On employee productivity, two layers of cost, and why your workforce solved the self-service problem before you did.

“The first thing most people do is ask a colleague. The second thing they do is Google it or ask ChatGPT. They are not using any of the company’s assets at all.”

Raido said this quietly, the way he says most things. We had been sitting in a diner on York Avenue, up near the park on 86th Street, for about twenty minutes by then. Our ten o’clock had been cancelled because half of Manhattan was not going anywhere, and we had ended up here watching the snow settle on the East River through a window that had not stopped fogging since we sat down.

He had already ordered by the time I took my coat off. Coffee, eggs, toast. No menu. He just told the waitress what he wanted and she wrote it down without asking anything. I looked at the menu for about three minutes and then ordered the same thing. We had started with the obvious question. Why should a CIO care about self-service? And Raido had gone straight past the obvious answer.

Raido: If your self-service options let me solve the issue myself in just two minutes, imagine how much longer I would have spent on the phone with the service desk' That is an indirect cost saving as well. It does not show up in the same budget, but it is real.

Keyvan: So, there are two layers. The direct saving, which is the ticket deflection everyone already measures. And the indirect saving, which is the productivity returned to the rest of the business.

Raido: Exactly. And I am glad to see that service desk managers and some CIOs are starting to put a value on user experience now. They are seeing it more. But how do we get all the actors, all levels of management to align to the same goal, rather than focusing on their own immediate responsibilities?

Keyvan: Is that because it is hard to quantify?

Raido: Yes, it is hard to quantify. There is a budget for the service desk with specific metrics. There is a budget for operations and tools. The productivity saving sits in another team’s cost centre entirely. Each department is under pressure to hit their own numbers and stay within their own budget. It may sound cynical but saving people time in another department or enabling someone in another department to be more efficient at their work is not always on top of every manager’s mind. Only the more enlightened ones start counting the cost across the whole organisation.

This is something I have spent time on in other contexts. If you want to reduce your cost to serve and deliver great customer experience, you need great employee experience underneath it. They are connected. Self-service sits inside that chain. When your people can get what they need quickly and get back to their work, the customer eventually feels it. Most organisations treat employee experience and customer experience as separate conversations. They are the same conversation.

The diner was quiet. The snow had kept most people off the streets and the place was half empty, which made the people who were there easier to watch. The regulars at the counter barely needed to speak to the waitress. The couple by the window were still reading the menu. A man near the door had walked straight up, ordered, and taken his coffee back to a table without sitting down at the counter at all. Nobody had designed any of this. It had accumulated over years of the same people coming through the same door, and it worked.

Keyvan: When most organisations think about self-service, they think about the portal. Is that still the right way to look at it?

Raido: Self-service has been pigeonholed. For many people, it still simply means a portal. But self-service is chat as well. It is voice as well. It is Teams. It is whatever channel the user actually prefers. Put simply, it is about enabling users to be more independent. That is what this is ultimately about.

Keyvan: But some people will never want to be independent.

Raido: And that is perfectly fine. Some people will always call the service desk. They want to talk to somebody because that gives them the reassurance that someone is on it. They have probably spoken to the same agent before. They know them by name. That is just user behaviour, and whatever channels you introduce, however good the self-service is, that will never change for certain users. But you have to look at the generational differences as well. What I want from a service channel is very different from what someone else wants. I would like to solve my own problems. I do not want to call anyone. I do not even want to send an email. I want to get what I am looking for quickly and efficiently.

That shifted something for me. The question underneath all of this is whether you are enabling your people to be independent in the way they actually want to be. The portal is one answer. For a lot of organisations it is the answer nobody uses.

Outside, someone was crossing York Avenue on foot, hunched into their coat, not hurrying because there was nothing to hurry towards. The snow was the kind that does not fall so much as arrive, thick and steady, turning the street into something you watch rather than walk through. I thought about how many problems that person had probably solved on their phone this morning without calling anyone.

The waitress came past with the coffee pot. Raido put his hand over his cup without looking up. He was still thinking.

I asked him about something that had been on my mind since a conversation the previous week. A CIO at a financial services firm had told me his biggest worry was that his people were already solving their own problems outside the system entirely. Raido’s answer was the line he had opened with.

Raido: It has already happened. And I would not even say it started with generative AI. The first thing most people do when they get a problem is ask a colleague, which wastes both their time. The second thing they do is Google it or ask ChatGPT. They are not using any of the company’s assets at all. Generative AI has just accelerated it. People are now solving things with help from chatbots that they could never solve by Googling.

Keyvan: I am guilty of this myself. Gary knows I have had problems with my workstation that have lingered for a year. No amount of Googling fixed them. AI sorted them out in minutes.

Raido: Exactly. And organisations are behind implementing this internally. In our personal lives we have all moved on. We use these things every day. We expect them. And then we go to work and the self-service portal asks us to fill in a twelve-field form and wait two days for someone to look at it.

The implication sat there for a moment between the coffee cups. Your employees have already built their own self-service. They built it outside your system, using things you do not control, getting answers you cannot verify, and wasting time you cannot measure. I have written about this elsewhere. The gap between what people are doing with AI in their personal lives and what their organisation is offering them at work is already wide, and it is getting wider. The question for any CIO is whether the organisation is going to provide something better than what the workforce has already found for itself.

The door opened and Gary came in with the cold behind him. He had walked from the subway and it showed. He shook the snow off his coat, dropped into the booth next to Raido, and signalled the waitress before he had even sat down properly. She brought him tea without asking. He had clearly been here before.

I caught him up in a sentence. We had been talking about self-service and why most organisations were still thinking about it as a portal project.

Gary: There is something worth separating here that people blur together constantly. Self-service and automation. They are related but they are different things. You can have self-service without automation. The user logs a ticket through the portal, but at the back end someone still picks it up, reads it, and deals with it. From the user’s point of view that is self-service. They did not call anyone. But from the service desk’s point of view nothing has changed. It is still a ticket that needs a person.

Raido: And the other way around. An agent gets an email, triages it, and runs an automation to resolve it. The user never touched a self-service channel, but the resolution was automated. So the two things can start from either end. Self-service is just a layer on top.

Gary: That is the key thing. If you are good at automating your business processes, you almost do not need to think about self-service as a separate problem. Self-service is literally just a layer on top. The automation is the substance underneath.

Raido: And the real value is end-to-end. cost-saving user needs something, automation picks it up and resolves it, and the whole thing is done in minutes. Responsive. No waiting a day for someone to look at it. That is where the true cost saving lives.

Gary’s point reframed something I had been hearing from CIOs without fully understanding it. They had invested in self-service. The portal was live. The numbers had not moved. And the conclusion was that self-service had failed. What had actually happened was that they had built a new intake channel without automating anything behind it. The portal was routing tickets to the same queue through a different door.

Gary drank his tea. Raido was on his second coffee. Outside the snow had thickened and the window had fogged over completely. Nobody was leaving for a while.

I knew something I had not known an hour earlier. The business case for self-service has two layers, and most organisations are only counting one of them. Enabling your people to be independent is the point, and your workforce has already started doing it without you.
The conversation was about to go somewhere I had not expected. I asked Raido a different question. You work with a lot of customers. You see the implementations up close. What actually stops this from working?

His answer took us through the rest of the morning and into a second pot of coffee. In Part 2, we get into what actually stands between most organisations and self-service that works. Almost none of it is about the technology.

Keyvan Shirnia is Chief Revenue Officer at Fusion GBS.

Raido Oja is a Principal Solutions Architect based in New York and a long-standing member of the Fusion GBS community.

Gary Pruden is Chief Technology Officer at Fusion GBS.

This blog is part of The Six Critical Capabilities series. To find out where your service management foundations actually stand, the Fusion GBS scorecard gives you a benchmarked baseline in five working days.