Striking the Balance: Cost-Effective Strategies for Providing Adequate IT Support with Generative AI

Employee support is a critical area of business operations that expedites growth. Yet, businesses use an old method to streamline tasks and provide support. This probably costs companies employee frustration, the continuous pain of filling up new support positions for unexpected attrition, and indefinite days of lost businesses.

The fact is user support needs a huge influx of IT tools and technologies, which certainly leads to high IT costs.

Unfortunately, the growing number of tools is burdening CTOs' balance sheets yet provides little to no performance gains and efficiency for service desks.

IT cost optimization remains challenging for many reasons within service desks.

Fortunately, there is Generative AI, which holds huge promise for service desk transformation.

There are many ways Generative AI can help reduce waste, foster optimal use of resources, drive cost-effectiveness for service desk operations, and boost productivity and efficiency.

Let’s learn how you can embrace cost-effective strategies to drive proactive AI support with Generative AI and strike the right balance between cost optimization and IT tool efficiency for your support.

The varied outlook towards IT investments can impact the existing state of IT functions across service desks and lead to inefficiencies.

Increasing IT investments

Companies can be intrigued to increase their IT spending on emerging technologies.

The latest example of increasing IT spending includes Generative AI.

Research by Gartner says that 80% of customer support or user support will increase the use of GenAI to improve agent productivity and user experience by 2028.

Another Gartner report predicts that chatbots and customer virtual agents will become the primary tools for service desks by 2027.

This means companies are inclined to increase their IT investments in chatbots, virtual agents, conversational user interfaces, etc.

Leveraging modern technology is necessary to keep up with the competition. However, this should not neglect the need to optimize IT resources and costs to help realize valuable business outcomes.

Unfortunately, new additions of tools can overlap existing tools if there is no clear roadmap.

Underutilizing the existing investments

There’s another catch that makes IT leaders underutilize the existing investments.

They have tools for service desk tasks, but they are not properly optimized. Companies lack strategies for utilizing resources appropriately to increase efficiency and save costs.

Unless service desk leaders have a better strategy for improving IT cost optimization for IT support, businesses will continue to lack the ability to gain benefits.

Too much reliance on legacy systems has a ripple effect on the company.

1. Disparate tools:

Due to the lack of centralized tools across service desks, your people may be forced to work with disparate systems.

2. Preference over familiar tools:

Despite having a service desk platform, your people continue to use familiar tools such as emails, phone calls, and messages to communicate their problems and get help.

3. Scattered metrics:

Information in silo hinders visibility into service desk metrics, making it challenging for stakeholders to improve service desk performance and leading to user dissatisfaction.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. The internal problem is quite big.

High total cost of ownership (TCO)

With a legacy infrastructure, you combine many tools to facilitate service desk operations. Under the fold, the total cost of ownership of these tools is high. You must take care of so many things one at a time—

• Recurring license costs

• Hardware maintenance costs

• Cloud infrastructure

• Developer costs

• Upgrades and installs

Another pain point is that you inadvertently have a similar kind of communication tool for service desk management with similar use cases. These tools work in a silo, giving limited visibility into their usage and unnecessarily breaking the bank.

For example, you have a point solution to manage service desk operations. Yet, you find your people use Teams to communicate the same concern. Hence, you pay for the point solution and the MS 365 suite for service desk management. As a result, you cannot optimize the use of tools and resources appropriately.

Lower adoption rate

Let’s say, as a point solution, you have a service desk platform to maintain IT support. In most cases, these platforms are less likely to offer advanced forms of automation to streamline operations. As a result, users are more inclined towards using familiar tools such as emails, phones, and chat.

This is the perfect example of underutilizing your investments in these tools. Your people avoid the point solution and use scattered mediums for employee support. One reason can encompass a deep learning curve, leaving employees annoyed to adapt to the platform easily.

Higher rate of agent involvement

As you struggle to optimize IT resources to the fullest, the efficiency of service desks eventually drops.

The limited automation in self-service piles up ticket volumes, forcing agents to overutilize their time on these tickets.

This can lead to errors while addressing the same issue and agent fatigue. Alongside the high IT investment, you are highly likely to increase your bottom-line spending to compensate for agents' overtime payments and to refill new positions for repeated attrition.

IT cost optimization is essential for striking a balance between service desk efficiency and cost-effectiveness. Generative AI can play a big role in helping you optimize your service desk resources.

Generative AI is the latest addition to the world of AI innovation. With its high-scale NLP, NLG, and NLU capabilities, it is making transformative waves for almost every business function.

It makes sense to keep up with modern technologies like Generative AI to make your IT service desks efficient and competitive. Generative AI complements your existing platform, helping you optimize IT costs overall and generate valuable ROI from IT investments.

According to Gartner, IT cost optimization is a business-focused continuous discipline that helps drive IT spending while reducing costs and maximizing business value.

On the service desk side, IT cost optimization for IT support means investing in tools that are not hard on your bank yet continuously offer optimal support efficiency for your employees, agents, and stakeholders while optimizing cost reduction opportunities for maximum business value.

For example, integrating Generative AI is beneficial for your IT support. It augments existing workflows and adds an extended level of automation to streamline workflows, continuously improve efficiency, and reduce costs.

Workativ can easily transform itself into a point solution that offers comprehensive and all-encompassing features, such as Generative AI, shared live inbox, app workflows, and integrations to complement service desk platforms.

Furthermore, MS Teams conveniently enables your teams to adopt conversational AI bots to seek help and resolve problems, elevating the employee experience and improving savings.

While the focus is on continuously improving cost optimization for service desk tools and increasing efficiency, Workativ powers this business objective by enabling you to strike the right balance between cost efficiency and support enhancement.

All featured cost-effective strategies reflect the best way to optimize costs and leverage enhanced IT support using Generative AI.

If you aim to optimize IT costs for your tools and elevate service desk efficiency, Workativ can help largely.

Schedule your demo today.