The topic was: Building a Web Self-Service Portal: Keys to Success

The speaker was:  Paul M. Dooley, President and Principal Consultant - Optimal Connections, LLC

 Overview:

The support center of the future will be focused on providing multi-channel support to customers, and a key channel in this support environment of tomorrow will be the ''self-service portal''. Why? Its all about operating the support center like a business, and businesses today are customer-centric and cost-focused. The web is a hugely effective tool used by business today to boost productivity, operate more effectively and efficiently, and to cut costs - so its a natural for the support center to adopt the web as a key part of its multi-channel support structure.

But where do you start? What are the best-practices? What are they keys to success in designing, developing, launching, and maintaining a web self-service portal? In this very practical presentation you will learn the best-practices and keys to success for designing, developing and rolling out your customer self-service portal:

• Why its critical your support center have a self-service portal
• A sample business case for presenting this to management
• Sample Return on Investment analysis for a typical support center
• The most popular applications for a self-service portal
• Pitfalls to avoid in planning and deploying your portal
• Key success factors to pay attention to in designing, developing and launching
• How to ensure on-going success and continuing ROI

This was a valuable presentation for learning the best practices of designing, developing and maintaining an effective customer self-service portal.  The PowerPoint slides that went in conjunction with his presentation can be found here.

As an added bonus, Paul provided a copy of his “Self-Service Portal Checklist” intended to help you in your planning and deployment efforts!  For those who were unable to attend, or who forgot to pick up a copy, you can grab a copy of it here.