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Do your employees still have to wait 40-50 minutes for a human agent to reset their passwords or configure laptops? Do your support agents manually prioritize incidents, service requests, or employee tickets? Do you feel that the IT service desk team is swamped with recurrent, time-consuming requests for user permissions, software installations, and document accesses? Does your organization still rely on traditional service desks? If you do, you are wasting your time…! 

As reported by Romexsoft, most organizations' IT teams are forced to spend around 30% of their time on routine tasks and processes. Another study by Mckinsey states that an employee spends almost 2 hours every day- 10 hour per week on average finding and gathering relevant data that they need to perform their jobs. This is a significant productivity loss for the organizations. Since the corporate world has recognized the importance of employee support and experience in this post-pandemic environment, no company wants its employees to be distressed and helpless when a problem arises.

CIOs and CEOs have realized that seamless employee support is critical in determining employee engagement inside every company. And when you deliver seamless support to your employees' queries, they will be able to perform well, and your organization's total productivity will benefit. However, selecting the best way to deliver assistance to your employees is more important than ever in 2022. But, relying on a traditional service desk can leave employees confused or dissatisfied with the support because they lack an organized support system. Thus, it is high time to think about automating your service desk, transforming the "time suck" of employee support into a smoothly-running automated machine. 

In a digitized world, where personalized support and employee experiences are the new normal, companies are lagging far behind; employees are exhausted. Having to wait several days for the right support would be devastating. In order to address these serious issues, companies are turning to service desk automation to create frictionless employee interfaces while optimizing their IT departments. 

But what is service desk automation? What makes service desk automation more important than ever in this post-pandemic era? Read this article to clear up all your doubts about service desk automation.

Defining Service Desk Automation

A service desk is designed to streamline routine tasks for employees and to assist organizations with meeting their primary goals of providing exceptional customer service and enhancing business revenue. But traditional service desks were incapable of meeting the specialized needs of employees. In a traditional service desk, employees are unable to complete their usual tasks when they must wait an extended time for the proper and consistent support. As a result, many employees will make complaints via phone calls or email, stating that “There is always a long wait for tickets." Oftentimes, a traditional service desk can confuse employees. Employee productivity and ROI, both of which are major workplace concerns, are ultimately hampered. In order to prevent these serious issues, employers must look for modern technologies that can provide seamless employee support. This is where service desk automation can help! 

Service desk automation can be defined as the process of automating mundane and tedious repetitive tasks and workflows by leveraging advanced technologies such as machine learning (ML) and conversational artificial intelligence (AI). It provides a single platform for support agents to resolve employee issues with minimal effort, allowing them to focus on high-impact activities. Automating your service desk will provide end-to-end employee support without requiring your IT helpdesk agents to set up workflows.

What Make Service Desk Automation So Important Today?

Needless to say, employee support is critical in determining employee engagement inside your organization- whether it is a Fortune 100 company or a small start-up. Providing seamless solutions to your employees' challenges can boost your organization's total productivity. However, selecting the best way to deliver assistance to your employees is critical. Employees' individual demands were rarely met by the standard employee service desk. Employees have been using the traditional service desk for years, but it always leaves them confused or dissatisfied with the support because they lack an organized support system. Previously, employees had no idea whom to approach to handle their issues.

Employees were often discouraged from using a traditional service desk because of this and the cumbersome and convoluted nature of the manual ticketing system. Employees eventually resorted to writing multiple emails and making multiple phone calls to find answers to some of the most fundamental issues. However, this situation drastically changed, as soon as the implementation of automated employee service desks.

Service desk automation can boost productivity by removing manual tasks from employee workloads, allowing them to focus on more complicated problems. Unlike a traditional service desk, an automated service desk can act as an IT help desk, an HR help desk, a marketing help desk, a finance help desk, a project management help desk, and many more functions. The modern employee service desk is intended to serve employees from all departments within an organization while also enhancing overall employee engagement. These service desks make employees feel valued and connected to the businesses in which they work by ensuring that all complaints are answered swiftly and effectively within 15 seconds rather than waiting for dedicated agents to examine and respond to their problems. This boosts employee productivity because an automated service desk allows employees to spend more time on essential tasks rather than waiting for their problems to be resolved. Employee engagement makes a company more productive, resulting in higher profits. Thus, investing in service desk automation is the need of the hour.

Service Desk Automation Ideas To Enhance Business Performance and Quality

Now that you have a better knowledge about service desk automation, let’s look at some of the top ideas for improving an automated employee service desk's productivity and general performance: 

1. Leverage Conversational AI-powered Chatbots
   
   When employees face problems accessing an HR-related document, configuring a printer, resetting accounts etc, they always look for an expert agent to help. But an automated service desk eliminates this requirement. A modern service desk integrated within collaborative platforms like Slack or MS Teams allows employees to interact with conversational chatbots as soon as they log in. These intelligent chatbots give first-level help (L1) to your employees and address their issues by providing the best-suited solution in 10-15 seconds.
   
   Read: How Conversational Chatbots Boosts Employee Productivity and Agent Experience?
   
   
2. Automate Knowledge Base
   
   Knowledge management is critical for streamlining an organization's support for its employees. Whether an employee is unable to open a file or needs assistance with the most sophisticated programming, employee knowledge management ensures that the right employee is delivered with the right answer. On the other hand, traditional knowledge management strategies fail to maximize the utilization of your enterprise's knowledge. They provide staff support using limited resource material, which is ambiguous, time-consuming, and ineffective overall. When you use a modern service desk to streamline knowledge management, you can easily integrate employee support for employees across your organization. When employees have a question, they must add the inquiry, and all relevant information will be displayed. Employees can access all necessary information in the form of articles, videos, handbooks, user manuals, and so on a single unified platform in seconds.
   
   
3. Making Ticketing System Invisible
   
   Most employees oppose the ticketing system, while some are unsure how to utilize it. They prefer to register complaints via email or phone calls. Because most employees do not want to leave their collaboration platform, an AI-powered employee service desk makes ticketing invisible. The modern service desk employs a conversational AI interface that allows employees to create issues, monitor the status of their tickets, and chat with an agent directly within MS Teams and Slack. Once the issue has been rectified and the ticket has been closed, the employee will be notified.
   
   
4. Enable Live Interaction With Dedicated Agents
   
   Ensuring the provision for live interaction with the expert agents is one of the service desk automation ideas. It is best to keep this option as a last resort for employees looking for answers. When your employees are dissatisfied with the first-level support (L1) offered by the conversational bot, it will automatically transfer your case to a dedicated service desk agent for second-level support (L2) in real time. This enables employees to describe their difficulties better and get satisfactory replies.
   
   
5. Repetitive Task Automation
   
   Every organization conducts a variety of tasks every day, and your IT team will be required to spend a substantial amount of time and effort on tasks such as "checking the VPN status," "configuring new laptop," "resetting a password," "gathering reports and insights," etc. An automated service desk will streamline all time-consuming and tedious routine tasks and processes and allow employees to perform their day-to-day tasks and processes more efficiently.
   
   
6. Create a Feedback Loop
   
   An employee service desk's performance is typically monitored by metrics such as cost per ticket, rate of resolution, and time taken per resolution. But, neither of these criteria matter if your employees are dissatisfied with the service desk's performance. Keep track of the efficiency of your employee service desk by collecting honest and regular feedback from users. One of the most significant ways to get feedback on your services is to include a quick poll in the email delivered to employees once their issue has been fixed. You can analyze the performance of your service desk and make required modifications once you receive their comments based on their experience (if required).
   
   Read: Do we need a new approach for employee surveys in 2022?
   
   
7. Automate Workflow Approvals
   
   The workflow approval process comprises of several steps that help a company to verify that the appropriate processes are done at the appropriate time. Traditional workflow procedures are no longer efficient in the age of digitization because they slow down the entire process. You can streamline various complex and multi-step repetitive processes with service desk automation, such as getting document access and verifying identities.
   
   
8. Conversational Microlearning
   
   If your organization needs employees to learn specific skills to execute their jobs or improve their performance, you can ensure training them using a conversational microlearning tool. According to the extent of the skill to be learned, you can add relevant training material to your knowledge base here. Your personnel will access the training resources and learn the necessary skills right within MS Teams or Slack. When employees learn by themselves, they will be motivated to work. It is likely that your organization will be more productive if your employees are independent enough to learn and apply new skills.
   
   Read: Conversational Microlearning For Employee Training and Development
   

Conclusion

If your company isn't looking at service desk automation possibilities, you could miss out on a highly productive team and a satisfied customer base. It is undeniable that service desk automation creates a win-win situation for all parties. It assists you in enhancing the quality of your service, avoiding manual activities, eliminating errors, and, most importantly, providing seamless and consistent support and experiences to your employees.

FAQs

1. What is service desk automation?
   Service desk automation refers to the use of technology and tools to automate various time-consuming and repetitive tasks and processes in a service desk environment. It involves leveraging software solutions, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of support operations.
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2. Why is service desk automation critical?
   Service desk automation is essential because it helps organizations enhance their overall IT service management (ITSM) capabilities. It enables quick response times, decreases human error, enhances employee satisfaction, and optimizes resource allocation. 
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3. What are the benefits of service desk automation? 
   The benefits of service desk automation include:
   - increased productivity
   - reduced response and resolution times
   - improved service quality
   - enhanced customer experience
   - cost savings through resource optimization
   - improved compliance with service level agreements (SLAs)
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4. Which tasks can be automated in a service desk? 
   In a service desk environment, a number of processes can be automated, including smart ticket creation and routing, incident and request categorization, knowledge base management, password resets, system monitoring and alerting, repetitive software installations and updates, status updates to end users, reporting and analytics, and knowledge base management.
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5. How does automation improve response and resolution times? 
   By prioritizing and routing tickets according to established rules and criteria, automation allows responses to be given instantly. Support desk agents can concentrate on more important issues and difficult problem-solving because it lessens the need for manual intervention in routine and basic tasks.