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BlogGenerative AIHidden Costs of Manual Ticket Resolution: Why IT Directors Need Gen AI and Automation
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Generative AI

Hidden Costs of Manual Ticket Resolution: Why IT Directors Need Gen AI and Automation

16 Jan 20258 Mins
Deepa Majumder
Deepa Majumder
Senior content writer

What’s not on paper does not mean that they are unquantifiable. The total cost of ownership is only visible with yourtraditional service desks. Does this mean you can view every aspect of your service desk spending? Certainly not.

There are hidden costs beyond TCO, which you cannot see– they are likely hidden beneath how your service desks unleash too many efforts to expedite ticket resolutions manually.

A simple calculation is that when there are too many manual interventions for ticket resolutions, the service desk incurs significant costs for time, resource allocation, training, and managing employee experience.

Though the costs of manual ticket resolution are hidden, you can quantify the figure as soon as you get a little cautious about it. The numbers are precise, and you certainly discover the dreaded fact of the bottom line impacts. The respite is the GenAI chatbots and automation, though. You can remove all the bottlenecks of manual ticket resolutions and save costs.

Here’s why you need GenAI and automation and how it can help you combat the high costs of manual ticket resolutions in employee support.

1. What are the reasons for the hidden costs of manual ticket resolutions in your service desks?

The service desk incurs high costs when it runs on legacy systems or paper-based manual exercises a familiar norm for traditional service desks. Due to the lack of service desk automation, the cost per ticket ranges between $75 and $600 when escalated to the higher tiers. But that’s only the surface-level view of the hidden costs of manual ticket resolutions. It has many sides, which can be more painful and strain your bottom line.

Legacy infrastructure and operational inefficiencies

Most service desk tools follow a legacy approach. This means they consist of cumbersome user interfaces for service desk agents, requiring them to toggle between several tabs and modules to handle and resolve a query. Your agents spend a lot of time getting context and coming to a conclusion. Due to the inefficient agent interfaces, legacy tools lead to poor experience and operational inefficiencies, increasing the volume of tickets and costs.

Lack of standardized processes for ticket escalation

Traditional service desks work in silo. The legacy system forces employees to use emails, embedded chats, social messaging, and telephony or voice calls. These provide a disjointed experience for agents, leaving them confused and frustrated as they look for what they need to connect with employees and solve problems. There are often high infrastructure costs for these additional tools, while longer wait times cost you lost productivity.

Employee training and development

With traditional service desks comes the inevitable need to provide employee training and development. This is quite a bottom-line strain for you. Since legacy systems contain fragmented fields or modules to convey various types of employee queries, both employees and agents need steep learning curves to work with multiple systems.

High operating costs

The traditional service desk incurs high operating costs for various communication systems to create tickets manually. Apart from TCO for the legacy infrastructure, tools such as emails, chats, social messaging, and telephony systems add to high infrastructure costs. Also, the shortages of L1 support, including high-level support agents, need additional costs for refilling and allocating resources for extra hours.

Increased response time

A familiar scene in traditional service desks with legacy systems is that manual exercises are highly prevailing. Since automation has little to offer help, agents heavily depend on a paper-based approach, mostly Excel Sheets, to track tickets and incidents. Agents need more context of previous history due to missing references or manual errors. So, when a new case comes up, manual triage takes time for analysis exercise, which increases MTTR. Longer wait times translate into a backlog of tickets and high costs.

Reactive support

Paper-based exercises across the traditional service desks leave fewer scopes to improve service desk performance. Due to the manual process, many critical data points might fall through the cracks, giving little insight into performance monitoring and future needs. This approach turns traditional service desks into a break/fix model or reactive support, which only tends to fix the problem as it arrives. Unfortunately, the tenacity leads to reassignments of tickets and costs your users—both employees and service desk agents tangible productivity hours of 109 minutes. Don’t bypass the expedited cost per ticket for this reason.

Compliance issues with ITSM

To a great extent, manual interventions delay the service desk’s response in addressing employee problems. Unfortunately, delayed responses hinder you from providing support in tandem with the standards as per ITIL for ITSM. As a result, you tend to violate service level agreements or SLAs, which impact user experience.

Scalability issues

As you grow, your traditional service desk experience will become more painful. The manual approach takes more time to solve each ticket, leading to a backlog of tickets for service desk agents. Agents undoubtedly need extra hours to spend on tickets outside their working hours, raising the cost per ticket.

As you can see, manual ticket resolution in employee support involves high costs, even though the legacy vendors claim cost savings on TCO. However, the trade-offs clearly indicate why IT directors must work with modernized IT ticket resolutions built with GenAI and automation.

2. What is a modern service desk built on GenAI and automation?

A modern service desk leverages the power of Generative AI abilities and automation to automate mundane and repetitive subtasks and streamline workflows for ticket resolutions, eventually improving employee experience.

With a modernized service desk infrastructure, you can drive efficiency and productivity in employee support through automated ticket resolution and encourage cost savings. Leveraging GenAI and automation allows you to eliminate manual exercise, gain extended automation, and provide frictionless experiences for agents.

3. How to mitigate the hidden costs of manual ticket resolution with GenAI and automation from your service desks

A survey by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Teneo reports that the use of AI for small businesses is expanding. 98% of SMBs use AI tools to harness their benefits, and 48% of survey respondents use GenAI tools like chatbots and image generators to free up time. The fact is that businesses of all sorts want to improve productivity, save time, and optimize costs. See how GenAI and automation enable you to combat the hidden cost of manual ticket resolution and save significant costs.

Hello

Leverage a single source of truth for everyone across service desks.

When integrated with ITSM platforms, GenAI chatbots facilitate a standardized process for raising tickets, giving every stakeholder a single source of truth or a single pane of view to manage tickets efficiently. Using automation within GenAI chatbots, your employees can quickly escalate a ticket to the service desk, with GenAI understanding the user’s intent instantly. Thus, GenAI encourages user adoption and eliminates the use of emails, chats, voice, etc.

Workativ provides a unified user experience, allowing users to escalate tickets within their MS Teams or Slack chat interface. This flexibility prevents employees from using multiple coordination methods such as emails, calls, messaging, etc., and allows agents to get a unified context of employee history to take on user calls instantly and resolve them in real-time.

Cut costs on employee training and development.

GenAI-based chatbots gain massive human-like language generation capabilities to automate content generation without supervision. Built upon this feature, GenAI chatbots help you reduce training costs in many ways.

  • Self-learning for your people : Chat-based questions and answers, in a back-and-forth way, allow employees to ask questions, build understanding, and gain experience. Automating training is one way to simplify learning for your employees and service desk agents.

  • Chatbot integration with ITSM platforms : Deploying chatbots with MS Teams, Slack, or widgets for your ITSM platforms needs no user guidance to work with the service desk environment, thus limiting training costs otherwise required for legacy tools.

Workativ’s GenAI chatbots are built to provide a flexible user experience. Combining 4-in-1 support automation tools, Workativ ensures you gain maximum savings on employee training.

  • Intuitive interface for users : It is easy for your employees to work with GenAI chatbots featuring familiar scenarios like MS Teams and Slack. This requires no extra time to work with the platform. With that, Workativ chatbots provide an omnichannel interface with tools and features to create tickets and coordinate follow-ups with stakeholders, simplifying the learning process and eliminating training costs.

  • Unified agent screen : With Workativ, agents no longer need to spend time learning several modules to resolve tickets. Using the Shared Live Inbox, agents can leverage everything in one place, which speeds up training and onboarding at lower costs for your agents.

Drive optimal utilization of resources.

Automation reduces the involvement of agents and also fills the gap for L1 support agent shortages by fostering self-service capabilities through enhanced knowledge management. This is beneficial to remove infrastructure costs such as emails, chats, messaging tools, etc., which contribute to high operating costs. Besides, Automated service desks can generate a treasure trove of data points, which also help determine when to allocate the correct number of resources and when not.

Workativ enhances chatbot experiences for your employees, improving user adoption and thus eliminating multiple coordination tools, which can save you a significant amount of money. In addition, by unleashing Generative AI capabilities through ITSM chatbots, Workativ helps streamline mundane workflows, reduces employee strain, and ensures long-term employee retention, cutting down costs for refilling and rehiring.

Improve response time with reduced MTTR.

GenAI automates triage, eliminating manual intervention and cutting short the time needed to analyze and escalate the ticket to the right person. With the reduced MTTR or the Mean Time To Resolution, you can speed up resolution and reduce the cost per ticket.

Workativ’s employee IT support chatbot uses Generative AI and automation to improve context and intent for NLP queries. Unlike the manual-based approach, Workativ provides complete context to user queries by sharing history. GenAI and automation embedded in Workativ allow agents to better understand the problem and the ticket with speed. In addition, Workativ’s Shared Live Inbox also helps categorize and prioritize tickets for improved MTTR and resolutions.

Data-driven decision-making for proactive service desk management

GenAI can work with massive datasets and hence helps delve deep into data points to drive data-driven decisions and analyze future needs based on interactions, user requests, tickets resolved, queued tickets, etc. It boosts predictive analytics capabilities and thus provides predictive maintenance, which helps avoid issues and mitigate the need to create tickets for the service desk, therefore saving costs.

With Workativ’s GenAI chatbots, you can leverage proactive service desk management. Easy-to-use dashboards reveal chatbot analytics, giving insights into user interactions, user sessions, user metrics, and ROI to determine future steps and make your service desk operations even more flexible and convenient for your employees and agents.

SLA’s transition to XLA for improved experience management

GenAI chatbots for service desks no longer focus only on aligning with SLA’s imperatives to fix issues. Instead, it makes harnessing data points easy for analysis and finding performance gaps. So, the focus is to expedite employee experience, thus fostering experience level agreement or XLA. The advantage is that GenAI chatbots help you work in tandem with industry best practices per ITIL standards while ensuring XLA.

Workativ Knowledge AI chatbot harnesses the power of LLMs and company proprietary data to offer custom answers for specific domains. It ensures your employees and agents find the right information to solve service desk challenges and play with massive datasets to prepare for future service desk issues at their best capacity. The comfortable journey for you is not only to comply with SLA but also to transition to XLA.

Scalability in ticketing handling

GenAI chatbots boost self-service and improve auto-resolutions; hence, ticket volume decreases. As a result, the service desk can handle more critical tickets and improve resolution rates.

When it comes to automating tickets, Workativ provides several benefits, including solving user calls without exerting much manual effort.

  • AI suggestions : The LLM-powered GenAI bot allows Workativ users to use recommended responses in ongoing conversations. It is like your agents can get an AI copilot to help them suggest steps using knowledge bases, speeding up responses and resolutions.

  • AI summary : It is fast for your agents to get the context of the scenarios as Workativ provides an AI summary of the case and helps mitigate the impact of downtime in much less time.

  • User personalization : Workativ makes it easy to personalize chats with user information. This allows agents to get all related information about a user call and unleash necessary actions to minimize the impact.

GenAI-powered automation is reshaping how agents manage their day-to-day ticket resolution work. Deploying GenAI bots ensures maximum benefits and significant cost savings.

4. Business benefits of GenAI and automation for your service desks

With GenAI and automation, you eliminate the hidden costs of manual ticket resolution, improve the health of your bottom line budget, and drive optimal cost savings. Thus, you can optimize the amount through investment in other significant aspects of service desk operations.

  • High ticket deflection rate : GenAI-based chatbots deflect tickets at a high rate, giving agents more time to handle critical tickets and improve uptime.

  • Tangible ROI : AI summary and AI suggestions help reduce resolution time by a few notches, improving ESAT for your business.

  • Improved ticket assignment : According to the 2024 Freshworks benchmark report, streamlined tickets help reduce the time spent assigning tickets to the right agents by around 13 minutes.

5. The promise of GenAI and automation: driving cost efficiency for the service desks

The burden of manual ticket resolution profoundly impacts your IT budget. Without knowing that manual ticket resolutions incur hidden costs for your bottom line, you have already wasted enough money on so many disjointed workflows and subtasks. The curse of manual exercises can plague your service desks, resulting in agent attrition, high cost per ticket, and excessive resource allocation to manage ticket volumes.

GenAI chatbots can drive significant efficiency by streamlining your workflows using automation and eliminating manual exercises for ticket resolution. The benefits are immense—you can save more beyond TCO for legacy systems, retain agents for extended periods, and build enhanced customer experience for your overall business growth.

Want to know how Workativ can help you upgrade your traditional service desks and automate manual ticket resolutions? Schedule a demo today.

FAQs

1. How do you waste money on manual ticket resolution in employee IT support?

Traditional service desks use manual exercises to manage their workflows and handle tickets. From manually triaging tickets to capturing enough insights into user calls to resolve them, the service desk spends a lot of time translating into significant spending. Unfortunately, these are hidden phenomena and add high costs for ticket handling.

2. What can GenAI chatbots do to improve service desks' cost efficiency?

GenAI chatbots extend the current state of automation through content generation and data analytics capabilities. They improve NLP responses for self-service, provide answers using your knowledge base, and recommend performance improvement for future issues. These automated workflows can eliminate the costs associated with manual labor, thus helping you save time.

3. How does GenAI help you optimize time and speed up ticket resolutions?

With the GenAI bot working inside your service desks, you can automate routine tasks and agent responses and streamline workflows to speed up ticket resolutions, which enhances compliance and improves employee experience for long-term retention and growth.

4. What are the benefits of GenAI and automation for your service desks?

GenAI and automation ensure you can improve user call response through rapid data analysis, automating triage, and escalating tickets to the right person. So, every service desk ticket has a shorter queue time and gets resolved soon, which improves user experience, agent efficiency, and cost efficiency.

5. How does Workativ make it a seamless experience to cut costs on manual ticket resolution?

Workativ GenAI chatbots seamlessly sync with MS Teams or Slack to give a familiar experience and speed up onboarding. Without extra work for platform training, agents and users can work together collaboratively and resolve problems using AI features for maximum cost savings.

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About the Author

Deepa Majumder

Deepa Majumder

Senior content writer

Deepa Majumder is a writer who nails the art of crafting bespoke thought leadership articles to help business leaders tap into rich insights in their journey of organization-wide digital transformation. Over the years, she has dedicatedly engaged herself in the process of continuous learning and development across business continuity management and organizational resilience.

Her pieces intricately highlight the best ways to transform employee and customer experience. When not writing, she spends time on leisure activities.

Deepa Majumder