IT Service Desk Automation Strategies to Boost Business Productivity
Undoubtedly, a lot of an organization’s productivity depends on its IT infrastructure. Today, almost every process within an organization is carried out using digital platforms or technologies. Needless to say, the need to work remotely has increased significantly over the last two years, further adding to the importance of IT services provided by companies to their employees. In this ever-evolving workplace, employees are no longer satisfied with generic support that provides similar solutions to specific issues. They need personalized support that requires the organization to tailor their services according to their needs and preferences. This calls for seamless IT service desk automation. This blog post will discuss everything you need to know about IT service desk automation.
Let’s begin.
What impact automation has on IT Service Desk?
Automating your IT service desk helps you make your business more productive. It allows your IT team to streamline a range of processes that make their work easier and faster. Seamless workflow automation helps your employees save their valuable time and effort that can be channeled towards their core tasks instead of carrying out repetitive processes manually. IT service desk auto allows you to reach out to every employee across the organization and provide them with personalized assistance. This helps them resolve their issues within a few seconds and get back to work immediately. Moreover, when your employees obtain personalized support, their engagement with your business increases, increasing their productivity. ITSM automation can help you build healthy and lasting relations with your employees and your customers if implemented well.
Before getting to the IT service desk automation strategies that help your business become productive, let us discuss some of the reasons why traditional IT service desks can no longer be used to boost productivity.
Reasons Why Traditional IT Service desks Are No Longer Relevant?
- Lack of integrated system
- Lack of personal support
- Delayed support due to an overburdened agent
- Poor knowledge base
- Manual performing repetitive tasks and processes
IT Service Desk Automation Strategies to Make Your Business More Productive
All the issues discussed above (and many more) can be resolved by automating your IT service desk. The modern service desks use advanced technologies like Conversational AI and machine learning to provide proactive and personalized support to the employees. These tools consider all relevant historical data regarding the employees to provide answers, solutions, and suggestions that best suit their individual needs and preferences. This helps organizations make the most of their enterprise knowledge base and automate IT support processes.
Now, let’s check out the most important strategies that you can use to automate your IT service desk and streamline the support provided to your employees:
- Integrating the Service Desk with Collaborative Platforms
Ever since the pandemic outbreak, corporate employees have been forced to work remotely, which has increased the adoption of collaborative platforms like Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Slack etc. Although Covid-19 is no longer a threat to the world, the trend of working remotely does not appear to be fading anytime soon. Thus, it is advantageous to connect your IT service desk with them. One of the best ways to optimize your automated IT service desk is by integrating it with a collaborative platform.
This allows your employees to work and seek automated support from the same platform. It prevents them from switching to a different platform every time they need IT assistance. All they need to do is open a dedicated window and get their issues resolved effectively. Also, integrating your IT service desk with your collaborative platform makes it easier for the management to keep track of the support provided to the employees and measure the effectiveness. - Letting Your Employees Interact with AI-powered Chatbots
AI chatbots play a vital role in IT service desk automation. If you are willing to increase the speed and efficiency of your employee support, it is always advisable to deploy AI chatbots to provide the first level of support. In the first level of support (L1), virtual assistants relieve support agents from the burden of handling multiple cases at once. When your employees interact with the chatbots and ask a question, with the help of a robust knowledge base, it will come up with the most suitable solution. This helps your employees obtain a solution to their issues within a few seconds and effectively get back to their work. Your employees can also ask the AI-powered smart chatbots to route their cases to support agents to obtain a more detailed solution. A simple command helps your employees obtain personalized help from support agents, with the chatbots acting as a communication link.
- Invisible Creation of Support Tickets
Traditional IT service desks often made it challenging for employees to locate a ticketing platform and create support tickets. This involved the employees spending a lot of time creating the tickets, which does not go well with emergencies. IT service desk or ITSM automation allows you to create support tickets with a simple chat. Employees must interact with the chatbots within their collaborative platforms, and the service desk will invisibly create a ticket for them.
The automated IT service desk would send all the details regarding the concerned employee and their case to a suitable agent to provide context. The agent would then look into the case and get the issue resolved in the best way possible. All this while, the service desk would send automated notifications to your employee about the status of their case, keeping them updated in real-time. The automated IT service desk will close the ticket once the issue is resolved and record the exact details in your knowledge base to use them as future references. - Automating Password Change/Reset
ITSM relieves your IT employees from performing repetitive tasks like changing or resetting the passwords of the employees. The modern service desks allow your employees to make these changes by themselves by chatting with the service desk through their collaborative platforms.
A simple command would let the service desk connect to the back-end, verify the identity of the concerned employee, and get their passwords changes/reset within a few seconds. Such a seamless approach does not require your IT employees to get indulged and perform these tasks manually. This allows them to focus on the more pressing issues and work on improving their productivity. - Sending Automated Notifications to Employees
IT service desk automation allows you to keep your employees updated at any point in time by sending or scheduling automated notifications. A modern IT service desk allows you to send notifications to your employees across multiple channels. Whether you want to notify them on the collaborative platform they work on or send them automated text messages on their mobile phones, IT service desk automation streamlines the process of keeping your employees informed about things that matter. - Providing Easy Access to Software and Platforms
An automated IT service desk helps your IT professionals provide your employees with easy access to software tools and platforms using a centralized platform. These platforms gather the needs of all your employees, trigger the approval needs, and provide access to the right tools to the right employees almost immediately.
Conclusion
These were some of the critical strategies of using IT service desk automation to improve the productivity of your business. Implementing modern IT service desks allows the management and your employees to streamline business processes and organizing the much-needed employee support processes.