There are two main hurdles to be overcome when rolling out a Self Service portal for your service desk.

The portal must be accessible and simple to use.
The portal must provide a real benefit to the client and the service desk.
First of all the portal must be simple attractive and easily available for clients to log in to.

It should be an easy to enter URL, ideally linked from a corporate intranet site so customers can find it when they need it. Where possible it should use some form of automatic authentication so the client does not need to remember their login ID and password to gain access.

Once a client is logged in to the site it should be very straight forward to navigate. Any site that requires training to be provided to the client before they can use it is not going to appeal to the majority and will not be universally accepted. Remember that in an ideal situation most clients will rarely access the site and will not remember the details of how to raise a request if it is not obvious.

Now that you have the client logged in and the site is straight forward and easy to navigate, you have to provide some real value in terms of the capabilities offered. What can the client do when they get there? What kinds of services are available through the site? If the client can only perform a small subset of the tasks they might need to do and they have to resort to phoning the service desk for everything else, they are quickly going to side step the Self Service portal and head straight for the phone. You need to provide a good service catalogue so the client can see what services they can sign up for and what they are already subscribed to. The client needs to be able to raise a request for support or for additional services quickly and easily and they need to be lead, step by step, through providing the information necessary to fulfill that request.

If a client logs a request through the Self Service portal you need to gather as much relevant information as possible from them during the request process so that the request can be fulfilled without necessitating a call back for more information. This should be done using a question and answer session in the form of a wizard style interaction gently leading the client through the process and asking only relevant questions in a logical order. Presenting the client with a large form with a dozen or so fields to be filled in before they can continue will overwhelm most non technical staff and will lead to bad or incomplete information and dissatisfaction with the experience resulting in clients resorting to the phone instead of using the Self Service portal. The aim is to get clients comfortable with the process and to the point where they would rather use the Self Service portal than the telephone because they like the experience. Many portals are only used because it takes too long to get to a real person and not because the portal offers any real benefits. This does nothing to improve the clients' perception of the service desk.

Offering a full list of services available and a good knowledge base for Self Help will go a long way to making the client want to use the Self Service portal in preference to calling for a live person. The services should be described to the client in a way that they can understand. Any costs involved that are the responsibility of the client should be detailed so the client knows what they are signing up for.

Well produced knowledge material is structured and presented in a uniform way. The articles should be written in language that all clients can understand and they should provide good quality information and procedural steps that can be easily followed. Knowledge should be readily searchable to ensure that clients can find an article with a wide variety of search criteria. When documenting fixes for error messages the articles should always include any error codes in the key words for the search as well as common descriptive terms that clients might use.
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