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You must have heard about the importance of customer-centric activities taking center stage for a business organization. Almost every business process and strategy revolve around providing personalized services to the customer catered by an organization. 

However, in this discussion of building and maintaining effective customer relations, people tend to overlook the importance of employee support. The productivity of an organization is directly proportional to the productivity of the employees. If you are able to streamline the support you provide to your employees, you are bound to get the desired traction from your customers/clients. 

However, the practice of employee support is going through a revolutionary change. The manner in which the employee service desk is evolving and getting in sync with the latest technological advancements hints towards a future full of fruitful process automation and several other productive technologies. 

Failure Of The Traditional Employee Service Desk

Employee service desks have been used for several years for providing support to the employees working in an organization. However, this support has not been faring well for the employees. There are several reasons behind the failure of the traditional employee service desk. 

Employees often complain of the traditional service desk favoring the agents more than the employees. Essentially, the older system involves an employee creating a ticket based on an issue faced by them and/or approaching the relevant senior/agent to get their queries resolved. 

In such cases, the support is often provided in an unorganized and delayed manner. As compared to the number of employees in a specific department, the number of employees is often considerably lesser. This makes it practically impossible for an organization to have every issue of every employee resolved simultaneously. 

Employees often have to wait longer for their complaints or questions to be addressed, looked into, and resolved by the dedicated agent. Ultimately, this affects the overall productivity of the said department in specific and the organization as a whole. 

Moreover, the traditional employee service desk often ends up confusing the employees. Owing to multiple platforms, multiple front-end agents, and multiple communication channels, employees end up confused as to which alternative to choose and whom to approach. 

Emergence Of The Modern Employee Service Desk

Looking at all the inadequacies of the traditional service desk, a modern alternative was created to automate employee support and make it smarter. The modern employee service desk is powered by artificial intelligence and provides a unified platform to the employees for seeking seamless assistance. 

The newer and smarter service desk makes it much easier and more effective for your employees to ask questions, raise issues, and obtain personalized solutions for the same. The AI technology allows the platform to have human-like analytical abilities that help it understand the issue being raised thoroughly. 

The emergence of the modern employee service desk was a gradual process. The traditional fragmented service desk was replaced by a single service desk for handling all queries. However, it became difficult for the organization to hire an agent having proficient knowledge about every department of the company. 

Further, interactive and collaborative platforms like SharePoint allowed employees to discuss and resolve issues among themselves. Still, it did not allow two-way communication between the employees and the organization. 

Ultimately, an AI-driven service desk came into the picture and checked all the boxes. It was a unified platform suitable for all departments, allowing the employees to engage in two-way communication with the organization through AI chatbots. 

These AI service desks have found application in prominent online collaborative platforms, including Microsoft Teams. Rezolve.ai, the AI-driven employee service deskused within Microsoft Teams, allows users to get their issues resolves and processes automated using a single integrated platform. From helping users in micro-learning and automating specific business processes to obtaining swift solutions to the most complicated problems, Rezolve.ai makes use of automation and AI technology to streamline employee support. 

The Must-have Features In A Modern Employee Service Desk

If you are planning to implement a modern service desk for your employees, it is important to make sure that you set up a platform that suits all needs. 

Although there is no universal checklist for the features that an employee service desk must have, here are the most important features you should look for in the automated platform: 

1. Conversational AI 

Conversational AI is the foundation for a modern employee service desk. The virtual assistant or AI chatbots interact with your employees to solve their issues and follow their commands. 

Here, the virtual assistants replace the role played by the support agents in traditional service desks. Instead of having to wait for an agent to attend to them, your employees can simply log into the service desk and start talking to the chatbots, getting instant replies to their messages. 

Conversational AI combines the seamless efficiency and accuracy of a machine with the behavior of a human being. This adds convenience to the process of obtaining support as your employees feel like they are interacting with a human agent. 

Moreover, the use of conversational AI makes sure that your employees get personalized answers to their questions. Unlike the long and text-heavy materials provided in the case of traditional service desks, the virtual assistants can gauge the perception of the conversation and provide answers accordingly. 

2. Provision For Carrying Out Analytics 

Providing employee support is supposed to be a systematic and organized process. When you use the modern employee service desk in your organization, it should help you make sense of every conversation your virtual assistant has with your employee.

Thanks to artificial intelligence technology, the modern service desk can help you keep track of the issues raised, solutions provided, and all relevant details about the same within an organized database. This record helps the platform to understand the perception and context of a question asked, and the command is given by your employees in subsequent interactions. 

In simpler words, the modern employee service desk takes the data gathered during the interaction with your employees and uses the same in making future interactions better. 

Also, useful analytics carried out using this data allows you to understand the nature of issues raised, the frequency of specific issues raised, and the success rate of the solutions provided. These details can be used by the senior management and developers in making your employee service desk better with time. 

3. Invisible Ticketing System 

One of the biggest advantages of having a modern service desk is that it eliminates the manual ticketing system. The entire process of creating, managing, and closing support and request tickets are handled by the virtual assistants, freeing your employees from putting in the effort. 

Whenever your employees raise an issue, and the virtual assistant is not able to solve it in the first level of support (L1), the chatbot will automatically create a ticket on behalf of the employee and route the case to a suitable expert. Based on the problem, the expert will come with the best possible solution and communicate the same with your employee through the virtual assistant. 

If the employee is satisfied with the response, the chatbot will automatically close the ticket and end the conversation. 

However, an efficient employee service desk will retain some aspects of the traditional ticketing system for the worst-case scenarios. If an employee is not satisfied with the solution despite all possible help, the service desk will allow them to raise a ticket manually and facilitate live interaction with a dedicated expert. 

4. Automated Knowledge Management 

Enterprise knowledge always forms the base for an employee service desk. In the case of the traditional service desks, this valuable knowledge was left unexplored and unused due to mismanagement. However, the modern counterparts automate the process of managing enterprise knowledge for providing seamless employee support. 

Whenever your employee asks a question, the virtual assistant scans your knowledge base to extract the best possible answer and comes up with a solution that is tailored just for the concerned employee. This way, your enterprise knowledge is put to optimum use according to the personalized needs of your employees. 

5. Seamless Incident Management 

No organization is prone to any irregularities in any department. There are times when your employees face hurdles in their work because of reasons such as printer failure, WiFi connectivity issue, laptop crash, email service issue, software bugs, file-sharing issue, application lock issue, and many more. 

You wouldn’t want any of your business processes to be affected by such incidents. The modern employee service desk takes such instances into consideration across your organization and comes up with efficient solutions to get the incident managed and fixed at the earliest. Just like the invisible ticketing system, automated incident management frees your employees from reaching out to the right agents and waiting for their response to get an incident managed. 

6. Efficient Micro-learning System 

If your organization requires your employees to learn specific skills for doing their job, having an employee service desk with a micro-learning system would definitely help you. 

You can add relevant training material and resources to the system for teaching the required skills to your employees through the micro-learning system. The AI-based platform will make sure that your employees are well-versed with the skills taught and are able to train themselves independently. 

As your employees no longer need to get trained by dedicated trainers and relevant programs, implementing a service desk helps you cut down your training costs to a great extent. All you need to do is make engaging training resources available to your employees and allow them to learn the skills by themselves. 

Moreover, when employees learn micro-skills by themselves and become self-reliant, they can focus more on their job and perform better. Ultimately, having a micro-learning system within your service desk helps you increase the productivity of your organization.

7. Mobile Customization 

It is very likely that some of your employees do not use laptop/desktop all the time. This may also be true for organizations where dedicated employees are required for fieldwork, where it is not possible to work on a laptop or a desktop. 

In such cases, you can implement an employee service desk with seamless mobile customization to allow your employees to obtain support on the go, using their cell phones or tablets. 

8. Workflow Engine 

We live in the age of digitization, where almost every business process can be automated. Your modern employee service desk should provide you with an efficient workflow engine to track multiple workflows carried out by specific departments. 

Using a central database, the workflow engine would help you in seamless process automation, allowing your employees to streamline their processes to achieve the desired results. 

9. Diverse Content Formats 

It is always advisable to choose a service desk that provides employee support in different content formats. Employees no longer prefer reading manuals and guides to obtain a solution to their problems. Just like the rest of the world, they have moved on to more interactive and engaging platforms to consume a variety of content. 

The modern service desk provides support to the employees using charts, graphs, images, videos, and animations. As compared to tedious texts, these formats improve the retention of information for your employees. 

10. Simple And Interactive UI 

Finally, everything boils down to how efficient the user interface is. One of the major reasons why employees have shifted to AI service desks is difficulty in obtaining employee support. This makes it imperative for an organization to opt for a service desk that offers the utmost ease of operation to the users. 

The Final Word 

The world has already started switching to the modern employee service desk. Looking at the exponential rise in the adoption of virtual workplaces and online collaborative platforms in 2020, you can rest assured that technologies like process automation and conversational AI are going to be around for a long time. With an AI service desk, you can always take the first step into the world of fully automated employee support!