Employee IT support automation is different today from what you assumed a few years ago. IT leaders want to usher in the wave of Generative AI transformation. As per a report from Freshworks on the 2024 Global AI Workplace Report, 72% of workers surveyed trust AI to bring value to their work processes. In addition, GenAI, or new dimensions of AI, provides good quality work, and they also believe it helps increase productivity levels with hyper-automation.

Another surprising fact is that 85% of IT leaders use AI at least once weekly. The multidimensional potential of Generative AI drives efficiency and productivity for business, which IT leaders think they must harness lest they miss out on competitive innovations or fall behind competition.

When you know the value of employee IT support automation, you must implement strategies and best practices regardless of whether you are already leveraging IT support or planning to get one as you grow. Strategies and best practices help you drive maximum value from investment while also allowing you to optimize employee IT support.

IT heads or directors must rethink their employee IT support automation strategy. Several reasons contribute to IT leader's dissatisfaction with the existing automation.

According to Axelos 2022 ITSM Benchmark Report, 11% of respondents surveyed said they don’t have an ITSM tool, while 24% want to replace their existing ITSM tool. However, less than half of organizations (46%) think their ITSM tools are great.

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—-

• Lack of ITSM tools

Employee support IT support automation tools or ITSM tools must include specific capabilities. Automation is limited and supports only FAQ-based conversations. API integration, a cloud-first scenario, and workflow customizations are integral to providing a personalized user experience, which legacy systems or traditional modes might need to be included.

• Lack of collaboration and communication across teams

Despite automation being used at the service desk, users juggle email, voice, and chat to coordinate and communicate. Unfortunately, the context of a key issue gets lost in transit, and delays ensue in issue resolutions. This could result in increased IT tickets, recurring issues for the service desk, and straining IT teams.

• Lack of skills and training

The service desk is a domain that experiences short periods of employee retention. This results in IT heads continuously providing upskilling and development training to work either with the legacy platform or learn the practice of the ITSM ecosystem. Unfortunately, continuous refilling only results in people who need more domain knowledge.

So, if your existing employee IT support automation tool or no tool at all does not meet your business objectives, it makes sense to adopt best practices and strategies.

Rethinking your strategy means having the ability to garner the best ROI, too.

AI, or a more advanced version like Generative AI, helps IT leaders drive productivity gains for their service desk people and provide more opportunities for high-value work.

With Generative AI working to boost automation capabilities for end-to-end service desk processes, you can expect the following advantages—

Productivity increase

By leveraging the LLM-powered knowledge search embedded in the ITSM tool, your users can accelerate the pace of finding information and auto-resolving routine problems. IT agents handle more than those repetitive and routine issues. Instead, they can focus on strategic work and add value to the user experience. According to a report from HCLTech, businesses can expect a 10%- 20% productivity increase with GenAI-based platforms and use cases.

Process efficiency

Generative AI extends automation capabilities for existing processes, streamlines workflows, and reduces manual efforts to manage repetitive tickets and minimize impact for a specific period. One report claimed that a GenAI-based platform could help inexperienced agents 35% of chat-based issues per hour.

User engagement

An increase in auto-resolutions makes users happy and drives them to adopt GenAI-powered service desk tools to solve their productivity issues and give up traditional methods of communications and collaborations, thus centralizing information in a single place and increasing the resolution time.

User experience

Generative AI improves productivity and efficiency for both users and service desk agents. Users can easily retrieve relevant knowledge to solve routine problems. Agents can provide support with AI suggestions and predictive analytics through ticket triage and the right escalation. One interesting fact is that integrating GenAI-based intelligent chatbots into workplace platforms such as MS Teams or Slack can drive ESAT scores by 10% to 20%.

Revenue increase

With increased productivity and efficiency around service desk processes, IT leaders can experience a reduction in ticket volumes and less workload on agents. This translates into cost savings and revenue increases for business leaders.

Let’s look at best practices and strategies as to why IT support automation should be implemented.

Here are some best practices if you are determined to take on an employee IT support automation journey to realize the value and stay competitive.

Define goals

Understand what your organization needs to achieve in automating employee IT support. For example, if you realize that repetitive problems such as password resets or account unlocks are regular problems for your IT service desks, you can optimize automation for the task. Note what a repetitive issue is and bog your team’s performance and time down.

On the other hand, if your legacy platform lacks automation, which prevents engagement, prioritize integrating your ITSM tool with collaborative platforms. This simplifies streamlining manual workflows, automating existing tasks through an intuitive interface, and enhancing resolution rates.

The best approach is to get GenAI-based service desk chatbots, such as the Workativ conversational AI platform or Knowledge AI GPT, to integrate with your business comms channels and personalize the user experience with service desks.

Prioritize stakeholder buy-in

A collaborative approach is essential as you build your employee IT support automation strategies. Getting stakeholders, from IT leaders to directors and service desk managers to HR teams and employees, helps you distill critical components necessary to expedite and streamline employee support processes for improved productivity.

Leverage multi-tiered model for all types of support

Employee IT support automation must provide support for multi-tiered user response and resolution. Ensure the automation capabilities you build allow your team to leverage auto-resolutions through self-service at the L0 tier and escalate tickets for the L1 tier and L2 and L3 during critical problems.

Workativ applies the power of Generative AI properties or LLMs to its conversational AI platform to enhance knowledge search and auto-resolutions. This reduces the escalation rate to a varied section tier. However, Workativ also provides necessary tools to help agents at different tiers quickly solve a user’s call by using —

• LLM-driven knowledge repository to lessen dependency on the senior IT leaders and help address issue

• AI suggestions to generate responses and speed up responses and resolutions

• Mentions in the shared live inbox to tag fellow members and collaborate for real-time information sharing

• AI summary to allow next-tiered agents to have a complete sense of the scenario and speed up the resolution process

Harness AI/ML innovations

The latest AI/ML technologies are best at giving you more through extended automation capabilities. If your existing automation in the service desk portfolio only limits itself to FAQ-based chat responses, bring in GPT-based self-service automation to stay competitive. Make sure you can deliver personalized responses based on unique user queries.

Workativ turns every user query into a personalized workflow and resolves them with ChatGPT-like and human-like responses using Generative AI capabilities to boost user engagement. The outstanding advantage of GenAI properties in conversational AI chatbots is to drive real-time responses for every query outside predefined scenarios and resolve problems using predictive analytics.

Ease of UI adoption

Legacy models can have clunky module features, requiring a steep learning curve for users to adopt. Training and reskilling might be another bottom-line burden for IT heads. Ensure to have a no-code platform with user-friendly interface, with which all stakeholders can connect efficiently. The intuitiveness is such that admins can implement custom configurations for workflows without needing technical know-hows , whereas employees can adopt it seamlessly.

Workativ’s no-code platform allows you to build single-step or multi-step workflows without writing a single line of code and streamline service desk tasks.

Integrate with existing systems

Examine if you can have the integration flexibility for employee IT support automation. Pre-built app integrations help you avoid custom development and easily deploy your chatbot in a few clicks. In case of IT support, integration with industry-leading ITSM platforms can help you maximize the value. Besides, integration with MS Teams or Slack is the easiest way for your employees to increase adoption and improve resolution rates.

Workativ’s conversational AI platform easily allows for seamless integration with ITSM platforms and connect your bot with MS Teams and Slack for better user experience.

Ensure safety and compliance

AI/ML-powered chat platform can be susceptible to hallucinations and misinformation. Ensure your platform provides data integrity and end-to-end encryption for privacy control and security.

Workativ employs enterprise-grade security features best in industry standards and ensure compliance and security. Essential security features like mulit-factor authentication, access control, etc ensure operational and personal security for users.

Focus on flexibility and scalability

As you grow, the number of IT assets also increase. So, do the IT tickets to the service desk. Please note the platform you choose must adjust to the growing bandwidth and support scalability. What looks hard to scale can result in process mismanagement for your service desk workflows.

With Workativ’s conversational AI platform, you can handle scalability while ensuring user experience by resolving problems effectively and efficiently.

Continuous feedback loops and improvement

Prefer fetching continuous feedback from your users to drive better engagement and adoption through continuous improvement to the workflow implementation. Ensure the employee IT support automation platform provides rich metrics-driven by predictive analytics. By harnessing these metrics, you can understand which areas of operation needs improvement and build user rich experience.

Workativ provides chatbot performance and analytics to work on the weak areas and improve performance through better implementation of workflow automation.

More often than not, it goes on and on without bringing any change. If you think you are good enough with your existing IT support automation or no automation, reluctance to adopt changes tends to put you at business risks. You lose to business competition. Why? Your employees need to put in more effort to achieve productivity and efficiency. Time taken more than usual for a particular task can result in lost productivity and high cost.

Get started now. Learn best practices in employee IT support automation to drive efficiency and revenue generation. To learn more about seamless implementation of GenAI-powered employee IT support automation, connect with Workativ.

1. What are the key strategies to implement employee IT support automation for service desks?

Among the many critical factors for employee IT support automation are prioritizing business objectives, stakeholder buy-in, a multi-tiered service desk model, AI/ML capabilities, and security and compliance.

2. How can Generative AI enhance employee IT support automation?

Generative AI enhances automation capabilities to streamline mundane workflows, reduce manual workloads, and enhances productivity and efficiency by increasing the pace of information search and addressing issues through auto-resolutions.

3. What are the benefits of employee IT support automation?

The best strategies for employee IT support automation can help drive optimal efficiency for your service desk, which helps increase productivity, enhance user engagement, reduce costs, and build revenues.

4. How does Workativ help meet the best strategies for employee IT support automation?

Workativ provides the necessary tools to implement employee IT support automation for end-to-end service desk operations. It easily helps create tickets within a communication channel, resolves issues with adequate knowledge management resources, and enhances agents’ productivity with AI/ML or LLM-driven functionalities.