Heading

No organization wants its employees to be distressed and helpless when they encounter an issue. Employee support plays an important role in gauging employee engagement within your organization. If you are able to provide seamless solutions to the problems faced by your employees, it is bound to show in the overall productivity of your organization. 

However, it is important to choose the right approach for providing support to your employees. The traditional employee service desk hardly served the specific needs of the employees. Without an organized system of support, the traditional service desks often leave employees confused or dissatisfied with the support. 

Earlier, employees had little knowledge as to whom to approach to get their specific issue resolved. This, along with the tedious and complicated nature of the manual ticketing system, often discouraged employees from using an employee service desk altogether. Ultimately, employees resorted to writing repeated emails and making repeated phone calls to find answers to some of the most basic issues. 

However, the scenario changed after the introduction of automated employee service desks. 

An automated employee service desk considerably reduces the time and effort needed to get an issue resolved. Using the same traditional ITSM principles, the modern service desks are powered by the technologies of artificial intelligence and process automation to provide personalized support to the employees. 

Instead of having to wait for the dedicated agents to look into their cases and provide them with an answer, employees can use the automated service desks to obtain solutions in a few seconds. This ultimately results in an increase in employee productivity as the employees can spend more time doing their job instead of waiting for their issues to be resolved.

The scope of an automated employee service desk is immense. Technological advancements have made it possible to customize a service desk according to the specific needs, preferences, and objectives of an organization. 

Top 15 Employee Service Desk Automation Ideas That Boost Performance And Quality

Here are some of the best ideas for making an automated employee service desk to be more productive and leverage its overall performance: 

1. Automate Knowledge Management 

Knowledge management plays a pivotal role in the working of an employee service desk. It allows the platform to make use of your enterprise knowledge to provide solutions to employee issues. 

For making the most of your employee serviced desk, it is always advisable to automate knowledge management and use knowledge as a service. When you use knowledge as a service, you are able to optimize the valuable information stores in your knowledge base to provide the best solutions to your employees. 

From the simplest routine tasks to complicated processes, automated knowledge management will help your employees in an organized, sustainable, and structured way. 

2. Use Conversational AI 

The use of conversational AI eliminates the need for your employees to approach agents themselves. When you employ AI chatbots and virtual assistants in your service desk, your employees have active support as soon as they log into the platform. 

Your employees can engage with these virtual assistants to obtain the first level of support (L1). Here, all your employees can interact with the chatbots, who would come up with answers to their questions at once. The virtual assistants will engage with your employees as if they are support executives who are available on demand. This makes the approach much simpler and more organized. 

3. Make Ticketing System Invisible 

One of the biggest issues faced by employees using traditional service desks is that of the manual ticketing system. Not everyone working in your organization is an expert in creating and managing support tickets by themselves. This results in an unwanted delay in the case getting handled by the agents. 

Instead, you can let the AI chatbots handle the entire ticketing system, making it invisible to the employees. Whenever an employee encounters an issue, and the first line of support is not able to resolve it, the service desk will automatically create a support ticket and route the case to a dedicated agent. 

The agent will then come up with a solution and communicate with your employee through the chatbot. When you take the visible ticketing process out of the system, the ease of operation for your employees increases sufficiently. 

4. Establish A Feedback Loop 

Normally, the performance of an employee service desk is measured by factors like cost per ticket, rate of resolution, and time taken per resolution. However, none of these factors matter if your employees are not satisfied with the performance of the service desk. 

Always make sure that you take honest and regular feedback from the users to keep track of the efficiency of your employee service desk. One of the best ways of obtaining feedback for your services is to attach a small survey along with the email sent to the employees once their issue is resolved. Once you receive their feedback based on their experience, you can analyze the performance of your service desk and make necessary changes (if needed). 

5. Allow Live Interaction With The Experts 

Although complete automation of your employee service desk is always a good idea, make sure that you have a provision for live interaction with the experts of the dedicated areas. It is advisable to have this option as the last resort for an employee looking for solutions. 

When your employees are not satisfied with the help provided by the virtual assistants and the agents via virtual assistants, they should have an option of interacting with the subject experts live. This allows employees to explain their problems better and obtain satisfactory answers from the experts. 

6. Automate Standard Request Fulfilment 

If your team is fulfilling all standard requests manually, it is advisable to automate them with the help of your employee service desk. Whether they are software or approval requests, they can be easily automated because of clearly defined workflows that can function without human interruption. 

Automating standard requests will help your IT team save a good amount of time and allow them to focus on other more important issues. The automation would result in a seamless balance between the front-end and back-end activities. While your employees request software permission, access, or use of a specific device, the request will immediately interact with automated back-end workflows for quick process initiation. 

7. Make Use Of Engaging Content 

Traditional service desks often provided employees with lengthy texts as solutions. However, automated and improved knowledge management allows you to provide answers and solutions in several engaging formats. Instead of providing tedious write-ups that disarm the employees right from the beginning, make use of images, charts, infographics, and videos. 

When you optimize knowledge management to provide support content in an engaging manner, you would ultimately increase the retention capacity of your employees. Also, transferring information in the AV mode helps them understand the solution better. 

8. Keep The Employees Informed Of The Progress 

While they are getting their issues resolved, employees need to know the status of their requests. Traditional service desks often failed to provide real-time information about the stage their request was at. 

Always make sure that you have an organized system in place for keeping your employees updated. The best way to go about this is to automate emails to be sent to your employees for specific triggers. This will keep your employees in sync with the support provided to them, allowing them to estimate the time taken for their issue to get resolved. 

Moreover, you can make use of efficient email marketing tools for making the onboarding process more wholesome. These tools will help you send automated emails to the employees of specific departments when they join the organization. These emails should contain detailed information about setting up their systems and/or using new systems for doing their work better. 

9. Automate Password Reset 

Generally, IT teams spend a lot of time in matters related to resetting the passwords of the employees. Instead, you can automate the entire process using your employee service desk. 

When they forget their passwords, you can allow your employees to reset their passwords on their own using the same platform. Automate the identity verification process with the help of the encrypted personal data stored within your database. Automate the workflows that follow and your employees will have a new password without the IT team having to intervene multiple times. 

10. Prioritize Major Incidents 

If you are using virtual assistants for providing round-the-clock employee support, there are chances that your agents and experts are not available throughout the day and over the weekend. 

In such cases, you need to have a system of prioritizing and elevating specific issues that cannot wait for too long before getting resolved. Depending on the severity of the issue, the service desk should be automated to send the right cases to the right agents immediately. The platform should also notify the experts when cases are routed to them to ensure timely resolution of the same. 

11. Provide Microlearning Opportunities 

If your organization required your employees to learn specific skills for performing their jobs or getting better at them, you could get them trained through an automated microlearning system. 

Here, you can add relevant training material to your knowledge base according to the scope of the skill to be learned. Your employees will simply access the training resources and train themselves in the required skills. This helps you save a substantial amount of money spent on hiring trainers and organizing workshops every time a new employee joins the team. 

When you allow your employees to get trained all by themselves, they feel more motivated to work. The independence of being able to learn and implement new skills is bound to lead to an increase in the overall productivity of your organization. 

12. Have A Single Service Desk For All Departments 

One of the biggest issues faced by employees using the traditional employee service desk is that of fragmented support. When there are different service desks for different departments and different issues faced by the employees, it will lead to unwanted confusion and delay in getting things done. 

Instead, when you automate your employee service desk, have a single support platform for all departments of your organization. This is what Enterprise Service Management (ESM) is all about. Gone are the days when employee support was limited to ITSM. With ESM, you use the same principles and apply them to all the departments within your organization. 

13. Customize The Service Desk For All Devices 

If you have a single integrated service desk for all departments, it is important to understand that not every employee will have access to a laptop or a desktop for doing their work. However, they would still need personalized support for the work they do. 

For such cases, it is always advisable to have seamless mobile customization of your employee service desk. This will allow your employees to log in from their respective cell phones or tablets for using the service desk and obtaining help on the go. 

14. Close Dormant Tickets 

Automation of service desks makes it extremely easy for an employee to ask questions and raise tickets. This may result in a lot of tickets lying inactive or dormant for a longer period of time. Always make sure to close these dormant tickets to allow the platform to run smoothly and the agents to stay focused on the right cases. 

15. Have A Simplified User Interface 

Finally, it is important to have a user interface that is easy to understand and simple to use. No matter how effective your service desk is, it will never succeed if your employees are not comfortable using it. 

The Final Word 

There is no end to the innovations that can be made and ideas that can be incorporated when it comes to optimizing an automated employee service desk. If you have more ideas that would help an organization boost the performance of its service desk, mention them in the comments below.