users would not like to wait for IT to reach them which could take time in days for most of the organization.

Positive reinforcements and community effect

Adopt techniques like showing user feedback on self-help portal, metrics on usage, time taken to resolve issues. Proactively handle user feedback.

Effective Mailer and Campaigns

Use conventional Emails to educate users about self-service. Drive the point that it is not regular pages which they have to read and do the things themselves. Find out what is user pain points in your organization. Do they have to wait for hours for agents to solve their issues. Or agents are not available when they need it most. Use languages like “Why wait for x hours to resolve issues which you can resolve in less than a min.”. Make sure that you have designed solutions for volume drivers like “Printer configuration”, or “how to use password recovery tools in their organisation”.

After some days of usage make sure to circulate positive feedback from users. Feedback are captured from users and can be viewed by Administrators. Compile data from dashboard like time taken by users, no of users using the solutions to create effective and real mail to drive adoption.

Involve your marketing and communication teams for framing these mails.

Continuous Improvements

Use your monthly incident logs and Self-Help admin dashboard data which could help you to improve the system –

1 – Analyse tickets. Are there any new volume driver in your system. If yes bring those as solutions.

2 – Look out for day to day things that employees need like fill expense reimbursement forms, fill appraisal forms, apply for leave, generate wifi access codes etc. They are simple things but many times lot of systems are involved which make them confusing. Bring those as self-help solutions. They might not be ticket generating queries but it makes user come daily to self-help and improve mind share. They will surely come here when they need it.

3 – Analyse failure rates of solutions and if some of them are failing more often than others it is time to re-look into what they are doing and changes.

FAQs