Common Issues and Root Causes
There are a number of common issues experienced by unsuccessful self-service initiatives. It’s important to separate what are often the symptoms from the root causes. For instance, if the issue is that employees aren’t using the new self-service capability, then it’s a symptom. The reason(s) for the lack of use might be that employees:
• Don’t know that self-service is there to help
• See no benefit in using self-service over existing channels, like telephone and email
• Consider self-service difficult to access and use
• Find available knowledge articles to be insufficient
Of course, there are additional reasons why self-service adoption levels are lower than expected.
These might be a mix of symptoms and root causes, with the need to trace each symptom back
to the root causes.
It’s therefore important to dig deeper than these visible symptoms to understand what’s really
causing the lack of self-service adoption for employees, including any issues where the selfservice capability is being used. For instance, as shown in the chart below, employees are less happy, resolutions are slower, and there’s lower self-service portal adoption than expected
• A lack of automation for incident resolution and service provision
• Failing to continuously improve the self-service capabilities
There are many known root causes for the underperformance of IT self-service. These include:
• Focusing on technology implementation not the capabilities
• Not creating the self-service capability around employee needs
• Failing to provide sufficient knowledge articles for self-help (quantity and quality)
• Insufficient investment in organizational change management
Source: HappySignals, based on 303k pieces of employee feedback in the previous six months