Itsm Automation Strategies That Are Redefining It Support In 2022

IT infrastructure plays a significant role in optimizing a company's performance and productivity. Almost every business process within an organization will be carried out via digital platforms by 2022. Additionally, hybrid work has become increasingly important in recent years, emphasizing the importance of IT services provided by businesses to their employees. Earlier, ITSM was all about IT improvement. In reality, IT service management (ITSM) is one of the most important strategies any company must have. IT Service Management (ITSM) is not a new concept, and many organizations have used ITSM principles for many years. Those who have been 'doing it for years' are frequently left behind. Unless you periodically update your ITSM approach, you're probably not making use of all the tremendous opportunities that contemporary ITSM provides. Although your current ITSM procedures may appear to be effective, many businesses continue to rely on outdated processes, particularly those that were formerly considered best practices. Today, employees are dissatisfied with generic support that offers similar solutions to specific challenges. Since most workplaces are facing challenges like Great Resignation, Great Attrition, Quiet Quitting, Recession, and rising inflation, it is imperative for organizations to offer tailored services to meet employees' specific needs and preferences to provide them with personalized support. This calls for the need for seamless ITSM automation.

What Is ITSM Automation?

IT Service Management (ITSM) refers to the set of systems and processes businesses use to improve how IT services are offered to employees and customers. ITSM automation entails automating manual IT processes and tasks to enhance overall efficiency and reduce the burden for service desk agents. The ITSM automation revolution is engaged with adopting a single unified AI-powered platform. By leveraging artificial intelligence, your IT service desk can auto-resolve issues for your employees in a few clicks. As a result, your employees can receive seamless IT support while saving time and effort.

What Makes ITSM Automation Critical In 2022?

Automating your IT service management solution or IT service desk helps your organization provide seamless IT support to employees and make your workforce and business more productive. An automated IT service desk 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. ITSM automation 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, leading to an increase in their productivity. If implemented well, ITSM automation can help you build healthy and lasting relations with your employees and your end-user. 

Before getting to the ITSM automation strategies that enhance your IT support, let us discuss some of the reasons why traditional ITSM tools can no longer be used to boost productivity.

Reasons Why Traditional ITSM Tools Cannot Provide Right Employee Support

1. Lack Of An Integrated Platform
   
   The traditional ITSM tools often provided employee support that was fragmented. They did not provide all employees with a single platform to obtain all IT support. This required different employees to use different platforms to obtain support from the agents.
   
   
2. Lack Of Personalized Employee Support
   
   The traditional ITSM tools often failed to understand the context of the issue faced by the employees. This results in the service desks providing generic support that adds little value to the solutions provided. Especially in the case of emergencies, employees cannot rely on traditional ITSM tools to get their issues resolved and carry on with their work.
   
   
3. Delayed Support Due To Overburdened Agents
   
   The traditional ITSM tools put support agents in the first level of support. This results in all the cases getting routed to the agents, making them overburdened with work. In such cases, the focus of the agent shifts from providing insightful solutions to getting the caseload cleared as soon as possible. This results in delayed support and degradation in the quality of support provided to the employees.
   
   
4. Time-consuming Repetitive Tasks
   
   IT employees often spend a lot of their time catering to repetitive requests such as changing or resetting passwords. This results in the employees being distracted from their actual work while performing these tasks. As these requests keep pouring in from different employees all year round, your IT employees are occupied instead of performing the tasks that matter.
   
   
5. Lack Of Knowledge Base Optimization
   
   The traditional ITSM tools were hardly able to optimize the valuable treasure of the enterprise knowledge base. They did not allow organizations to extract suitable data from the knowledge base according to the issues raised by the employees, resulting in an inadequate support system.
   
   

ITSM Automation Strategies To Enhance Your IT Support And Business Productivity

All the issues discussed above (and many more) can be resolved by automating your IT service desk. Modern service desks make use of technologies like AI and machine learning to provide proactive and personalized support to employees. These tools take into consideration 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. 

Here are six of the most important strategies that you can use to automate your IT service desk and streamline the IT support provided to your employees: 

1. Integrating The Service Desk With Collaborative Platforms
   
   Over the last two years, collaborative platforms like Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Slack, and many more are being used by professionals more than ever. The global pandemic forced organizations to function virtually and employees to work remotely. However, the trend of working remotely does not seem to be going away anytime soon, making it beneficial to integrate your IT service desk with them.
   
   One of the best ways of optimizing your automated IT service desk is to integrate 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 of the same.
   
   
2. Letting Your Employees Interact With AI Chatbots
   
   AI-powered conversational chatbots play an important role in ITSM 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. When virtual assistants replace IT support agents in the first level of support, it relieves them from the burden of dealing with a large number of cases at once. When your employees interact with the chatbots and ask a question, they scan your knowledge base and revert to a solution that is most suitable for them. This helps your employees obtain a solution to their issues within a few seconds and get back to their work effectively. Your employees can also ask the AI 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 chatbots acting as a communication link.
   
   
3. Invisible Creation Of Support Tickets
   
   Traditional ITSM tools often resulted in the employees finding it difficult to locate a ticketing platform and create support tickets. This involved the employees spending a lot of their time creating the tickets, a practice that does not go well with emergencies. ITSM automation allows you to automate the ticketing system, allowing your employees to create their support tickets with a simple chat. All they need to do is 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 employees concerned and their cases to a suitable agent to provide them with 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 would close the ticket once the issue is resolved and record the details of the same in your knowledge base to use them as future references.
   
   
4. Automating Repetitive Tasks
   
   ITSM relieves your IT employees from performing repetitive tasks like changing or resetting their passwords of the employees. The modern service desks allow your employees to make these changes by themselves by chatting to 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.
   
   
5. Sending Automated Notifications To Employees
   
   ITSM 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, ITSM automation streamlines the process of keeping your employees informed about things that matter.
   
   
6. Providing Easy Access To Software Tools 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 are some of the key strategies for using ITSM automation to provide the right IT support to improve employee productivity and business productivity. Implementing modern IT service desks allows the management and your employees to streamline business processes and organize the much-needed employee support processes.

Read: Top 10 ITSM Tools To Consider In 2023