Read on to get 5 reasons to use automation to deliver self service IT support and modernize your service desk.
IT service desk technology has made tremendous strides over the last few years. With service desk automation residing at the heart of IT operations, IT leaders have gained momentum by ruling out the need for humans to attend to repetitive and time-consuming tasks. But, at the same time, it’s putting constant pressure on IT service desk agents to meet customer demands along with the ability to reduce costs and increase staff productivity.
And to achieve the same, self-service capability can ease the pressure on the IT service desk while meeting business demands and maintaining customer satisfaction. Without self-service, the IT service desk staff will likely find themselves answering repetitive queries, resolving the same issues repeatedly, and raising customer tickets. With self-service, IT service desk staff can be empowered by allowing them to find answers to inquiries, fix their own incident, and raise their support ticket by following a culture of knowledge sharing and collaboration.
How does IT Self-Service Support work?
To make self-service support a success, the self-service portal can be linked to a knowledge base that can house documentation like user guides, instructions to resolve IT requests, a community to ask questions, and general FAQs on IT hardware and software. Direct access to this knowledge base helps end users search for documents that can help them answer queries and resolve their own incidents.
Also, the self-service portal enables end users to log and track their own incidents in one place. This gives more control to customers and gives them a choice of their support channel. In addition, service desk staff can use this portal to gain valuable insights from customers whenever any new document and knowledge article is added. To make self-service capability more valuable for customers, it can be coupled with AI bots to give more relief to IT service desk agents in handling complex queries in a fraction of a second.
Let’s explore the top 5 reasons to use automation for delivering self-service support to the IT service desk.
- Maximize Efficiency and Productivity
As per HDI research, password resets constitute 32% of the service desk ticket volume. Resolving this repetitive process adds struggle for IT service desk agents. Do you want your service desk agents to spend their time on iterative methods like this? Along with password reset, there are other menial tasks and business processes that hamper employee productivity. Utilizing self-service support helps end users and service desk agents resolve these queries faster, thus enhancing their efficiency and productivity. With automated self-help capabilities, service desk agents can give their precious time to processes that require human intelligence.
- Offer 24/7 operational support
It is costly to provide 24/7 human IT support, and smaller organizations or those with limited budgets cannot afford to offer support outside of normal business hours. Despite this, many end users are clocking in during off-hours due to remote work arrangements. Businesses of any size and budget can provide round-the-clock availability by incorporating virtual agents and RPA without increasing staff or expenditures.
With self-service capability, service desk agents don’t have to offer a resolution for every incident. Users can autonomously get the results when they raise service tickets through the chatbot.
- Reduce Operational Cost
Managing a large number of IT service tickets can be time-consuming and costly due to the manual effort required to resolve them. Along with increased operational costs, the struggle to resolve them also comes on IT service desk agents.
Self-service IT support reduces the number of tickets raised for a service desk agent. This reduced number of tickets eventually decreases the cost spent on resolving a service ticket. In this way, automated self-service capability enables enterprises to gain maximum value out of their IT staff along with cost.
- Stellar Employee Experience
Employees’ experiences at work are becoming increasingly important with the rise of great resignations. A long queue of raised service tickets and handling iterative business activity ruin the employee experience in every possible way.
Extracting data from multiple systems, routing tickets to the right agents, and providing on-time resolution put some extra burden on service desk agents. This exerted pressure not only ruins the employee experience but also doesn’t let them focus on strategic tasks that require their attention. Self-service capability makes room for IT service desk agents work on tasks that matters the most. Also, it not only enhances employees’ productivity but also makes them aware that if in the future they are facing the same situation they can solve the same issue faster and help other members too.
- Create Happy Customers
Empowering end users to solve their own incidents and requests with self-service capability results in higher satisfaction levels. Self-service capability can also create a personalized user experience as per its role and easy access to data they need for ticket resolution. With this kind of unlimited support from IT, service desk agents keep the customers happy with faster and more efficient resolutions.
Successful self-service IT support requires a combination of virtual agents and intuitive automation that ease the burden of service desk agents and help them meet customer expectations.
With Conversational ITPA, Conversational AI, and automation solutions, AutomationEdge is helping customers all across the globe to create autonomous service desk support. Processes like password reset, database support, ticket intelligence, and others can be automated efficiently with AutomationEdge IT process automation.
