Do you think burnout is synonymous with call center agents only? No, that's a half-truth. ITSM or IT helpdesk employees experience burnout at a higher rate.

IT helpdesk burnout may not technically be a medical condition.

It is an occupational or work-related condition that can cause extreme physical or emotional stress on your helpdesk or service desk employees.

According to The 2022 State of Remote Support Market Trends Report from Splashtop,65% of IT helpdesk teams report an increase in team members facing unsustainable stress levels.

Burned-out employee support teams are very common at helpdesks, especially with the rising phenomenon of hybrid or remote teams.

The need to constantly look for IT support to get help and be able to work their best adds to the growing volume of tickets.Compounding the stress for helpdesk teams are live chats and phone calls.

Besides implementing the best work policy for helpdesk teams, investing in your agents pays off in the long run.

Generative AI and automation are at your rescue. Helpdesk modernization derives the best value from Generative AI investments by allowing you to boost agents’ engagement and morale and elevate their experiences.

What is Generative AI for IT helpdesk?

GenAI for IT helpdesks can refer to applying LLMs or GPT to automate communications and collaboration to ask questions, get answers, and efficiently speed up agent assistance to mitigate service requests or problems.

Generative AI is an advanced AI version that uses the power of massive natural language processing to simplify language understanding and enhance human-like response generation and content creation.

These two unique GenAI abilities can allow helpdesks to reduce agent burnout by—

• Automating helpdesk workflows

• Reducing manual efforts

• Speeding up responses

• Delivering real-time assistance

• Keeping users content

You can derive significant value from Generative AI and automation for your helpdesks as you efficiently prevent agent burnout or take your employees out of extreme fatigue or emotional stress. (We’ll explore this more later in this article.)

IT helpdesk burnout refers to agents' deep fatigue and exhaustion from excessive work pressure in handling tickets, addressing user calls, or continuously following up with pending tickets.

IT helpdesk burnout occurs with the onset of stress, which continues to compound as agents become overworked due to rising helpdesk tickets.

Anxiety, depression, and irritation are common signs of IT helpdesk burnout. Long-term sick leaves, frequent breaks from the desks, and attritions are common consequences of burnout at helpdesks.

A broken ticketing system or clunky helpdesk software is one significant reason for helpdesk burnout.

Since the work scenarios changed post-COVID-19, the number of helpdesk calls has risen exponentially. Employees seek helpdesk support for many issues—

• Hardware support: Your employees may need a new laptop or a graphics card. IT helpdesk agents can guide.

• Password resets: IT helpdesk agents need to intervene for password resets when the issues become quite complicated.

• Account unlocks: Chances are your company applications prevent access, and agents must provide help.

• Software installs: This may include the MS 365 suite, Figma, Adobe, or any other application installation tasks for employee productivity. Your agents must be in full swing.

• Patching and upgrading: A sudden bug in your company-wide applications and users need to get troubleshooting help from helpdesk agents.

• VPN connectivity: This work can only be managed by expert IT support.

Alongside complex issues, helpdesk agents also manage common issues, giving them little time to spare and focus on self-being.

According to the same report by Splashtop,

• 94% feel completely overwhelmed by the volume of support tickets they handle (including Live Chat and phone-based troubleshooting).

• 94% of IT/ITSM and call center staff feel extreme pressure due to a shortage of agents.

• 67% reported difficulty maintaining expected and KPI-based service standards and CSAT needs because of overwork, overwhelm, and sector-wide staff shortages.

Employee burnout is a severe work-related issue, with IT leaders paying little attention to it.

In addition to having to work with fewer team members, helpdesk burnout has too many business implications—

Low CSAT

Agents are fatigued, and they continue to follow the practice of no-shows. Tickets keep piling up in queues, and employees wait for days for a resolution, leading to poor user experience and frustration.

Poor helpdesk performance

Helpdesk agents are fatigued, and manual work contributes to error-prone outcomes for end users. Resolutions see a dip, and ticket escalation increases for agents.

Rehiring for new agents

Agent attrition is a common scene in the helpdesk. IT leaders or managers are on a continued search for new agents. However, it is a lengthy process, which increases agent burnout until a new hire is onboarded.

Lost revenues

Untimely resolutions lead to productivity losses, requiring companies to pay for missed hours of operations and missed business opportunities. Besides, IT leaders must allocate funds to retrain new hires, which puts quite a strain on balance sheets.

Helpdesk burnout is a common phenomenon for service desk managers and leaders.

Generative AI and automation deliver multiple functions to helpdesk leaders reduce agent burnout and improve overall user experiences for ultimate business growth.

Here is what you can gain with Generative and automation—

Answer basic questions accurately

80% of IT support requests contain basic or common questions involving password resets or account unlocks. Generative AI can speed up responses to common queries by offering accurate information and mitigating downtime.

Knowledge accuracy and context remove ticket escalation and free agents from handling mundane tasks.

Streamline repetitive workflows

Knowledge GPT or Knowledge AI can easily automate responses for repetitive workflows such as VPN settings, connectivity, software installs, hardware patching, and other IT support tasks. helpdesk agents can save time and engage in creative work to stay energized and motivated.

Deploy RAG-based self-service

The best thing about Generative AI is that it can connect with third-party data repositories or company-wide proprietary data systems to facilitate RAG search. Your employees can find information and get help to do their best work. This effectively eliminates the involvement of agents and the number of tickets for them.

Deliver real-time responses

A Generative AI-powered helpdesk can seamlessly allow agents to retrieve information from previous interactions and get the real-time context of a case. Also, GenAI generates AI responsesto suit user queries. With added clarity and handy AI suggestions, agents can deliver accurate responses, solve problems, and improve user experience.

Reduce MTTR for common questions

GenAI can summarize lengthy knowledge articles into consolidated responses. It dramatically reduces the time needed to read lengthy articles and fetch important answers to solve an issue autonomously. Employees who remain calm and patient with their search are less likely to bother agents.

Help agents retrieve knowledge

New agents can act independently in unexpected scenarios by asking the GenAI chatbot to provide the necessary information. Generative AI can self-learn and provide contextual information from helpdesk interactions to help reduce wait times and improve CSAT.

Fetch better analytics and reporting for improvement

GenAI generates massive data points to facilitate advanced analytics and reporting. Pulling up these helpdesk interaction datasets, you can gain deep insights into agent performance. As a result, you can know which issues take longer for your agents to handle, including what remain unresolved. This gives you rich, actionable insights to improve your agents’ performance and ensure employee support.

A report by Deloitte says that 69% of agents surveyed agree that a positive employee experience can ensure their retention for as long as 3 years.

So, a helpdesk reduces employee burnout and can reap high-yielding benefits. Some amazing benefits for agents and businesses include,

High CSAT

Generative AI automation improves employee and agent satisfaction rates. Employees use self-service to get resolutions rapidly, while agents can speed up responses for ticket escalations using embedded RAG search.

Elevated helpdesk performance

Helpdesk queries find answers from LLM-powered knowledge repositories. Users get contextual answers, which limit errors and prevent ticket escalations to the higher tiers.

Reduced agent attrition

Automation and GPT knowledge improve information sharing and facilitate a unified knowledge repository for everyone, reducing wait time and faster response time. This gives agents time to relax, be creative, and be loyal to their responsibilities, allowing IT leaders to retain agents for longer and avoid rehiring. It also reduces training costs.

Increased revenues

Downtimes can have minimal impacts, as employees find information and resolve problems twice as fast. As agent involvement decreases, employee productivity increases, improving customer experience and keeping revenues flowing.

Improved NPS

Your helpdesk agents love what they do, and they work with a powerful and modern ITSM platform like GenAI-driven chatbots. With AI suggestions, they can speed up responses and mitigate issues, which improves their experiences. This leads them to promote an amazing helpdesk culture in their community.

SLA compliance

Generative AI makes it easy to address and mitigate problems in a specified timeframe using automation and response generation. As MTTR reduces, agents can handle scenarios efficiently and comply with SLA guidelines.

Workativ uses Generative AI properties or large language models within its conversational AI chatbots to improve employee self-service and speed up agents’ efficiency in handling and mitigating calls.

Workativ combines many features that align to empower agents, help them stay calm, and prevent burnout.

The following features work in their style to empower agents—

App workflow automation

Using Workativ’s app workflow builder, you can create simple or multistep workflows for common or cross-functional tasks. Agents no longer need to put manual effort into mundane tasks but can instead be engaged with high-value tasks.

Conversational AI platform

Whether it is a simple or company-specific question, Workativ provides a hybrid NLU experience—the combination ofconversational AI and RAG to elevate the self-service search experience and autonomous problem resolution. By decreasing the ticket volumes to the helpdesk, Workativ boosts agent satisfaction levels by helping them save time and reduce excessive workloads.

Knowledge AI

You can bring the magic of ChatGPT to your helpdesk chatbots by leveraging Knowledge AI, a powerful LLM component, to enhance search results. This allows you to use your knowledge bases and turn them into Generative AI chats, helping reduce MTTR. Your agents no longer need manual effort to triage and allocate a ticket to the right person. No extra mundane work!

Shared live inbox

Workativ provides comprehensive tools for agents via a shared live inbox feature to speed up their actions and help them avoid helpdesk pressure.

• Consolidated view of tickets: Agents can view user tickets from multiple channels in a single screen, reducing the extra work that would otherwise require them to pull up datasets from siloed channels and delay response.

• Team collaborations: It is easier to ask for help from a fellow team member and speed up responses without waiting for long. Use @ Mentions to invite agents to share information and tackle a specific case.

• AI suggestions: A shared live inbox is a perfect example of an AI copilot, which uses your knowledge bases to generate AI-based suggestions and help speed up response times. Your agent can feel relieved by avoiding the rather difficult task of composing personalized responses.

• AI summary: Allow your agents to leverage AI summaries of user cases to share them instantly with fellow members. This will give the full context of the story and boost resolution efficiency without all the hassles of manual effort.

A modern helpdesk with a comprehensive set of tools can ensure convenience, flexibility, and comfort for agents as they continue to work to provide a resolution.

Workativ facilitates agent efficiency by providing the right tools to improve their performances, boost their engagement, and enhance their productivity, ultimately preventing burnout.

If you are interested in promoting agents' well-being and preventing helpdesk burnout, Workativ can help.

Try our free AI chatbots. You can also schedule a demo today with our sales experts.

1. What is helpdesk burnout?

ITSM or IT helpdesk burnout is a condition of overwork by an agent, which eventually leads to poor mental well-being, physical strain, stress, and exhaustion.

2. Why does helpdesk burnout happen?

Most helpdesks work with legacy or broken ITSM platforms, which offer zero convenience and flexibility in dealing with tickets. This leads to service request tickets piling up in the queue, putting more pressure on agents to maintain KPIs. As a result, agents develop stress, gradually compounding to helpdesk burnout.

3. How can IT leaders prevent helpdesk burnout?

Modern technologies that offer agents a suite of tools can reduce response times, help handle more tickets, and free them from doing mundane or repetitive tasks, thereby reducing helpdesk stress.

4. How does Generative AI address helpdesk burnout?

Generative AI utilizes NLP and NLU capabilities to automate agents' tasks. It can automate ITSM responses, solve more common problems through LLM knowledge, and streamline common workflows to relieve agents from excessive work pressure.

5. What can Workativ do to help you combat burnout?

Workativ has LLM-powered conversational AI that turns into a powerful ChatGPT-like self-service to help solve common problems without any agent’s assistance. Besides, agents can use AI suggestions and AI summaries, gain visibility into helpdesk tickets, and seek help from fellow team members in unexpected scenarios to speed up resolution and gain peace of mind.