IT self-service is not adequate for solving problems, says Gartner

Socitm chief argues that it is essential for local government to cut costs

Jos Creese argues that self-service is necessary to cut costs

IT self-service is a great concept but even the best systems struggle to solve more than one eighth of IT problems, a report from Gartner warns.

The analyst says that in theory as many as 40 per cent of all service desk queries could be solved through IT self-service but the reality is that most companies resolve only five per cent of IT helpdesk queries in this way.

And even by 2015, the majority of IT organisations will have less than 10 per cent of the contact volume managed by IT self-service.

"IT self-service is a great concept, enabling and empowering end users to solve their own IT problems, thereby allowing support organisations to become more efficient through a reduced incident and request workload, " said David Coyle, research vice president at Gartner. "However, building a best-in-class IT self-service portal does not guarantee that end users will use it."

Gartner has highlighted a number of myths surrounding IT self-service, which it believes are hampering successful rollouts and preventing IT organisations from successfully delivering IT self-service.

It says that although self-service can reduce IT support costs, this is only true for specific issues, mainly how-to requests (how to access or operate IT resources), FAQs and password resets. Password problems make up 20 to 30 per cent of all IT service desk volume, Gartner says.

“The bottom line is that if the investment in IT self-service is higher than the return associated with reducing support costs and increasing end user productivity, then self-service will actually increase costs," Coyle said.

The analyst also warns that ongoing monitoring and marketing of IT self-service is essential if users are to understand how it functions and how they can get value from the systems to discourage them from automatically resorting to calling the service desk.

Understanding the adoption of IT self-service by end users is critical to developing a successful IT self-service strategy, and most organisations will find that the first-year adoption rate can be very low, Gartner warns.

"If properly implemented, self-service can improve customer satisfaction, provide incident trend analysis, identify training opportunities and consolidate the knowledge that currently exists in silos across the support organisation," Coyle said. "These 'soft' benefits should always be outlined when making a business case for self-service."

Despite these issues with IT, Jos Creese, president of IT body Socitm, argued while in conversation with Computing this week that it was essential to making cost savings in local government.

He said: “End-to-end self-service should be the default way of doing business. Citizens should only have telephone or direct contact with local government when all other avenues have been exhausted.

“Therein lies a real challenge because we’ve spent a lot of money on self-service applications – many are extremely good and have saved us a lot of money. But unless we do a wholesale channel shift – meaning we switch off choice and the more expensive means of delivering service – we’re not going to realise the maximum savings.”

Creese said that authorities are still manually handling the last stages of the customer service process but that contact centres and specialist teams that take calls from the public should be cut.

A report from Socitm called Use of the Web – Local Government Compared with Central Government said that extent of self-service was the most critical performance indicator for its web sites. It said that visitor failure is likely to lead to a costly requirement for phone contact with local government representatives.

Where the cost of a web enquiry may be 23p or less, phone enquiries cost more than £2.50. For this reason, Socitm believes that even the 54 per cent local government average should be much higher.