Let’s face it: any support interruption or delay is a productivity challenge with high implications for an individual and the entire value chain. In a rapid technological shift, average employees use 7-8 different tools or apps. The number can also surpass.

Rather than deriving the benefits of SaaS tools for workplace productivity, employees grapple with challenges to use their tools. If IT support disruption is widespread, it translates into a high deluge of IT tickets. So, it is a recurring challenge for the service desk to maintain high-quality support, help employees get help in real-time, and get back to work without losing significant productive hours.

In fact, the inability to overcome these challenges leads to productivity and efficiency drains. AI is a game changer for how the service desk performs and enables employees. Unfortunately, for many skeptic IT leaders or stakeholders in the companies, AI and even GenAI adoption remains in an exploratory state only.

Our blog highlights the crucial role of Generative AI and automation in building high-performance employee IT teams and transforming service desks.

Service desks experience recurring and new challenges in today’s IT support scenarios. Some are known, and some are unknown. Let’s know them.

Wrong choices of technology stacks

In a bid to build a collaborative and highly productive workplace, organizations accumulate too many unnecessary technology stacks. The technology stacks could be more streamlined but redundant, hindering productivity instead of providing help. As per 63% of IT executives, they regret not being judgemental about their choices of technology stacks.

Wrong choices of technology stacks

There is a stark difference between IT people, where 50% of people are satisfied with their ITSM tools, while the rest of the numbers aren’t happy. The following reasons might make sense—-

Legacy systems

Service desks still use legacy tools. But, these tools need continuous maintenance and updates to work in a proper order. While maintaining and updating is a recurring burden for IT leaders, having the right kind of resources to implement configurations, customization, or provide fixes is hard. This can make AI integrations challenging. With outdated systems or legacy tools, employee productivity takes a hit and puts a burden on service desks, too.

Lack of automation

Legacy or outdated systems need more automation capabilities. Employees usually engage in manual activities. So, their IT support requests and service delivery are also manual. With disparate tools, they randomly send support requests using multiple tools. The lack of centralized data increases the challenge for support teams as they manually address employee requests, which delays response and resolutions.

Absence of risk management

Regulatory compliance is a critical need for any organization. Companies must comply with federal, international, and local laws with the growing need for IT assets and technologies. However, lacking resources and adequate knowledge can lead companies to overlook the need and create legal complications.

Flawed digital transformation

The outcomes of the support challenges are low employee morale and inefficient support. The cost of ignoring AI or generative automation has a profound impact on productivity and efficiency. The productivity-related challenges have significant implications for your business.

A poor technology stack, lack of proper governance, and legacy systems directly impact productivity decline for your service desk. In every aspect of service desk operations, efficiency decreases and impacts user experience. Here they are

• Increased downtime

Service desk teams rarely use their tools optimally. Being disparate and fragmented, these tools have limited access when needed. Tracing a critical user request and other information in a centralized way usually takes more time than usual, which increases the time to leverage context and respond to user requests. Perhaps this makes the service requester wait for the resolutions, which increases the length of downtime.

• Delay in response

Manual processes take much time to streamline workflows and deliver responses to the requester. Deriving context to the question, triaging tickets, and capturing information from outdated knowledge bases is time-consuming and error-prone. It gradually increases the response time and probably the mean time to resolution.

• Slow progress on critical tasks

A prevalent scene is delayed onboarding or offboarding due to the lack of proper service desk tools and automation. When service desks struggle to normalize downtime, end users get delayed responses and service. It’s pretty common for it to take longer than usual to set up systems, implement new customization, or provide access to new systems and de-provision users out of the existing systems. The ripple effects across the value chain cause companies to lose productivity.

• Increased rate of errors

Password resets, software installs, account unlocks, and other routine service desk tasks are mundane. Despite being common and routine, they require a lot of effort to accomplish. When done manually, these tasks seem overwhelming and intricate. This perhaps leads the service desk teams to make mistakes. As the number of errors increases, the resolution time also increases, leading to a backlog of tickets.

• Repetitive recurring cases

The pain of legacy tools and outdated systems hinder easy access to information for service requesters. Knowledge articles are obsolete, restricting access to the latest information. Unable to find real-time information, employees or users continue raising tickets to the service desks for resolutions. However, teams need a centralized system to keep records of history and minimize the impact of downtime.

• Increased security risks

Limited expertise and mundane workflows can expose a company to security risks. A threat to your IT assets directly shocks your service desk performance. You need new tools, expertise, and technologies to address security risks to your business systems.

• Decline in creative and strategic support

As your team is engaged in tedious workflows, they continuously address repetitive and routine tasks. This denies them enough time to handle unique cases outside of routine and everyday tasks. Thus, a service desk has little to offer its teams to expand expertise and address unique challenges, prolonging the time needed to handle critical tickets.

Reduced efficiency leads to decreased productivity, widespread across the service desk. With diminished real-time response and resolution, the service desk struggles with the huge burden of tickets. Generative AI and automation can help to reduce the impact of legacy and outdated systems and process inefficiencies. Here’s what Generative AI and automation can do to elevate your service desk through increased productivity and efficiency.

A new level of productivity

Generative AI, a new extension of AI and ML, has the inherent capacity to generate texts, parse NLP queries, and generate relevant answers using its vast training datasets, including third-party knowledge repositories. A service desk offers users real-time information for their everyday or unique queries, enabling them to solve problems autonomously. With many common queries being solved at the L0, service desk agents can focus on creative and strategic issues.

Streamlined workflows

Generative AI extends the current state of automation or transforms how a service desk performs with its legacy or outdated tools. The service desk can automate routine workflows, eliminate the need to manage tedious tasks, and streamline workflows efficiently. With GenAI delivering straightforward answers, users quickly solve their problems, reducing ticket escalation.

Rapid problem resolutions

Employees can always access the latest information for GenAI, which generates relevant and domain-specific information quickly. This reduces the time needed to call the service desk and find accurate information to solve a problem. GenAI helps automate information discovery, helps with ticket triage and escalation with the right team, and facilitates rapid problem resolution.

Efficient collaboration and communication

GenAI unleashes the capabilities to communicate and respond in a humanizing way. It can understand back-and-forth questions, detect the intent and context of a query, and improve the relevance and accuracy of answers. The ChatGPT-like answers solve many questions and provide real-time resolutions.

Enhanced decision-making

Generative AI harnesses massive datasets to make up answers and derive context from historical data of previous interactions. With the advent of data analytics, GenAI gives you end-to-end visibility into data, which helps drive data-driven decisions. You can make improvements to your existing business case and elevate user experience.

Generative AI unleashes many great tools for your IT leaders or support teams to apply LLM-powered capabilities across the service desk for support in various ways. As your team holds on to these tools, you can elevate performance, employee experience retention, and growth.

Here’s how you can unleash these technologies and build a high-performance team.

Single pane of view into issues through a unified platform

Generative AI works as a unified platform to turn your service desk into a single source of truth for your IT teams. Not just your IT team but your employees also find information in a centralized place, which unifies support information in one place and eliminates contextual confusion. This helps get the correct answer for common to critical issues and solve them.

For example, suppose a device encounters a logging issue and gets a fix only to reoccur again. In that case, the unified platform offers context for service desk agents to piece together historical data, analyze it, and help fix the problem efficiently. The power of Generative AI makes it easy to harness external and internal data and offer better insights into device performance.

Generative AI-powered chatbots, such as Workativ, offer better visibility into queries through multichannel integration. Your Slack or MS Teams bot can store service-related information in one place, eliminating the need to move between a couple of disparate systems that might take time and delay response. Workativ provides easy access to information for user queries and allows agents to solve them seamlessly.

Automation of mundane tasks

Password resets, account unlocks, software installs, account setups, onboarding, etc., are everyday tasks for the service desk. They are routine and common, yet the most troublesome. The lack of updated knowledge management has employees escalating tickets to the service desks. But not anymore. Generative AI’s inherent capacity to create new and unique content from training data is highly effective in providing relevant and accurate responses based on NLP.

As you train your GenAI chatbot with knowledge articles of common service desk issues, your Generative AI chatbot can quickly learn them and adapt to new scenarios if a query related to common problems comes outside the trained data.

Generative AI helps automate these tasks by utilizing robust knowledge management workflows. Whenever a query arises for any of the common problems, GenAI can ask follow-up questions until a solution is provided.

Workativ's advantage is that you can automate and streamline 80% of mundane and repetitive IT support tasks by leveraging GenAI capabilities inside its LLM-powered chatbot. Workativ helps turn your knowledge into chat for user queries and gives ChatGPT-like natural language experiences. It is a win-win for your employees and the service desk agents; both can enhance productivity and do their best work.

Relevant and context-aware answers

Your employees want relevant and accurate answers to their workplace questions. Sometimes, common answers from the world of knowledge may contain too little relevance and accuracy to support your employees' needs. Generative AI chatbots that retrieve information from third-party data repositories from a company’s knowledge management resources can help using RAG systems.

Suppose your employees need answers about salary, HR operations, leaves, device upgrades, software updates, or anything else. In that case, the RAG approach helps them retrieve relevant answers rather than answers offering generic value.

With Workativ’s LLM-based chatbot, you can leverage the flexibility of RAG systems through our hybrid NLU, Knowledge AI, that fetches information from both the public knowledge repository and domain-specific knowledge systems such as SharePoint, Google Drive, intranet, etc. Integrating Knowledge AI helps you enhance knowledge search and auto-resolution of common problems steadily and efficiently.

Creative problem resolutions

Your service desk team becomes empowered and capable of unleashing high performance to serve your employees with unique queries. Since RAG systems improve knowledge search and information discovery, service desks gradually reduce the number of escalated tickets for agents, which gives them enough time to handle creative problems and improve employee experience.

The other way around, Generative AI unlocks data analytics capabilities for service desk teams. This gives insights into the performance of service desks for various types of employee queries, helping IT leaders reveal areas for improvement. With continuous performance review flexibility, IT leaders can fix problems in advance, reduce the number of calls, and focus more on critical issues. Additionally, GenAI data analytics helps detect problems instantly and assign the ticket to the right team, thus reducing the time for ticket triage and helping minimize the impact of downtime.

Workativ has a data analytics dashboard that enables you to fetch data seamlessly and examine user interaction history. This can be extremely helpful in personalizing employee experiences by customizing workflows based on evolving user needs. Also, Workativ’s chatbot builder is an intuitive interface that allows everyone to set up workflow customizations without any technical know-how. It’s simple and fast to go ahead and leverage the benefits.

All-tiered support

Integrating Generative AI with your chatbot enhances experiences for employees and IT leaders or service desk teams. Employees apply self-service optimally for GenAI, which unleashes extensive knowledge generation capabilities.

For service desk agents from L1-L3, instant information retrieval for calls gives contexts and speeds up the time to resolve an issue. AI suggestions, AI summaries, and consolidated responses provide an enriching experience for agents to fix problems while saving time on each case and solving more queries.

Workativ ensures your service desk gets solutions for all-tiered support. Its LLM-powered self-service capabilities use Knowledge AI to reduce MTTR and accelerate resolutions. Agents amplify their capabilities in resolving user problems using a shared live inbox, allowing instant knowledge sharing from teammates when adequate information is unavailable. It also allows them to use AI suggestions to reduce the time to create relevant responses, AI recommendations for personalized answers, and AI summaries. Since agents spend less time solving a problem, they look relaxed, handle more queries, and love what they do.

For many companies, Generative AI may look just like another AI innovation, which is unnecessary now. But companies that have started using it have realized tangle benefits in employee productivity, especially in customer-facing services. Service desks can leverage the massive potential of generative AI and transform how the employee IT team works. An IT team can reimagine their performance by enhancing productivity and efficiency. This helps companies like yours improve employee experience and retain them for longer for expedited growth.

Generative AI is the answer to driving Generative AI benefits and building a high-performance employee IT team. Workativ can help in your journey. Book a demo today.

1. What are the key challenges your employee IT team faces today?

Your employee IT team continues to work with legacy systems, outdated systems, and limited knowledge management resources, which impede their ability to unleash better performance in real time and result in employee dissatisfaction.

2. How can your employee IT team overcome the challenges of a service desk with GenAI and automation?

Generative AI and automation unleash unique abilities to generate new content using training data. This helps automate knowledge search and information discovery, ultimately streamlining workflows and enhancing efficiency. It provides real-time support through updated knowledge articles in a self-service portal and data-driven decision-making abilities for personalized user experiences.

3. How does Workativ help build a high-performance employee IT team?

Workativ provides exceptional abilities for the employee IT team to enhance knowledge search and information discovery through RAG systems called Knowledge AI and elevate agents’ productivity and efficiency by providing a single screen for agents to unify information and speed up problem resolutions.