What is Self-servicing?
Self-service is an innovative way to reduce costs and at the same time improve the customer experience.
User
For the user, self-service has to be seamless, provide control and insights about his/her operations with the company.
Company
For the company to provide the above, the product and the processes have to be simplified first, in order to manage a standardised and automated service/product.
My approach to Online Self-Service
When launching or improving an online self-service, it’s important to involve the user in the different phases of the development to ensure it will be used effectively.
The double diamond design technique (below) will help you build a service that answer the users’ needs.
First diamond - solving the right problem or providing a service which will be used
- Discover: this is about understanding the user, his universe, his needs but also the internal users. The following techniques can be used to help:
- Studying research that has been conducted
- Studying the behaviour of the user in Google Analytics
- Creating a stakeholder map in order to visualize who within your company will have to be involved.
- Define: this is about determining which problem has to be solved. The following techniques can be used to help:
- Conducting focus groups with the people of your company who are directly in contact with the user. The deliverables will be the personas, the AS IS customer journey and service blueprint.
- Conducting focus groups with current users of the service in order to complete the AS IS customer journey. Encouraging them to create a mood board will also help you to understand the service from their perspective.
Second diamond - refining the solution to the problem or ensuring the service you provide is useable
1. Develop: this is about fine-tuning ideas to solve specific issues. This is the moment to invite the stakeholders to a co-creation session to ensure their buy-in to the organisation and ask for their input. Here are some ways to generate ideas from them:
- The negative brainstorm
- Brainwriting
- Lotus Blossom
- Kingdom cards
Unless you have limitless resources, it is not possible to implement all the ideas that come from this co-creative session. In order to make a selection, it is advisable to use methods such as clustering or dot voting.
Once a shortlist of ideas has been made, it is time to build a prototype to test them. It is best to start the testing process with low-fidelity prototypes and to work towards finally using a high-fidelity prototype that is as close to the final version as possible.
2. Deliver: this is about providing the final customer journey, the final blue print, the specifications of the interface and the roadmap, as not all functionalities will be live at launch.
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