Looking for help building your company's IT self-service portal? Then this article is for you! We're about to detail the ten self-service portal best practices you absolutely need to follow when creating it.
From the design, delivery, and ongoing operation of a self-service portal to the critical mistakes to avoid when aiming for its success, here's a deep dive into practical advice derived from the real-world success of other organizations.
Keep reading to discover what will make the difference in your organization's level 0 of IT support!
What is a self-service portal?
A self-service portal is a digital space where employees or customers help themselves, giving them an alternative to calling or emailing the service desk. It mirrors the on-demand experience people already have as consumers: find an answer, log an issue, or request something without waiting in a queue.
Capabilities vary, but a portal usually brings a few core things together:
- A knowledge base with FAQs and self-remediation guidance, increasingly paired with AI chatbots that answer on the spot.
- Incident logging and service request capabilities, with status tracking for both.
- Automation for request fulfillment and issue remediation.
- Access to account and asset data, including self-audit.
- 24x7 availability, which deflects routine work from the service desk and frees agents for higher-value tasks.
10 self-service portal best practices
If you're starting or looking to improve what's already in place, the following ten self-service portal best practices will help your organization create or enhance a self-service portal so employees or customers use it:
- Make improving the employee experience the primary motivation.
- Design your self-service portal around what employees want and expect.
- Make the self-service portal easy to find.
- Make it simple to use.
- Recognize the importance of knowledge articles.
- Leverage automation.
- Offer a choice of access channels.
- Realize that a self-service portal will need to continue to evolve.
- Ensure Enterprise Service Management needs are considered.
- Market the self-service portal initially and over time.
Let's take a closer look at each of them.
1. Make improving the employee experience the primary motivation
While a self-service portal provides the opportunity for "better, faster, cheaper" service and support capabilities, starting with the right motivation or driver is essential. It resembles the famous business quote, "start with the why."
Ultimately, it will not deliver the promised cost savings if employees don't use it. Hence, design and deliver a portal that employees use, and cost savings will follow – perhaps these ideas and examples for designing a self-service portal can be helpful.
2. Design your self-service portal around what employees want and expect
This is an extension of the first best practice. Likely, employees will only use your portal if the offered capabilities align with their ways of working and expectations of such a capability. Instead, employees will try to keep using what works for them – for example, the telephone IT support channel.
To avoid the proliferation of informal communication channels, you can use InvGate Service Management's email, Microsoft Teams, and Zapier integrations to offer omnichannel support all within the platform.
3. Make the self-service portal easy to find
This one is an obvious best practice – if employees can't locate the IT self-service portal, they won't use it. However, the same is true if accessing it is difficult. Again, if a self-service portal makes accessing service and support harder, employees will keep using what they know works for them.
4. Make it simple to use
The point of a portal is to make service and support faster to reach, not just available. Every extra decision a user has to make — which channel to use, where to click, how to phrase a request — is friction that pushes them back to the phone or email. Simplicity here comes down to navigability and quick access to solutions, with the portal doing as much of the thinking as it can.
InvGate Service Management's redesigned self-service portal is built around that idea. A persistent Assistance Bar gives users one place to ask, search, or chat, and the system routes each input to whatever can handle it — search for a quick query, a Virtual Service Agent conversation for an attachment or a longer message — so the user never has to pick the right channel. The home page adapts to each person too: a new employee with nothing open lands on a clean screen, while a manager with approvals waiting sees those right at the top, so the portal feels relevant from the first visit.
5. Make your knowledge base good enough to answer on its own
Knowledge is what turns a portal from a request form into a place that actually resolves things. Before launch, make sure articles exist for the most common questions and issues — if the first visit ends without an answer, people won't come back. And availability isn't enough on its own: articles have to be easy to read and the right information easy to reach (here's how to write good knowledge base articles).
Good content also closes its own gaps once you let AI work from it. In InvGate Service Management's redesigned self-service portal, the Virtual Service Agent sits at the center of the home page and answers on the spot, drawing on two sources: the knowledge base your team writes and approves, and Knowledge Snippets that Knowledge Discovery extracts from closed tickets. An administrator reviews and approves each Snippet before it can feed an answer, so recurring fixes your team has already worked out become reusable knowledge without anyone writing a new article.
As an extra, that knowledge can be delivered conversationally. An administrator can flag a service catalog category as conversational, so selecting it drops the user straight into a Virtual Service Agent conversation rather than a form — a self-service-first path for the request types that suit it best.
6. Leverage automation
The key to this best practice is understanding that employees expect more than a shiny self-service portal front-end. If it simply captures demand rather than providing solutions through automated capabilities, there's a little benefit over merely sending an email to the service desk. Automation can be used to provision against both new service requests and the need for issue remediation.
7. Offer a choice of access channels
While the benefits of an IT portal should encourage its use, don't think it can completely replace the traditional service and support access channels. For example, some issues might require immediate access to human-based support. So, in addition to the portal, continue to provide alternative channels such as telephone, email, chat, and even walk-up to meet different employee preferences and needs.
8. Realize that a portal will need to continue to evolve
The introduction of a portal is not a "one-and-done" project. Many factors will drive improvements and other changes, such as:
- Changing employee expectations based on their consumer-world experiences.
- New technology capabilities that improve the self-service experience.
- End-user feedback, especially where the self-service experience was not as expected.
To address this, it's advisable to have continual improvement methods in place to seize the highest priority issues and opportunities.
9. Ensure Enterprise Service Management needs are considered
While a self-service portal might start as an IT support capability, portals are the ITSM tool element most commonly adopted in Enterprise Service Management (ESM) strategies. So, don't deliver just an IT portal when working on this approach. Instead, seek to accommodate the use of the portal in the context of the additional line of business use cases. Also, ensure that any of its capabilities are optimized before sharing them with other lines of business.
10. Market the self-service portal, initially and over time
A new self-service portal won't sell itself. Instead, the new capabilities and benefits must be sold or marketed to employees. This effort should start early, ramp up before "go live," and continue after implementation to help encourage higher employee adoption levels.
8 self-service absolute don'ts to avoid
While knowing what other organizations have done to succeed with their self-service portals is great, knowing the potential pitfalls is also essential. These are eight bad practices to avoid – i.e., the things that shouldn't be done under any circumstances – to improve the probability of success.
1. Don't make cost reduction the primary driver
While self-service portals can reduce service and support costs, this only happens when this feature is sufficiently used. The use is driven by what employees or customers think of its worth. So, if your portal is focused entirely on saving money and not improving the user experience (and their ability to do what they need), they will likely not use it, and the potential cost savings will be forgone.
2. Don't create a self-service portal based on "IT thinking"
While a portal is the technology-based enablement of people, it's unwise to allow IT personnel to drive its design. Instead, view it as people enablement, requiring employees or customers to be front and center in its design. Failure to do this will leave your organization with a self-service portal people don't want to use (and they won't).
3. Don't start without investment in OCM tools and techniques
Introducing a self-service portal is a people change because it affects traditional work methods, not simply a technology-based change. Organizational Change Management (OCM) tools and techniques, such as those shared in ITIL 4, will help deliver the required people change, from helping to achieve employee buy-in and reducing the likely resistance to change to providing the necessary communications, education, and marketing to help the portal succeed.
4. Don't place portal capabilities in front of poor processes
Adding a portal doesn't magically improve service and support capabilities. Without fit-for-purpose back-end processes, including Knowledge Management, employees will have similar suboptimal experiences for Incident Management and Service Request Management as they would with the traditional service and support access channels.
5. Don't use IT terminology
This "don't" aligns with the best practice of designing a self-service portal around the users, not IT thinking. Quite simply, the use of technical terms will only hinder users. So ensure your portal uses the correct language – from the capability descriptors to the knowledge articles provided for self-help.
6. Don't forget to measure self-service success from the outset
As with anything new, the only way to accurately measure the benefits is to start with a baseline. And measure what matters most to employees and customers, not simply what the IT organization deems important indicators of self-service portal success. The employed metrics are also vital for the ongoing improvement of the self-service capabilities.
7. Don't forget to review your knowledge articles regularly
In the same way that introducing a portal is not a "one-and-done" thing, there's also a need to ensure that the available knowledge articles remain fit for purpose. Over time, some will need updating, others will need decommissioning, and new knowledge articles will be required.
8. Don't ignore user feedback
While this can be considered part of the performance measurement portfolio used to assess ongoing self-service portal success, it's essential to appreciate that the only accurate measure of self-service success is the opinion of the users. For example, usage levels might rise, but the experience and lost productivity levels could still be lower than traditional service and support access channels. Here, self-service might save the service provider money, but the business as a whole is losing out.
Key takeaways
A self-service portal only pays off when it's built around the people using it — easy to find, simple to use, grounded in good knowledge, and measured and improved over time — so that adoption, and the savings that follow, take care of themselves. Talk to our team about building yours on InvGate Service Management.
