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With the advent of the remote working trend, the job of the HR department has become more challenging than ever. HR managers often find it challenging to deal with employees working remotely. Right from recruitment to resolving their issues while working, the HR department faces several challenges as the work culture changes rapidly. 

This has resulted in an increased need for an efficient and automated HR service desk. Gone are the days when employees were satisfied with the limited support provided by the traditional service desks. Over time, the need for an automated service desk has increased. There is a strong need to enhance their HR service desks for organizations operating at all scales and belonging to all major industries. 

The need for an improved service desk is two-fold. While it would help employees get their issues resolved faster and obtain personalized support from the organization, it would allow HR managers to automate several HR processes and reach out to their employees in the best way possible. 

One of the ideal ways to enhance the efficiency of your HR service desk is by integrating it with an online collaborative platform. Since the last two years, the usage of collaborative platforms such as Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Google Meet, Slack, etc. has skyrocketed. This has allowed organizations worldwide to function virtually and undertake all their processes through a single unified platform. 

When you integrate your HR service desk with a collaborative platform, your HR professionals can carry out many processes on a centralized user interface. Also, this helps your employees obtain seamless HR support without having to approach the managers and support agents directly. 

In 2021, the need for a modern HR service desk is evident. In order to understand this, it is important to understand the changing needs of the employees. 

The Changing Needs Of Employees In 2021

1. Working Flexible Hours
   
   Employees in 2021 no longer prefer working for a fixed number of hours and from a dedicated desk in an office. They prefer flexibility in the work hours, as long as the work is done effectively. Whether it is stretching the dedicated work hours to complete an important project or getting free early, employees today are more comfortable with flexible work hours.
   
   
2. Working From The Comfort Of One's Home
   
   Even before a pandemic hit the world, employees across the board preferred working remotely as it gave them more freedom and comfort while working. Industries like IT and eCommerce often have their employees work remotely as most of their work is done using a laptop/desktop.
   
   
3. Collaborating With The Peers
   
   Along with working remotely, employees in 2021 do not want to get isolated from their peers while working. They need to communicate and collaborate with their team members and managers to get the feel of working in a physical workspace. This has led to an increase in the popularity of online collaborative platforms in the last few years.
   
   
4. Obtaining Personalized Support
   
   Today, the quality of employee support plays a major role in determining the engagement and productivity of employees within an organization. Employees across industries seek support that is tailored according to their specific needs.
   
   

Major Issues With The Traditional HR Service Desks

Here are some of the major issues with traditional HR service desks that have increased the need for more efficient service desks: 

1. Lack Of Personalized Assistance
   
   As mentioned above, employees today seek personalized support. The traditional HR service desks provided highly generic support to the employees, leading to their questions not being answered effectively. Such an approach to employee support lacked the optimization of the enterprise knowledge base to provide the most suitable solutions to the issues faced by every employee.
   
   
2. Issues With Prioritizing Cases
   
   It is natural for support agents to prioritize more complicated and more extensive issues than the most basic ones. In a traditional HR service desk, this often led to employees with more fundamental issues waiting to get their questions answered as the agents are too busy handling the more extensive cases.
   
   
3. Overburdened Agents
   
   The traditional HR service desks often resulted in the support agents getting overburdened with requests from the employees. This is because these service desks are required to provide the first line of support. As none of the support requests are filtered, the agents had to deal with all of them, resulting in unwanted delays.
   
   
4. Lack Of Quality Support
   
   As the support agents get overburdened with requests, it often results in the quality of support going down. This is because the agent's focus is on resolving as many cases as possible instead of spending their time focusing on a single case at a time.
   
   
5. Issues With Onboarding Remote Employees
   
   

The traditional HR service desks lack the flexibility required to revise the onboarding plans for onboarding remote employees. When an organization switches its approach to working remotely, it is important to alter the onboarding processes to make the new employees more comfortable with the organization and its environment.

Five Ways To Enhance Your HR Service Desk Efficiency

Here are five important ways in which you can improve the overall efficiency of your HR service desk and leverage your employee support: 

1. The Use Of AI Chatbots
   
   In the case of a modern HR service desk, AI chatbots often replace the support agents. These virtual assistants help the employees navigate the service desk and provide a personalized solution to their issues.
   
   The AI chatbots make use of conversational AI to provide the first level of support to your employees. When your employees ask questions, the bots scan your knowledge base and develop solutions that are best suited for the concerned employee. This way, your employees can get their queries answered within seconds.
   
   However, the role of AI chatbots does not end here. If your employees are willing to obtain further support and more insights, they can ask the service desk to get their cases routed to support agents. The chatbots will now get dedicated support agents on board to look into the case and provide suitable solutions.
   
   This way, you can use your HR service desk to provide automated and personalized support to your employees without them having to wait for the same.
   
   
2. Helping Your Employees Train Themselves
   
   Another highly effective way of improving the efficiency of your HR service desk is by using it for training your employees. Whether it needs to train new employees or let the existing ones enhance their skills, an organization often spends a fortune on hiring training and organizing dedicated training sessions to improve the skill-set of its employees.
   
   A modern service desk allows you to feed your knowledge base with all the necessary training materials and let your employees train themselves from any location. This is an ideal option for training employees working remotely and cannot be a part of on-premise training sessions.
   
   As you allow your employees to train themselves, it helps you boost their morale and confidence.
   
   
3. Onboarding Remote Employees Virtually
   
   HR managers can use a modern service desk to automate the onboarding process for remote employees. As the new employees join the organization, a single prompt will send personalized emails to them based on their user persona, immediate email, software, etc.
   
   To build healthy relations with remote employees, HR managers can attach a personalized welcome letter, the company's expectations, company policies, and other important information to the emails. Further, a modern HR service desk allows an organization to create a separate IT ticket for every team as and when required.
   
   
4. Automating The Ticketing System
   
   Non-technical employees often struggle with the complexities of a manual ticketing system. They are often clueless about where to locate the platform and how to raise a support ticket effectively. A modern HR service desk helps you optimize your ticketing system by automating all the processes.
   
   The automated ticketing system allows your employees to create support tickets simply by initiating a chat with the service desk. The platform would automatically create a ticket and route the case to a support agent. Throughout the process, the service desk would keep sending automated updates to the concerned employee about the status of their case.
   
   As the agent resolves their issue, the platform would automatically close the case and record the exact details to help them in the future.
   
   
5. Taking Automated Employee Surveys
   
   HR managers can use a modern HR service desk to take personalized and automated surveys of employees. The surveys can be sent and responses recorded through the online collaborative platform used within the organization. This allows HR professionals to make valid assessments and improve their processes.
   
   

The Final Word 

These were some of the ideal ways to increase the efficiency of your HR service desk. Using an AI-driven service desk allows an organization to pay personalized attention to every employee and increase their engagement within the company.