Customer Service

Effective ideas for service desk automation - and why you need it?

A service desk is an interface between a company’s IT team and its employees, business partners, and customers. It is the primary point of contact between an organisation’s IT service department and its stakeholders in need of technical support. This puts service desk solutions at the heart of customer service and employee satisfaction.

Traditional service desks rely on support staff to raise tickets, manage service requests, and resolve incidents. However, with organisations going digital, incidents requiring IT support are steadily growing in range and complexity. Manually registering, categorising, and assigning calls and trying to avoid escalations is a huge burden on service teams.

Modern service desks need AI functionality to take over mundane, rules-based tasks, leaving human teams to resolve complex calls and enhance the customer experience (CX).   

Why do you need service desk automation?

You need automated service desk solutions to improve your IT support management (ITSM) practices and to protect your support teams from burnout.

As an organisation grows, so do its digital assets and offerings, and so, too, does the need for technical support. By modernising the service desk with AI, companies can ensure that support staff spend less time on repetitive tasks and focus on improving CX.

The key benefits of service desk automation include –

• Staff optimization
• Reduction in human intervention and errors
• Quicker response and resolution
• 24/7 support availability
• Better governance, risk management, and compliance (GRC)

Service desk automation ideas

An effective ITSM strategy calls for proactive rather than reactive service desk solutions. This means that service staff must not only handle additional issues but also preempt negative incidents such as SLA breaches, stay ready with resources to avert potential adversity and offer timely and contextual assistance to stakeholders before they reach out or escalate the incident.  

Here are five effective service desk automation ideas to optimise your ITSM practices:

AI chatbot

AI and NLP-powered chatbots easily integrate with ITSM tools and ensure 24/7 support for employees and customers. Bots can -

• Address repeated queries and common incidents
• Guide customers to relevant help sources
• Raise alerts and notifications
• Apprise human teams in real-time when escalations arise

Automated ticket processing

Automatic ticket processing is a powerful idea for service desk automation. Ticketing algorithms eliminate the need for human agents to create, assign, and track thousands of tickets. AI tools auto-generate tickets and route them to the right departments or personnel with relevant notifications. This minimises blockages and response times.

Self-service portals

Self-service portals are a popular way to reduce turnaround times and free up service desk staff for more pressing matters. Studies indicate that customers prefer self-service to long customer service queues on the phone. Self-service portals can include helpful features such as -

• A knowledge base with product or service information
• FAQs
• Onboarding videos
• Videos with detailed information on resolving common problems.

Email automation

Automated emails are among the most common service desk improvement ideas. There are many ways to leverage the email automation function, such as

• Auto-forwarding emails from multiple customer-facing accounts to a single dashboard
• Creating templates to address common requests
• Creating canned responses for similar issues
• Automatic post-resolution emails for feedback and ticket-rating

Onboarding automation

Automation can lower support costs and streamline crucial onboarding-related workflows. It helps new hires learn about their role, responsibilities, and company culture and manage tasks like documentation and password reset without manual intervention.

RPA for SLA compliance 

The Service Level Agreement (SLA) compliance ratio is an important indicator of service desk and ITSM efficiency. RPA-powered SLA automation enables you to set acceptable minimum performance levels, prioritise critical incidents, and track response and resolution times. This allows your teams to identify priority assignments and avoid potential escalation.

The system also sends automatic notifications to stakeholders when their issues are resolved, enabling your service team to close the loop and move on to low-priority incidents.

Service desk improvement ideas can deliver the best results only when they align with your company’s strategic objectives and fill the gaps in your existing ITSM toolkit. It is important to adopt a holistic, start-to-finish approach in deploying automated solutions. That is why many forward-thinking companies outsource service desk automation to reliable technology partners.

For organisations on the digital transformation journey, agility is key in responding to a rapidly changing technology and business landscape. Now more than ever, it is crucial to deliver and exceed on organisational expectations with a robust digital mindset backed by innovation. Enabling businesses to sense, learn, respond, and evolve like a living organism, will be imperative for business excellence going forward. A comprehensive, yet modular suite of services is doing exactly that. Equipping organisations with intuitive decision-making automatically at scale, actionable insights based on real-time solutions, anytime/anywhere experience, and in-depth data visibility across functions leading to hyper-productivity, Live Enterprise is building connected organisations that are innovating collaboratively for the future.

How can Infosys BPM help with Service Desk Automation?

Infosys BPM offers end-to-end customer service outsourcing solutions that deliver a holistic omnichannel experience. Our solutions are tailored to fit the client’s specific requirements.