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.

Businesses of all sizes adopt a universal theory for IT cost optimization that encompasses the following strategies

• Get the best price for IT purchases for service desk tools

• Standardize, simplify, and rationalize service desk tools and processes

• Automate and modernize service desk operations (Generative AI integration)

Let’s break down these theories and give good reasons for building cost-effective strategies with Generative AI for your service desk.

Negotiate the pricing with your vendor

There are many terms from the vendor side that you need to comprehend carefully.

Having a transparent idea about how you will utilize the packages can clear up doubts and help you maximize the use of the tools.

That said, it is essential to carefully understand long-term contracts, payment terms, trade-offs, and less tangible benefits.

While working with your vendor, be careful about vendor lock-in. High costs are involved if you get out of the term due to unsatisfactory IT gains.

When it comes to finding the right and most cost-effective solution for your service desks, Workativ has the best offer.

With its custom pricing option, you can invest in modern technical features like GenAI chatbot, shared live inbox, app workflow automation, and Knowledge AI to elevate your service desk efficiency and optimize costs.

Reduce costs and prioritize IT support demand

Generative AI can easily augment the level of automation your service desk offers.

With fragmented tools working on your side, you bear high costs for these tools.

The best idea is to evaluate which IT support issues are frequent for your service desks and consume your teams’ time.

Post evaluation, you can design your workflows using Generative AI features and integrate them with your service desk platform. You can realize interesting gains with GenAI and reduce costs in the following ways.

• Reduction of unnecessary tools— Generative AI consolidates tools through integration with a conversational AI platform and centralizes your service desk communications through automation. You can remove the dependency on emails and phone calls and save costs.

• Escalation of critical issues—GenAI can help automate agent responses to critical calls. With self-service improvement, employees can handle common issues using a knowledge base powered by Knowledge GPT and rarely escalate to agents except for critical needs. This leads to agents being utilized less, improving cost reduction.

Also, Workativ, with its GenAI-based conversational AI, helps you consolidate service desk tools and unify service desk communications through a shared live inbox.

Embrace the cloud and remove waste

Cloud storage appears to be the best cost-effective solution to help you optimize your IT resources and improve efficiency.

According to the Cloud Security Alliance, moving to the cloud helps businesses reduce operational, IT infrastructure, and IT maintenance costs.

If you can embrace cloud-based Generative AI-powered service desks, they can fulfill your ambition to bring cost efficiency to your IT infrastructure and simultaneously enhance IT support.

There are two interesting things about transitioning to the cloud for your service desk and embracing cost efficiency.

• SaaS or cloud-based solutions can easily remove the burden of on-prem infrastructure maintenance, including the need for hardware and ongoing maintenance needs.

• You can embrace GenAI-based service desks by leveraging no-code conversational AI platforms without increasing IT spending on in-house GenAI development.

GenAI solution providers like Workativ help you move to the cloud, manage your service desk operations efficiently, enhance efficiency, and save costs by optimizing workflows and removing redundancies.

• No longer will you need fragmented tools for service desk communications since Workativ gives you the benefits of a point solution, which intricately combines your tools into one single platform through the integration of a conversational AI chatbot with your service desk platform and brings the essence of ITSM directly to where your people are.

• Your teams become efficient and productive by avoiding unnecessary engagement with disparate tools. They save time and can do their best work in real-time, thus efficiently eliminating waste.

Leverage data insights and make improvements

Harnessing appropriate data and working on it to improve the existing state of service desk performance can increase IT support efficiency. Creating a framework that opens up huge opportunities for data analytics makes it easy to foster service desk transformation.

Generative AI is popular for creating a wealth of information using its NLP and NLG capabilities.

Again, Workativ, with its GenAI-powered service desk features, helps you capture rich insights, play with them, and create more meaningful reports to improve your service desk performance and optimize costs.

Leverage MS Teams or collaborative channels to foster adoption

Let’s get back to the fact of underutilizing the investments in existing IT tools. By no means can you overlook the existence of your existing tools when you tie them up with a conversational AI platform or a chatbot that interacts with your service desk platform.

For example, Workativ seamlessly turns your MS Teams into a powerhouse of information repository for your people.  Integrating conversational AI tools driven by Generative AI, like Workativ's, delivers hyper-automation at a larger scale than those IT support tools.

• Your people can pull up information from Knowledge GPT or third-party company resources to enhance information search and speed up resolution directly. This makes it easy for you to standardize processes for everyone across service desks, streamline operations effectively, and align with the company’s objectives.

• Your team can find information about company policy, leaves, reimbursement, new employee policy, compensation, insurance, password resets, etc., by initiating a chat only in Teams. Surprisingly, if a question is difficult, MS Teams can use Generative AI to escalate for agent help.

Workativ strengthens existing tools, makes it easy for people to embrace them via MS Teams, leverages adequate IT support, and optimizes the technology.

Invest in new technology for service desk modernization

Digital transformation looks easy if you have a solid roadmap. However, embracing modernization can also mean breaking the bank as you invest in new technology.

The technology sensation Generative AI indeed facilitates modernization for your service desks and overall operational processes.

Considering your aim for building GenAI solutions in-house, it can ask for new bottom-line investments.

It is hard for many to build in-house because of the high costs of cloud infrastructure setup, enrollment of AI experts, data buildup, and so many other things.

Workativ intricately combines the power of Generative AI in its conversational AI to help you apply LLMs for self-service automation and transform your service desks.

It offers a competitive edge by allowing you to save development costs on Generative AI solutions for ITSM. It encourages you to leverage emerging technology cost-efficiently and ensures you beef up your service desk efficiency.

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.

1. What is IT cost optimization for service desks?

The universal fact about IT cost optimization that applies to everyone refers to reducing costs continuously as you maximize the use of tools efficiently. When it comes to service desks, this also means optimizing service desk tools for efficiency and continuous cost savings.

2. How does Generative AI facilitate cost-effectiveness and efficiency for adequate IT support?

Generative leverages NLP, NLU, and NLG capabilities to create new content and data, enabling GenAI interfaces to automate service desk responses efficiently. Using third-party data resources and the world of knowledge, GenAI can consolidate information, reduce the time for knowledge discovery, and help solve problems in real-time. Users are greatly interested in using GenAI-based interfaces for service desk platforms, reducing waste, increasing efficiency, and optimizing costs.

3. What is the easiest way to leverage Generative AI and embrace cost-effective strategies for IT support?

Integrating a conversational AI platform layered by Generative AI automation within a collaborative channel like MS Teams or Slack can help you implement cost-effective strategies for IT support.

For example, Workativ drives efficiency and cost optimization with its GenAI-based self-service automation for IT support, which uses its conversational AI platform.