Exploring quality aspects of customer self-service in IT service provision: A case study

• The quality of customer self-service from an IT service provider’s perspective means improved transparency, increased efficiency and reduced workload of support. • Regarding self-service portals, IT customers value customizable views, smooth orders of devices and related optional equipment, as well as ability to view own configuration items, invoices and status of own requests. • Fulfillment of self-service requests may require value co-creation in a multi-provider network between the IT service provider and IT departments of IT customer organizations. • A large part of the quality improvement work related to the IT self-service portal (SSP) was spent on defining authorization rules for service requests, customizing data forms, and defining configuration items that users are allowed to order from the SSP. Customer self-service (CSS) plays a critical role in IT service provider organizations’ service business. Self-service can remarkably reduce the volume of IT support tickets, such as service requests and incidents, and provides customers and service users with 24/7 availability to access IT services. Self-service channels can also be used to offer solutions to service-related problems and answers to common issues. Modern customer self-service is implemented in practice by aggregating various self-service technologies and service management practices together. While technologies evolve, this also affects the concept of quality in the context of customer self-service. The purpose of the research is to explore quality aspects related to modern IT customer support, especially a customer self-service portal (SSP). The research problem of the study is: How quality of customer self-service can be improved in the context of IT service provision? This paper presents a unique case study addressing the quality of modern self-service technologies. The cross-case synthesis from four IT self-service portal deployment cases was used to derive a novel multi-dimensional self-service quality model with three dimensions: technology, management and organization.