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How to successfully promote your Self-Service Portal
So you’re just about to launch a Self-Service Portal. That should be the perfect solution to help your service department improve the customer experience and lower costs at the same time. However, for that to happen it’s obviously important that your customers use it – and continue to use it. And the key to making that happen is communication.
1. Take communication into account during implementation
Communication is key if you’re looking to get employees to use the Self-Service Portal. Consider your employees’ acceptance of the SSP even before you implement it. How will we handle the implementation and promotion of the SSP within the organization? How will we gain the acceptance needed to innovate the company processes?
The answer to these types of questions is not: “let’s send everyone an email.” It is important that you ask questions about future SSP users during implementation. Who fits the company profile and our target groups? But also: what is the specific aim of the SSP? Implementation and communication strategy go hand in hand.
2. Choose your communication channels wisely
It is useful to specify the goals of your SSP at an early stage. The goals can be different for every organization: easing the pressure on the service portal, more international SSP users who communicate through the same channel. Once you’ve set your goals, you can select the products needed to support these goals.
For instance: posters, desktop cards, tutorials, screensavers, or a fun gadget. A good way of really integrating the SSP into your organization is changing the interface to match your organization’s corporate identity. Put your mark on it and make it recognizable to the end user. It does a lot for making employees of a company identify with the portal.
3. Communicate in phases
It is important that you continue to communicate during all the phases of the self service portal implementation. Before the SSP goes live, you can focus on announcements like: “Coming soon: the SSP!” Just make sure that you also tell users what will be different with the SSP and how it benefits them. The ‘what’s in it for me?’ is the biggest motivator.
Once your portal is live, it is a challenge to activate the target group with a different type of communication.
Later on it can be useful to continue communicating as a reminder, keeping your employees motivated to use the SSP. It is important to make sure the SSP not only goes live, but also does not lose its momentum.
With these 4 tips you’ll build user-friendly forms in the Self-Service Portal
4. Measure the goals and adjust if needed
Analyse a promotion process properly and you can check whether your goals are being met. In other words: you can see the return on investment on your communication plan. There are many tools that feature a reporting functionality.
You can step in if necessary, find out where the problems are (which departments do not yet use the SSP?) and initiate a specific campaign. Keeping up with these steps ensures that your SSP will remain a success.
More about Self-Service
Find more ways to professionalize your Self-Service with our Self-Service bundle, which you can download here.
Sumit De
Head of Consultancy
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