Why students love self-service...and IT support should too

Once a relatively cheap and unloved method for offering basic IT support, self-service is now the preferred way of fixing and configuring technology for today’s students.  We explain why self-service can now halve your support burden and how you can make it happen without massive investment.


Online self-service used to have a bad reputation.  It was once seen as a tool for fobbing off customers, a cheap way to reduce call volumes and offer the illusion of 24/7 support.  Back in the nineties, customers largely rejected attempts to funnel them into self-service routes.  Even if they did venture in the self-service area of a website, they were generally greeted by an ugly interface and a mess of unstructured documentation.  Self-service, it seemed, had failed before it even started.

But then self-service began creeping back into our lives. Supermarkets installed self-check outs which while alien at first, have evolved into useful tools for avoiding lengthy queues.  Websites have ditched the FAQs and now rank knowledge articles based upon usage and current support updates, while retailers such as Amazon have proven that not only is human intervention while shopping not needed, it’s actually helps create a better experience.

The same has happened to IT support.  If something goes wrong with your smartphone, or you are struggling to find a setting on your PC, what do you do? Conventional wisdom would say ring the relevant helpdesk, but in reality this is no longer the case.

To fix technology today, most of us now perform the following actions, and continue down the list in this order until we reach resolution:

1) Search Google
2) Search/ask a question on social media
2) Search the suppliers’ or manufacturers’ support page
3) Ask a friend or colleague
4) As a last resort, email or phone support

Students, by definition techno-natives, follow this ritual without even thinking.  While the older generation may be searching for a phone number, those under 21 have already found the answer.

The crucial difference for IT support in education is that while the older generation may begrudge the new, slightly convoluted support process and wish for traditional support to return, the techno-natives actually prefer the DIY approach.  They have no interest in how much support costs the supplier, or where the answer they seek comes from, they just want the right answer in the shortest possible time and they have the tools and technology skills to do just that.

This means that building and maintaining an effective knowledge resource to serve your school, college or university is easy to justify because if you do it well, the students will use it.  Results vary, but it is not uncommon for technology providers to exceed a self-service incident closure rate of 50 per cent.  Yes, it takes time to create knowledge articles, but this can be built into the incident process itself.  We have seen examples where service desk staff are encouraged to publish the description of what actions were taken to resolve an incident.  They may resist at first because they are being asked to move from ‘adding notes’ to a slightly more detailed mini-guide to specific issues, but when the documents get noticed, and the number of calls start to fall, giving staff more time and reducing the day-to-day pressure, they soon realise the extra time to close each incident more than pays for itself.

If you need help improving your self-service capabilities or building a knowledge tool from scratch, give us a call.  The Richmond Systems Self-Service Portal is integrated with our SupportDesk IT support product, making it easier to create the kind of knowledge repository detailed above.  It’s clear that self-service is primed to fulfil the role of providing efficient, always-available support, so let’s work together to make it happen.