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An HR service desk is essential for an organization to provide support to employees and ensure the well-being of an organization. It undertakes all the processes of an HR department without the managers having to conduct the processes manually. 

In 2021, employees demand personalized support services from their organization. This makes the HR department responsible for catering to all the employees' needs in a personalized manner. Implementing an advanced HR service desk helps your HR professionals to reach out to your employees and provide them with a conducive work environment. 

However, the traditional HR service desks are no longer relevant in providing employee support in 2021. Today, inadequate support and HR services can lead to reduced engagement and employees switching companies. Ultimately, poor HR support leads to an overall decline in productivity within an organization. 

Therefore, an organization needs to implement a modern HR service desk to provide state-of-the-art HR services to their employees. If you are still using the traditional service desk, it is highly advisable to switch to their new and automated counterparts. 

Major Issues With The Traditional HR Service Desks

1. Lack Of Consistency
   
   The traditional HR service desks are limited in their approach. They rarely allow the organization to provide all possible HR services to their employees. This results in a fragmented approach, resulting in the employees using different platforms to avail themselves of different services. A lack of consistency often hampers the experience of your employees while working in your organization.
   
   
2. Difficulty In Onboarding Remote Employees
   
   Since 2020, the trend of working remotely has skyrocketed. A global pandemic forced organizations to operate virtually and employees to coordinate with each other from their homes. Onboarding remote employees are often far more challenging than onboarding on-premise employees. As there is no physical contact and communication between the HR managers and the new employees, measuring the effectiveness of the onboarding processes becomes difficult.
   
   The traditional HR service desks offer little flexibility when it comes to onboarding remote employees. They often allow HR managers to use the traditional onboarding processes while dealing with remote employees, which is seldom effective.
   
   
3. Delayed Employee Support
   
   Employees today require quick support from their HR departments. The traditional service desks often make employees wait to answer their questions and find solutions to their problems. This is because these service desks have support agents providing the first level (L1) support to the employees.
   
   This results in the agents getting bombarded with support requests from employees all day long. When the agents are overburdened with cases, it takes them longer to resolve every case on time. This delays the support provided to the employees, distracting them from the work to be done.
   
   
4. Lack Of Personalization
   
   The traditional HR service desks often provide generic solutions to the issues raised by employees. These solutions are the basic template answers that cannot be applied to every employee in every situation. This adds little value to the HR service desks implemented within your organization.
   
   
5. Challenges In The Ticketing System
   
   The traditional HR service desks require your employees to raise and track tickets using the manual ticketing system. This often makes it challenging for non-technical employees to get their issues resolved. When the employees cannot locate the ticketing platform and operate the same, they often resort to making calls and writing emails to suitable entities.
   
   

Reasons Why You Should Switch Your HR Service Desk

Looking at the issues with traditional HR service desks, it becomes crucial for an organization to switch to a more modern alternative. A modern service desk allows your HR managers to automate their processes and provide your employees with personalized services. These service desks use AI to improve the quality of services and ensure high engagement, productivity, and retention of employees. 

Here are some of the key reasons why you should switch from a traditional HR service desk to a modern alternative: 

1. Integration With Collaborative Platforms
   
   One of the most significant advantages of modern HR service desks is that they can be integrated with collaborative platforms. In the last two years, more and more organizations have been using collaborative platforms while working remotely. When you integrate your service desk with your collaborative platform, your employees can obtain integrated support on the same platform they use for work.
   
   This prevents your employees from switching to a different platform for availing of support services. They need to initiate a chat and get their work done in a few simple clicks. Also, it allows HR managers to approach employees and keep track of their processes using a centralized platform. This ensures consistency in the services provided by your HR department to your employees.
   
   
2. Automated Ticketing System
   
   The modern HR service desks relieve your employees from the challenges of manual ticketing by automating the ticketing process. Such an approach allows your employees to create support tickets simply by chatting with the service desk. A simple chat would automatically create a support ticket and route the case to a suitable support agent, depending on the problem.
   
   While sending the case to the agent, the service desk would send all relevant details about the case and the employee's background to the agent to facilitate personalized support. While the agent is handling the case, the service desk sends notifications to the concerned employee regarding the status of their case. When the issue is resolved, the ticket is closed automatically, and the details are recorded within the knowledge base for future reference.
   
   This way, a modern HR service desk makes it easier for your employees to create and manage their tickets while auto-resolving their issues.
   
   
3. Primary Support By AI Chatbots
   
   The modern HR service desks make use of conversational AI to simplify the support processes. This involves the use of AI chatbots for providing the first level of support to your employees. Instead of waiting for the agents to look into the cases and provide a solution, your employees can chat with virtual assistance to obtain all answers to the basic questions.
   
   When an employee asks any question to the AI chatbots, they scan your enterprise knowledge base to find the most suitable answers within seconds. This allows your employees to obtain personalized help within seconds and return to their work on the same collaborative platform.
   
   The AI chatbots also help your employees get their cases routed to the support agents to obtain more insights into the same. They need to chat with the virtual assistants and ask them to get their cases routed.
   
   The use of conversational AI provides your employees with an ideal balance between human-like interactions and personalized support provided by machines. This makes seeking support as good as interacting with a personally assigned agent for your employees.
   
   
4. Automated Onboarding Of Remote Employees
   
   As discussed earlier, it is highly challenging for HR managers to onboard employees working remotely. As modern HR service desks can be integrated with collaborative platforms, they can be used for onboarding remote employees effectively.
   
   Based on the user persona, these service desks can send personalized emails to new employees as they join your organization. These emails can contain a personalized letter welcoming the employees, the company policies, their respective login credentials, roles and responsibilities, and any other details relevant to getting new employees on board.
   
   Also, the use of a collaborative platform helps HR managers measure the effectiveness of the onboarding process and make necessary changes to improve the same. This makes it easier for an organization to ensure that the new employees are comfortable working in the organization and can adapt to the new work environment.
   
   
5. Increasing Self-reliance Through Microlearning
   
   When you switch to a modern HR service desk, you can use microlearning features to get your employees trained virtually. Instead of hiring a trainer and setting up on-premise workshops, you can allow your employees to consume bite-sized content regularly.
   
   Instead of making them read lengthy handbooks, manuals, and articles for learning new skills, microlearning helps you cater to your employees' limited attention span. This allows them to retain information for a more extended period. All you need to do is add the training materials to your knowledge base and make your employees access the same from any location.
   
   
6. Conducting Streamlined Employee Surveys
   
   The modern employee service desks help you conduct automated and personalized employee surveys by sending the questionnaire directly through the collaborative platform in use. This helps you in collecting responses in an organized manner and evaluating the same for making important decisions.
   
   

The Final Words 

These were some of the many reasons why you should switch your HR service desk. Implementing an AI-driven service desk helps your HR professionals and your employees leverage their respective processes and add to your organization's productivity.