A self-service workshop guide — from us for you!

Self Service plays a major role in corporate success these days. But there is a big problem: Many companies would like to offer more self-service, but they don't know where to start. There are numerous tools, consultants, solutions and ideas. Not everything is relevant to your own company and in the end you lose sight of the problems of your own customers in all the confusion.

Our solution: A separate workshop to optimize self-service. The introduction or improvement of your own self-service solutions requires careful planning and analysis. In our guide, we share our experience on how to design a successful workshop.

1. Clarify the meaning of self-service

Before we start the workshop, it is crucial to define the importance of self-service for the company and customers. This will clarify the urgency of the issue and remove doubts within the company.

We recommend presenting a business case for self-service and viewing the project as an investment that must pay off after a certain period of time. This quickly shows how much potential is behind this investment.

2. Define workshop goals

Set clear goals not only for the company, but also for such a workshop to define the scope and priorities. This helps to precisely identify the optimization potential and to make the workshop effective.

Here are a few examples of workshop goals: Be able to better understand customer needs, identify best practices, evaluate your own technology, identify training needs, develop a roadmap, identify risks, and generate measures...

As you can see, such a self-service optimization workshop can be quite extensive. At the start, we usually focus on creating a roadmap and evaluating the current situation. In other words, strengths and weaknesses compared to competitors as well as opportunities and risks in the current market situation.

3. Set participants & agenda

Workshop participants should be carefully selected. Based on the focus areas and the stakeholders needed to make decisions. Keep the number of participants as low as possible so as not to break the time frame with endless discussions. We recommend a maximum of 10 participants here. Regardless of the size of the company!

The workshop agenda should consciously plan discussion rounds, group work and breaks. An example agenda could look like this:

• Introduction to the workshop goal
• Discussion of the current situation
• Introducing best practices
• Idea development
• Prioritize ideas
• Definition of prototypes
• Defining KPIs to measure success

Finally, a discussion of the implementation and compilation of an action plan by summarizing the workshop, naming and distributing to-dos.

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4. Prepare an analysis of the current state

Before the workshop, you should already carry out an analysis of the company's current self-service status. Take offers into account user experience, customer behavior, customer feedback and frequent ticket reasons. Here, you can draw on quantitative data if your company uses it in Customer Service collects.

However, don't forget to conduct qualitative interviews to address not only the cause of the problems, but also the perception and mood in the team and among your customers. Perhaps some issues should be more significant because they're more frustrating for your team or customers. You don't always see this in collected data.

5. Research and prepare best practices

As a last task before the workshop, you should research best practices from other companies so that you can present them in the workshop. This accelerates the generation of ideas and inspires innovative solutions. We have listed some best practices from the most well-known companies. Like to watch our white paper and save yourself some time preparing your self-service workshop.

Are you interested in running a workshop with us? Don't hesitate and Get in touch with us. We look forward to working with you to optimize your self-service approach.