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Investing in the right service desk is essential to increase employee engagement and productivity in your organization. In 2021, the traditional service desks hardly provide you with value for your money. You need to ensure that your service desk provides personalized support to your employees and provides you with a range of other services apart from answering your employees' questions. 

If you need your service desk to provide you with the right value, it is advisable to implement an AI-driven service desk. The modern service desk provides you with a range of tools and features for making a single investment. It allows you to provide personalized support to your employees and automate repetitive processes from a single unified platform. 

Before understanding how a modern service desk provides you with the right value, let us look at some of the key employee needs in 2021. 

Employee Needs In 2021 

Gone are the days when an employee's needs were limited to high remuneration and occupying a better position in the company. Over time, employee needs across the board have evolved and need to be taken care of by an organization to increase overall engagement and productivity. 

Here are some of the major employee needs in 2021 that need to be fulfilled by an organization: 

• The Need For A Flexible Work Environment
  
  Employees no longer prefer working the traditional 9-to-5 way. They need to work in a more flexible environment, especially if they are doing a creative job. As long as the quality of work is not affected, organizations switch to adopting flexible work hours to encourage their employees to give their best.
  
  
• The Need To Work Remotely
  
  This can be considered as an extension of the previous point. Several employees in all major industries prefer working remotely as opposed to going to the office every day. While some employees balance remote working by physically going to work for a few days, others prefer working remotely all along.
  
  Organizations can function with their employees working remotely, especially in industries where all work is done using online collaborative platforms and cloud-based software. The global pandemic in 2020 made the world realize that working remotely is a trend that is here to stay.
  
  
• The Need To Collaborate While Working Remotely
  
  While working remotely gives an employee more freedom and comfort, it cannot replace the vibe of a physical workplace. One cannot have the casual conversations had during shirt breaks while working remotely. Also, it is never advisable for an employee to work remotely without interacting with their team.
  
  Employees working remotely need to collaborate and interact with their peers and the management regularly. This helps them ensure that everyone is on the same page and allows them to fill the void of not interacting with colleagues in person.
  
  This is why online collaborative platforms like Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Google Meet, and Slack are getting increasingly popular with organizations having employees working remotely.
  
  
• The Need To Obtain Personalized Support
  
  It is natural for employees to encounter issues while doing their job and carrying out business processes, primarily if they work remotely. During such times, an employee needs to obtain support that is tailored according to their specific requirements.
  
  Employees are no longer satisfied with the generic support provided by the traditional service desks. They need quick and efficient support from an organization that understands their issue and guides them every step of the way.
  
  
• Getting The Right Value From Your Service Desk
  
  You can fulfil all the employee needs to be discussed above by implementing a modern AI-driven service desk within your organization. By making a single investment, you can get the right value from a service desk that understands the issues of your employees, provides personalized solutions to their problems and helps you automate your business processes to obtain the desired results.
  
  

Here are some of the major qualities of an employee service desk that would give you the right value for your money: 

• Centralized Employee Support
  
  The traditional employee service desks catered to employees working in specific departments, such as IT and HR. This restricted the scope of the employee support provided by the organization. If you are willing to obtain maximum value out of a single service desk, modern AI service desks help you achieve the same.
  
  The modern service desk provides centralized support to your employees, irrespective of the departments they work in. On implementation, a unified platform would function as an ITSM tool, HR helpdesk, marketing/sales helpdesk, finance helpdesk, and a project management tool with process automation. No matter who the employee is, they can log into the service desk and obtain seamless support from your side.
  
  
• Automated Ticketing System
  
  While the IT department is well-versed with the entire process of the manual ticketing system, other employees often struggle with the same. If you are willing to provide seamless support to every employee working in your organization, the traditional ticketing system will not help you attain your objectives.
  
  The modern service desk allows all your employees to get their issues resolved via an automated ticketing system. Unlike the traditional system, modern service desks make the ticketing system invisible by automating all major processes – right from creating the ticket to tracking it and closing it once the issue is resolved.
  
  This allows your employees to auto-resolve their issues without seeking any help from professionals. While the traditional ticketing system often left employees lost and confused, modern service desks relieve them from making any effort by automating the entire ticketing system. They need to start a chat to create a support ticket and get their issues resolved.
  
  Read More: Here's how MS Teams help you to auto-resolve employee tickets faster
  
  
• Interaction With AI Chatbots
  
  The modern service desks provide you with value for your money by not putting support agents for the first level of support. Instead, they make use of AI chatbots that help your employees navigate through the platform and get their issues resolved in the best way possible. This use of conversational AI allows your employees to interact with chatbots that understand the context of their issues and provide them with unique and tailored solutions specifically for the concerned employee.
  
  The virtual assistants accompany your employees as soon as they log in to the platform. A simple chat allows your employees to get all their basic issues resolved. The chatbots scan your company's knowledge base and come up with the best possible solutions to your employees' queries within seconds. Most cases are resolved at this stage instead of waiting for a support agent to provide answers to the basic questions.
  
  However, if your employees need a little more insight into the solution or want their cases managed by an agent, they can get the cases routed to a suitable support agent. The AI chatbots would provide the concerned agent with all the necessary context and details about your employee to help them provide a holistic solution to the issue.
  
  The chatbots act as the connecting link between your employees and the agents. Once they are ready with the solution, the agents communicate the same to your employees through chatbots. This allows you to streamline the support provided to your employees without the agents getting overburdened with requests.
  
  
• Training Your Employees
  
  The scope of the modern service desk is not limited to providing solutions to your employees' issues. The platform can also be used to train your employees in specific micro-skills. Whether you want to train your employees while onboarding them or want them to hone their skills, you can use your service desk to get your employees trained.
  
  Instead of providing long and plain text to your employees in the name of microlearning, you can add interactive training resources to your knowledge base to help your employees retain more information and make learning fun.
  
  Moreover, when you use your service desk for training your employees, you help them get increasingly self-reliant when it comes to getting themselves trained. Along with auto-resolving their issues, microlearning helps your employees become independent and handle their issues all by themselves. Ultimately, this boosts their productivity and engagement.
  
  
• Integration With Collaborative Platforms
  
  Suppose you want your service desk to provide you with value for your investment. In that case, you can integrate it with the collaborative platform implemented within your organization, such as Microsoft Teams, Slack, etc.
  
  This helps your employees find solutions to their issues on the same platform they use for work. Whenever they encounter any issue while working, they can have a quick chat with the AI chatbots, get their issue resolved, and resume their work immediately.
  
  Read More: How to Make Your Employee Service Desk a "Net Value Generator"
  
  

The Final Word

The only way to have your service desk provide you with the right value is by switching to a modern AI-driven service desk. This would help you resolve all issues faced by your employees and sustainably streamline your support processes.