IT Service Desk Chatbot: Automate your Service Desk
Automation rules today’s world. People rely on conversational AI and virtual assistants to do anything from purchasing a trip to scheduling a doctor’s appointment in the present digital environment. Yet, despite this consumer-driven enthusiasm, the IT help desk remains mainly in the dark. Surprisingly, a simple request to change the password for many businesses still requires an elaborate ticket-raising process.
A chatbot is a technological genie that uses intelligent automation, ML, and NLP to automate tasks. It adds a digital flavor by automating your day-to-day IT tasks to help businesses work smarter.
The load of the IT service desk team has increased dramatically due to growing IT infrastructure, increasing employee requirements, hybrid working models, etc.
Managing help desk and IT service requests using legacy processes causes agents to become bogged down in repeated chores and manual procedures. This makes it difficult for IT support teams to deliver faster issue response times and operational efficiency.
Chatbots are transforming the IT service desk's workplace support and service delivery procedures to make them more efficient and successful in serving employees.
Here are some challenges faced by the IT Service Desk team regularly:
Frequent requests from multiple channels Without efficient processes, it is difficult to solve IT issues effectively. A centralized help desk needs to handle hundreds of requests per day. The more time the service desk spends on the phone, email, or in person, the less time they have to fix problems. This means never-ending ticket queues that take a long time to resolve without proper processes. This cuddle leads to frustrated employees who expect a quick fix, as the delay in resolution could hamper their productivity.
Longer resolution time
Long resolution times are one of the most common challenges affecting every company service desk. They immediately contribute to higher support expenses, decreased staff productivity, and other financial losses. As a result, it reflects poorly on the service desk. A lack of an organized ticketing process often results in long resolution times.
Manually sorting IT requests slows productivity. Without a defined ticket intake process and request tracking technologies, the IT service desk can’t record data that can assist in detecting common issues and speed up future resolution times.
Repetitive issues
Unresolved, reoccurring issues lowers productivity and resolution efficiency. Without efficient record-keeping and data analysis tools, help desks spend time and corporate resources researching and resolving the same problems. If the team can’t gather relevant data, it’s hard to establish effective strategies to handle glitches and minimize the number of submitted tickets to manage typical employee concerns.
Monotonous tasks
The support desk is often bombarded with repetitive queries that consume a lot of time.20–50% of help desk calls are requested to change passwords. Often, end-users can handle help-desk difficulties provided they have the correct knowledge or automated processes. Lacking the right knowledge might limit your service desk potential and increase expenses. This also leads to agent burnout and other issues.
Recruiting, Training, and Retaining Staff
Are you wasting a lot of time and money on hiring and training employees? You might be facing an employee turnover problem or an employee retention problem.
Training a new agent is expensive. ContactBabel says it costs $6,000 to recruit, screen, and train a new agent. Attrition is unaffordable, especially in this economy when managers are being urged to reduce expenses.
New agents don’t deliver the same level of service as veterans. The service quality will suffer if there is a high turnover rate and many callers. The inability to handle a call will show the agent’s inexperience, which can annoy employees. You constantly need to identify trustworthy replacements that require money and effort.
Other challenges include a hybrid workplace, an old legacy approach to solving employee IT issues, lack of productivity, scaling IT service desk issues, etc.
Scalability
Do you struggle with scaling up and lowering down to meet changing requirements? This is a prominent issue for support desks. As a company grows in size, so does the number of employees, which in turn increases the number of IT requests. Suppose you scale up by hiring more agents while. things are busy, you will have a surplus of them when things slow down again.
And if you pull down when things calm down, you’ll have difficulties when ticket volumes pick up again. The cost and time commitment required to bring on a new hire also contributes to the scalability difficulty. Not to mention the cost of tools, licenses, and equipment required for the agents.
These are some common challenges faced by traditional help desks. As the digital landscape continues to evolve, robust help desk support is the need of the hour to scale to deliver quickly and provide integrated support.
Modern service desks can solve most problems your staff face with traditional ones.
How does the modern IT service desk work?
Traditional help desks couldn’t cater to every need of an employee. Thanks to the modern desks, this won’t be an issue anymore. It uses AI and seamless process automation to help your employees in a way that is tailored to their needs and the situation they are in. All they have to do is log in to the platform, and with just a few clicks, their problems will be solved. Increasing income and reducing expenses are two methods to save money. Modern service desks accomplish both.
Here are the benefits of a Modern IT service desk:
Cost-Effective
Traditional service desks didn’t have a way to help all of an organization’s employees in a coordinated manner. Companies had to set up service desks and support platforms for each department and each group of employees. Of course, this meant that the overall budget for helping employees increased.
On the other hand, a modern service desk can save you a lot of money by making it easier for employees to get help. A modern service desk can serve as an ITSM service desk, an HR helpdesk, a marketing helpdesk, a finance helpdesk, and even a project management tool. A one-time investment in a single, unified platform gives you more value for your money and higher ROI.
Automated ticketing saves money
Self-service ticketing was a major concern at traditional service desks. This ticketing system needed supporting and tracking rickets. Lack of technical understanding and elegance made it difficult for other staff to use the platform.
A typical ticketing system led to confused and helpless staff seeking alternate solutions (making calls and sending emails). Modern service desks offer an automated ticketing system for staff. Your staff can auto-resolve issues using this ticketing system. It seamlessly creates, tracks, and closes tickets, saving your agent time.
Reduce hiring costs
Traditional service desks required companies to hire many support agents to handle inquiries and situations. They dispatched first-level support agents. Regardless of urgency or complexity, every issue was sent to support agents, which overburdened them
This changed agents’ attention from individualized help to daily settlements and caused companies to hire additional support agents without improving employee support. AI chatbots replace first-level support agents at the modern service desk. These virtual assistants provide customized help to your staff.
Self-service
Modern service desks incorporate conversational AI so staff can self-serve with chatbots. The chatbot helps them log in and explore the platform until their issue is resolved. The chatbot examines your company's knowledge base and provides the best answer in seconds. Most employee problems are addressed without support agents. Chatbots connect employees to support agents only when it is needed. Once agents have a solution, they notify your staff via chatbots.
Modern service desks offer all these features (and more) without added cost. It streamlines and personalizes employee support with minimal agents.
Knowledge base optimization
Your business knowledge base may provide context-based information for employee assistance if used correctly. Traditional service desks supplied basic replies to inquiries, requests, and solutions with a “one size fits all” attitude.
Optimized and automated knowledge management helps the modern service desk overcome these weaknesses. Investing in AI-driven service desks gives you capabilities that personalize solutions to your workers’ requirements and preferences.
- The modern service desk tracks all employee contacts and notes their preferences and issues.
- AI helps the service desk understand your workers’ needs and give personalized solutions.
- These service desks work like Google, Amazon, or any big online site, analyzing your behavior and making suggestions.
Reduce training costs
In a digital era with continuous technical advances, learning is ongoing. Companies invest a lot of money in educating people on productive skills. A modern service desk saves money by allowing staff to self-train. These service desks use microlearning to teach agents micro-skills.
Add appropriate training resources to your knowledge base and let your workers access them. This makes your staff self-reliant by teaching them specific skills without assistance.
Being self-reliant enhances new workers’ engagement and productivity since they’re more determined. Optimized knowledge management makes learning interactive and engaging. You can add videos, articles, and milestones as your staff acquires new skills. Interactive material promotes employee retention, allowing for faster, better training.
Transferring repetitive tasks to the service desk
Organizations pay people to execute repetitive IT tasks like resetting or changing passwords. Modern service desks automate repetitive operations to reduce recruiting expenses. It lets your workers set/change their passwords by confirming their identities with the back-end system.
Modern service desks also perform the following activities:
- Tracking requests
- Facilitating onboarding process
- Monitoring metrics and reports like First-call resolution rate (FCR), Cost per contact, Incident Volume, Repeated Tickets, and Ticket Backlog.
No Code — Free IT Helpdesk Chatbot Get Started
Introducing IT Service Desk Chatbot
The IT Helpdesk is an essential support role for today’s IT to empower their employees and power their operations. It meets the IT demands of employees by handling key situations and providing access to critical resources and expertise. It helps employees with their IT needs by resolving their issues and giving them access to important resources and knowledge.
So, it greatly affects how productive workers are as a whole. But the IT helpdesk or service desk is also expensive because it needs technical support and live chat agents to handle incidents and service tickets.
Today’s businesses are struggling to satisfy their employees’ demands, whether it’s onboarding a new recruit, changing passwords, providing software, debugging device bugs, etc. All of these can benefit from an IT Service desk Chatbot.
What is an IT Service desk Chatbot?
IT helpdesk bot is an efficient way for employees to solve common IT problems on their own. Helpdesk chatbots automate repetitive processes so that human support agents can focus on more complicated and high-value requests from employees.
They are more effective at instructing users than traditional programs, so employees can easily ask questions. They achieve this by asking the user for input, seeking confirmation, and collecting essential data for back-end business systems, boosting data quality and avoiding mistakes. This reduces resolution time, promotes efficiency, and boosts employee satisfaction. A well-defined IT Service Desk Chatbot can boost IT Service Desk efficiency like no other tool.
Why should you integrate the IT service desk chatbot?
Several internal company collaboration channels and applications exist, including Slack, Microsoft Teams, Asana, and Trello.
Online portals are accessible 24/7 and allow workers self-serve, yet there is a poor adoption rate. An IT helpdesk bot helps by providing a single access point and channel where workers can make requests into the appropriate message channel, and the bot responds, gathering any additional details it may need to act on the request.
By understanding the goal, the bot can either resolve the issue, pass it to a live agent, or collect information so that the agent can do it later.
Want to know more detailed benefits of an IT Service Desk Chatbot?
Read on.
Benefits of IT Service Desk Chatbot
Expedite resolution
IT helpdesk chatbots with AI and machine learning skills can quickly handle problems, improving employee satisfaction. An issue that could typically take days to resolve can get resolved within minutes using chatbots. It also increases agent productivity by allowing them to address more queries in a single day without delays.
They can also work on more sophisticated tasks besides answering FAQs and repetitive questions. In addition to offering a route for more effective issue management, service desks provide self-service through a knowledge base, hence accelerating resolution.
Enhance employee experience
With their Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities, Chatbots enable organizations to redefine employee relationships by automating time-consuming and repetitive tasks.
Chatbots are changing the way employees communicate and get information to help them be more productive and satisfied. Employee interactions are more accessible, quicker, and customized, delivering a great experience. They provide more natural, frictionless interactions, with the possibility of human handover when necessary accelerating the resolution time. This is important for redirecting basic queries away from overburdened IT employees and increasing employee self-service levels. The magic of AI Chatbots is that they can do so much more than simply answer queries. They can recognize employee intent and assist them accordingly while automating redundant activities.
24-Hour Helpdesk Service
Chatbots ensure that they are accessible to employees around-the-clock, seven days a week. Businesses must assign multiple human agents to various shifts to accomplish this. Furthermore, chatbots are always on call and do not take breaks or vacations.IT helpdesk chatbots can handle all the employee’s basic questions and route difficult ones to the appropriate department. Many functions can be handled automatically by a chatbot, such as a password reset, answering FAQs, application maintenance, and so on. Chatbots improve the total response time of a user’s requests.
Cost reduction
One of the many benefits of a chatbot service is that it drastically reduces the cost of human capital.
This makes chatbots particularly attractive to businesses seeking expansion. A robust chatbot system can manage increasing requests when your business expands and your workforce grows. Hiring a new agent is expensive and time-consuming, but well-trained chatbots make it less urgent to swiftly scale up your support staff, easing a major challenge for a growing organization. This allows you to operate with smaller service teams, which cuts your operational expenses immediately. Most level 1 and 2 requests are automatically addressed by chatbots, leaving agents exclusively with sophisticated questions.
Improved Self-Service
IT agents must address many issues at the same time. Chatbots provide self-service options that allow employees to receive immediate responses without having to wait for human agents. AI-infused chatbots and assistants build a digital self-service environment by using Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Natural Language Understanding (NLU). IT helpdesk chatbots can address several tickets without delay and keep employees from waiting in line to get their questions answered.
Chatbots recommend resolutions and encourage employees to assist themselves. This is an excellent strategy to help employees become self-reliant. Chatbots make it easier for employees to complete routine tasks and provide them access to information anytime.
Chatbots can easily be integrated with platforms such as Microsoft Teams, Slack, knowledge bases, and other portals. They provide answers to everything from technical help to general inquiries seamlessly.
Employee Satisfaction
Chatbots are often pre-programmed with FAQs, regular issues, and service request inquiries with replies. Chatbots recommend the most likely remedy or offer relevant resources that will help address the issue. This leads to real-time, consistent, and individualized messaging, which improves employee satisfaction.
A chatbot can include ratings and surveys into various points of contact or discussions. They also communicate with staff more regularly and proactively, asking for feedback on their work, policies, and skill development and alerting them about meetings, events, and other important dates.
Chatbots are often used to answer level 1 and 2 inquiries, while sophisticated issues are delegated to human agents, thus improving their productivity. It saves most of the service team time and gives them confidence since they can learn about their problems before meeting them.
Ticket Division and Assignment
Manually segmenting tickets based on concerns and departments takes a long time. IT helpdesk chatbots can easily accomplish these tasks thanks to AI and machine learning capabilities. IT helpdesk chatbots with AI capabilities may use conversation history and other factors to detect the employee’s purpose and categorize them accordingly.
They can redirect the user to the appropriate department or person through phone or message by revealing the full information of what occurred before.IT helpdesk chatbots automatically resolve around 30–40% of tickets. Using an AI ticketing system, your support team saves up to 3–5 minutes for each issue — a 50% reduction in ticket rerouting.
Helps the IT Support Team
Chatbots are a win-win situation for both employees and the support team when it comes to resolving difficulties. Chatbots can provide operators with a specific employee’s conversation history and complete contact information. Thus, chatbots not only assist employees but also help support staff to do their tasks efficiently and swiftly.
IT helpdesk chatbots can also deliver notifications and other reminders to the internal support team to assist them in completing their tasks. Several repetitive tasks, such as service requests and change approvals, require immediate attention. This will not take long, but due to the high volume of inquiries, agents will be unable to fulfill them immediately, but chatbots can remedy this soon.
Management of Knowledge
Knowledge management is critical for improving the quality of service provided by the support team. The company should provide employees with the correct information so that they can address issues on their own.
IT helpdesk chatbots can evaluate and study relevant information or articles accessible in the database or on the internet and send links to such articles to employees whenever they ask or when chatbots detect a knowledge gap based on tickets raised or when they search for such material.
IT service desk chatbot use cases
Every firm that utilizes technology in some way will require and utilize an IT service desk. However, their precise needs may vary depending on the purpose of their technology. Here are a few primary use cases:
1. Ticket Routing and Handling
Many times, you can find IT help desk staff working on classifying and routing tickets. Manually handling these issues is time-consuming and prone to errors. Even the most seasoned IT support professionals find it challenging to classify the vast variety of reported issues.
A chatbot assists the support team in collecting information from various systems to examine an employee’s issue history for quicker resolution and to assist an employee in tracking the progress of a ticket.
It provides thorough information on tickets that have been opened, are in line, or have been allocated. Additionally, it allows setting up an alert for the support staff and searching all open/high-priority requests for a certain support agent.
2. Auto—resolution
A chatbot can resolve 70–80% of repetitive issues like password reset, account authorizations, etc.). Imagine how much simpler it would be to do routine activities such as changing a user’s password, onboarding employees, requesting access to new tools, and generating email lists via a simple conversation with a virtual assistant!
Automated Resolution provided by chatbot takes care of resolving difficulties, so the IT department does not need to be engaged. Automated resolution takes control of an issue rather than needing human intervention. As a consequence, workers get rapid and precise responses. Automated resolution leverages the power of true automation.
Suggested read: How a Virtual Agent Chatbot Helps Human Agents in IT Support?
3. Availability of Information and Knowledge Base
Creates a library of pertinent information, frequently asked questions, and instructions that promote self-service and self-help to speed up issue resolution. The knowledge base is the primary point of contact for IT users with recurring questions and problems. IT helpdesk chatbots can evaluate and study relevant information or articles accessible in the database or on the internet and send links to such articles to employees whenever they ask or when chatbots detect a knowledge gap based on tickets raised or when they search for such material.
4. Automating process
There are a lot of tasks that need to be done over and over again quickly, like service requests and change approvals. Manually completing complex processes, such as onboarding, can be time-consuming, inconvenient, and prone to errors. Given the number of problems and inefficiencies in the onboarding process, it makes sense to lean toward tools and technologies that are powered by AI, ML, and NLP (Natural Language Programming). introducing HR chatbots to the onboarding process so that it can be personalized and streamlined simultaneously.
5. Employee Feedback and Surveys
Do you find it challenging to understand the demands of your staff, particularly after the pandemic? How can you understand your workers’ demands when hybrid and remote work create physical and mental boundaries between organizations and employees? By providing quick employee feedback, of course. You can detect work-related concerns to retain and reduce turnover even before it occurs. This is possible only with chatbots. They are designed to collect feedback after every encounter, allowing anonymous, truthful responses.
Ticket resolution can only be improved if an evaluation happens. Chatbots can compile the data for review and send it to specific team members. Likewise, it can provide a template for staff to utilize when sending their questions.
Convert your MS Teams/Slack into an internal IT help desk
Workativ is a no-code interface solution that enables the creation of complex, intelligent, and responsive chatbots that integrate with Microsoft Teams. Without the need for a specialized development environment, we offer customization based on your unique requirements to promote employee engagement, productivity, and, ultimately, ROI.
Why should you consider Workativ to build Your IT service desk chatbot?
Make your IT Helpdesk more proactive to increase the efficiency of your IT employees. Workativ Assistant has a user-friendly interface, a revolutionary new approach to SLAs, and customized workflows to automate time-consuming tasks. It works with a variety of communication platforms, including Slack, Teams, and Skype, including your current portal.
Workativ Assistant enables IT teams to serve workers more quickly than ever before. We’ve progressed beyond traditional workplace help systems with our solution, including Helpdesk-specific features like:
Simple Easy to Use Interface (EUS)
A user interface that is simple and easy to use in order to develop sophisticated IT processes that include different aspects such as forms, approval, verification, ticket production, and so on. It is engineered for IT teams to focus on employee/user satisfaction while eliminating design challenges.
Automation Catalogue
An extensive repository of pre-defined automation workflows that allow low-coders to manage and execute basic IT processes effortlessly. Designed for IT teams to begin workplace automation immediately rather than designing workflows/processes from the ground up.
Conversational forms
Gather useful information from the end-user in a more engaging and interactive manner. To provide seamless workplace assistance, create interactive forms that encourage users to contribute the information they need.
A Flexible Digital Experience
Workativ Assistant can be integrated with popular digital channels to provide users with immediate workplace support from any location at any time. Users can instantly use their chosen app, such as Slack or Skype, to report workplace concerns, follow up, and get them fixed without the need for external assistance.
Transform your IT support.
Convert your present IT support to a digital model with RPA-induced Virtual Assistants in days. Proactively addressing workplace concerns in a more intelligent manner can enhance the workplace support experience for users. Instead of just focusing on tickets, concentrate more on resolving issues.
App Workflow Builder
Customize processes using an easy-to-use workflow generator, integrate with all critical business applications, and automate your process and issues right from the chatbot. Save time by regularly analyzing and modifying processes to improve the support experience.
Chatbot Builder
Create logic-driven conversations for users to employ in order to raise and address workplace concerns in a more conversational style. With our sophisticated intent detection tool, you can convert any complicated interactions into human-like dialogues.
Employees and your IT Helpdesk staff will thank you for a flexible workplace IT support experience. Delight your staff while increasing overall productivity and boosting profitability with the power of cognition, simplicity, and automation.
Try our FREE IT Service Desk Chatbot today.
This blog was initially published here.
