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Service desks combine a large number of individual processes and workflows. For example, incident management is broken down into tasks, change management into stages and statuses, project management into milestones, and so on.

Manually carrying out every task is not only cumbersome and time-consuming but can also introduce human error into the process. This is where automation will help.

Here are the top 10 tasks you need to automate in your IT Service Desk:

1. Onboarding:

Onboarding of new employees can be a strenuous task for many organizations when done manually. This is because everyone needs to be kept up to date and to ensure no one is left out of the loop, it can be a hassle.

Onboarding when automated can reduce paperwork errors and eliminate oversights. It can ensure no one is left out of the loop by providing consistent information to all new hires, such as company information, internal procedures, organizational charts, or tax forms.

Automating of the Onboarding process can also be carried out by sending a single email to new users with a long list of to-dos and instructions for setting up their systems, or it can be as complex as a series of emails that are each triggered as and when new users do/don’t take specific actions.

2. Providing Solutions to queries and enforcing the concept of Self Service:

Having a Knowledge base can provide for a self-service portal. This can be as simple as a FAQ, or steps to resolve a recurring problem faced by end-users. Problems that can be resolved by the end-user can be provided in steps to ensure that the user does not waste time waiting for a simple problem’s resolution.

Self-service among new hires will benefit them as they will understand the workflows of the company and also will lead them to be independent. The other advantage of providing a self-service portal will help the organization gather accurate data from new hires to continue improving onboarding processes.

3. Feedback:

While there are many ways to measure the performance of a service desk, customer feedback can be a key indicator. All the other factors such as cost-per-ticket, rate of resolution, average time-to-resolution, and so on do not matter if the quality of service you provide is not up to the required standard.

One way to ensure that your service desk is always up to par is by collecting customer feedback at regular intervals. There are tools available to help with collecting feedback automatically.

This can be carried out by creating and sending surveys to employees. When done manually, this process can be tiresome and can be forgotten easily when there are much more important tasks to be addressed.

4. Customer Update Management:

Miscommunication is found to be very common among traditional service desks. This becomes a pain point for employees that need to be addressed. Any employee would not want to spend hours together on a call just to find out the update on his/her issue. By automating the update management, employees are always kept within the loop throughout the process of resolution.

This automation can help manage customer expectations and improve satisfaction.

5. Repetitive and commonly found tasks:

Some tasks are repetitive such as Folder creation and access, Multi-factor authentication setup, Resource provisioning for new users, and Virtual server setup. Manually performing these tasks can be cumbersome. This is where automation can benefit the service desk staff.

Automating these tasks can free up service desk agents and can improve the productivity of the organization.

6. Routing of Tickets:

There are occurrences where tickets are assigned to the wrong people. A lot of time is wasted daily on routing new issues and tickets to the right people. This can lead to a longer response and resolution time therefore indirectly affecting the customer experience.

Service Desk with AI technologies can help route the tickets to the right people without a delay in time.

7. Resetting Passwords:

Evidence shows that some organizations estimated that password resets accounted for 22% of their total service desk ticket volume. It is seen that people forget their passwords a lot and most tickets are regarding password resets.

Automated workflows powered by knowledge can enable end-users to go through the necessary steps to recover their password without bogging down the service desk.

How does this help?

This decreases the number of level 1 tickets drastically and also increase user satisfaction by empowering your users to solve their problems with automated knowledge-based steps delivered through a responsive portal.

8. Escalating Major Incidents:

Organizations with traditional service desks have round-the-clock support teams, that is not the case for most. The problem with such service desks is that they delay the resolution times and will decrease the quality of service offered by your service desk.

Automation when introduced into the service desk can automatically monitor system issues or tickets. This is very important to an organization because having an automated system that escalates major issues and incidents to the right people when resolution cannot wait for normal business hours. This reduces the working time of staff during the day as well.

9. Knowledge availability:

This refers to the maintaining of a knowledge base. This would act as a guide with all the self-help procedures addressing all the recurring events. This can contain information about each user and ensure lesser resolution times.

This can be extremely helpful, and time-saving, for both end-users and IT staff.

10. SLA monitoring and compliance:

SLA compliance rate acts as a metric to calculate the performance of your service desk in the IT industry. Providing automated alerts for calls that are nearing escalation points, and as and when it exceeds SLA limits, the support desk should automatically reassign calls. This can be carried out by providing dashboard views of SLA performance to keep the service desk staff and end-users aware of current issues.