Improving the Quality of Self-service in an IT Service Provider Organization: A Case Study

Customer self-service (CSS) has become a crucial part of IT service provider organizations' business operations. Customer self-service is a type of customer service enabling customers and service users to receive service-related information and submit service requests and incidents 24/7 through a self-service portal as well as perform some routine tasks including reseting passwords or installing low risk configuration items (CI) to their workstations. There are clear business benefits for using self-service portals and self-service enabled processes. They improve customer experience by eliminating the need to communicate with service desk workers and provide a round-the-clock digital channel. From a service provider's perspective, self-service channels increase productivity by ensuring that relevant information is collected from users in structured format. The main contribution of this paper is to show how to organize deployment of self-service portal as a digitalisation initiative. The research problem of this study is: How quality aspects should be taken into account by an IT service provider organization while designing and deploying self-service portals to customers? A case study method with one case organization, a large Finnish IT service provider company, was used to answer the research problem.