Every year, billions of dollars are spent on software linked to digital transformation. IT Service Desks are now in charge of integrating these new service desk software installations tied to massive digital transformation programs. Consequently, ticket traffic increases, putting pressure on ticketing costs and the IT service desk. Turn your familiar communication tool Microsoft Teams into a Service Desk with bot integration and app workflow automation.

Teams Service Desk helps the IT service desk become lean and flexible, allowing end-users to remain afloat and sail over the technological tsunami. By helping to automate routine tasks, these Microsoft Teams bots are streamlining processes and connecting employees and customers. It can also be used to execute the ITIL framework's best practices for integrating service delivery with strategic goals.

How do you determine “ your business needs a conversational AI MS Teams Bot for the service desk”? Given your passive or reactive outlook in handling service desk issues, the question may seem irrelevant. But, workplace productivity, especially when you have a growing team and large client base, real-time and end-to-end service delivery is primary.

Microsoft, in its survey, highlighted 77% of respondents' view on low-code or no-code solutions to be helping them achieve their goals at work. On the other hand, 89% of respondents cited that they are more productive and fulfilled with automation and AI-powered tools.

In this context, it wouldn’t be wrong to say that service desk transformation through AI-powered MS Teams bot integration, including app workflow automation, would serve the purpose of what employees need to resolve issues and thrive at the workplace.

This blog will identify service desk issues and the need for service desk transformation. We'll further examine how the Microsoft Teams bot for the service desk delivers process efficiency and business resilience.

Streamlining work processes is the key objective of a service desk. But, when your service desk is built on a traditional model, it gradually adds to poor employee experience and hits the bottom line. Below are some striking challenges of a service desk.

A steep learning curve needed

Suppose you have ever noticed a recruitment drive for an ITSM manager or expert. In that case, it generally focuses on key expertise areas to handle major modules of a service desk platform in mitigating IT incidents and ensuring business continuity.

A steep learning curve about the platform architecture can be ideal for handling service desk tickets and driving employee efficiency. It means a service desk is built to help agents to resolve issues.

What if end users do not possess a sound knowledge of the platform? Instead of using the service desk portal, they tend to use multiple methods such as emails, phone calls, or one-to-one interaction to communicate the issue.

A bottom line crisis as your investment remains unutilized.

Lengthy Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR)

As per Service Desk Show, monthly tickets have grown by 35% over the two years. Coupled with the complexity of issues and a backlog of tickets, there is a rush to handle as many tickets as possible, which is a possible reason for committing mistakes and handling the same tickets repeatedly. Besides, a lack of context to the actual issue of a ticket usually prolongs the MTTR for a service desk agent.

Handling multiple requests altogether

A traditional service desk is not centralized and is supported by phone calls and emails. As a result,

• Phone calls take more time per user to triage and close tickets

• Emails make it challenging to track progress back and forth, causing delays in ticket resolution

This perhaps increases the total count of tickets to your service desk involving the same or more complex issues.

Handling a wave of tickets from your growing team is nerve-wracking, mainly because you are yet to bring automation to your service desk. Adopting chatbots is a cost-effective option as these sophisticated algorithms can handle numerous customers simultaneously, lowering wait time and freeing support employees to focus on problem-solving.

Repetitive service desk issues

A help desk is susceptible to backlog issues when failing to resolve current issues at scale.

• IT help desk gets into the trap of resolving the same issues as a traditional system lacks data analytics which can help collect, record, and analyze support data.

• IT teams are unable to address more critical issues because of high volumes of FAQ-based or common IT service-related queries.

Unable to keep track of the most common issues, service desk agents will waste time finding and addressing issues they have already worked on.

Lack of effective self-service interface

Many of the issues dealt with by the IT service desk are regular, repetitive, and time-consuming.

• Password resets account for 50 percent of IT service desk calls

• Also, password reset or group email access may take more than an hour to resolve due to the dependency on human involvement

Where 80% of productivity losses happen due to requests for a repetitive issue, the ability to auto-resolve can reduce this probability. But, a traditional service desk does not incite quick adoption and increase service request volumes.

Long resolution times and unresolved issues

The more tools and platforms in a business, the greater the requirement for faster troubleshooting. When the service desk gets too many requests to handle and lacks the appropriate communication tools, this will create massive damage. Many IT help desks use email to track client queries, and when employees manually sift through these inquiries, productivity suffers. The IT service desk also misses the chance to gain data that can identify recurrent issues. It ultimately speeds up future resolution times if it does not have a structured ticket intake approach and request tracking tools.

Microsoft Teams' strength lies in the fact that it enables users to interact while keeping in context. Bots created on the Teams platform operate as intelligent connectors between the Teams client and other services and processes, integrating them into your active collaboration platform.

They will help you save time by automating mundane chores with artificial intelligence. One of the most valuable features of Microsoft Teams is having a bot appear as any other team member to assist. T-Bot, for example, is a bot that answers commonly requested queries. Polly Bot may assist with polling among coworkers. Hipmunk can assist you in making travel arrangements.

Instead of sending employees to a separate HR system to read vacation policies. a bot that tells them how many hours of vacation they have left for the year and walks them through the process without even leaving Microsoft Teams.

MS Teams bots have various applications, including -One-to-one, group, and channel in a team. Users communicate with bots via text, interactive cards, and task modules, and interactions may vary from a basic search to a complicated AI-powered dialogue. Conversational bots make sense in Teams since it's a chat-based collaboration tool—the only difference is that you're conversing with a machine instead of another human. Great, isn't it?

Microsoft Teams Bot for service desk can easily fetch service desk data inside your familiar collaboration channel Microsoft Teams through an API call. Chatbot builder such as Workativ Assistant helps you create app workflow automation for service desk platforms and enable handling IT or HR issues at scale inside the chat interface of MS Teams.

Here’s how your employee can achieve operational efficiency and drive business growth for you.

Ease of adoption for organization-wide users

Unlike traditional service desk platform, which needs a deep learning curve for adoption, MS Team Bot for service desk is easy to raise issues. Its chat interface acts as a service desk portal to raise tickets and get real-time help from an agent without continuously logging in and out of the system. It is a universal interface rather than just for agents and facilitates auto-resolutions rapidly and accurately.

Continuous updating of knowledge base content

Traditional service desk incorporates knowledge materials with outdated information and offers no real value to the present-day service desk issues.

An AI-modern service desk keeps updating its knowledge repository and database by learning patterns of unique cases. As a result, employees need not wait for human help as they can easily fetch information from its portal. It is even easier to get knowledge articles and auto-resolve issues when a service desk is integrated with the MS Teams bot.

Real-time employee support

It is proven that the service desk is familiar with more than 80% of repetitive tasks. ML and NLU-based service desk portal fetches real-time and appropriate knowledge base articles relevant to specific service desk issues.

If knowledge articles are inappropriate, MS Teams Bot for the service desk automatically escalates the matter to the live agent. So, employees always get real-time employee support.

Self-service functionality

There is no denying that a modern service desk also comes with a dedicated self-service portal. But, it is pretty difficult for off-site or hybrid employees to connect with the portal, given the lack of easy access to system credentials.

While MS Teams Bot for service desk is a familiar platform for employees 一 no matter whether remote or on-site, they can easily communicate their issues in the chat interface and get solutions rapidly within their portals.

Automated app workflows with service desk integration

MS Teams bot for the service desk can flexibly adapt to any service desk infrastructure without major tweaks on the server-side end. A conversational AI platform, Workativ virtual assistant is easy to build your service desk chatbots for existing or new tools such as ServiceNow, Freshservice, Zendesk, HaloITSM, and many more.

So, leverage the integration and automate app workflows for just any service desk issues.

Accelerated resolution time

MS Team bot integration fits seamlessly into IT service desk settings for ITSM automation, especially as Teams becomes more popular as a preferred route for employee communication. It's a go-to IT and HR channel for workers since it doesn't need them to log into service desk environments or portals. Their queries are auto-resolved in seconds utilizing AI.

Workativ conversational AI is built to reduce MTTR by 5X from hours to seconds.

Elimination of lower-level support tasks through automation

MS Teams Bots for the service desk can assist with lower-lever support tasks to help lessen the strain on IT, admin, and support teams. This is a significant advantage of bots that has become more obvious as many workers have transitioned to remote work. The increased use of Teams has resulted in an overburdening of work for those working in customer service and IT. A "help bot" that can assist with requests addressed to IT is one of the most common bots people like to design.

Many inquiries that come in to help desks aren't actionable troubleshooting concerns. Therefore, help desk services are readily automated, particularly tier-one-level replies. You can have standard answers available 24/7 using cutting-edgeFAQ-based knowledge resources for issues such as,

• Printer issues

• Laptop issues

• Internet issues

When a bot can thoroughly diagnose and resolve an issue for a user, it saves time for IT professionals.

Serving as the perfect support center

Employee productivity has increased dramatically due to the user-friendly interface combining the service desk and Teams. The speed with which difficulties are resolved doubles when Conversational AI, NLU, Cognitive Search, and NLP are used. MS Teams now has an AI-driven workflow automation engine that automates user processes and tasks.

Increase in employee satisfaction and engagement

The ability of Microsoft Teams to modify self-service has been crucial in automating internal services and enhancing service desk productivity. Due to AI-powered auto-resolution, customers have seen an increase in user engagement and a significant drop in tickets because of Teams. What were the results? Employee satisfaction has risen, agent productivity has doubled, and average resolution rates have risen, making Service Desk efficiency a key performance indicator.

• Allow employees to respond to comments on complaints, approval requests, and modifications using actionable alerts in Microsoft Teams.

• Employees can access their pending assignments, the status of their tickets, and business records.

• Agents can book a live chat with an employee from a ticket inside Teams.

• Employee burnout, exhaustion, and churn can be reduced

• Reduce the cost of providing employee assistance at a large scale

• Increase in employee engagement

• Increased employee efficiency, which in turn improves organizational ROI

• Offers personalization and involves a human-centric approach

A service desk serves a broader scope to ramp up operational resiliency for an organization, enabling businesses to handle both help desk and service desk requests at scale. Here are the top use cases for every industry.

MS Teams Chatbot for IT

Workativ conversational AI platform is a powerful MS Teams Bot for the service desk. It helps you augment IT services, which enhances employee productivity and solves more tickets in less time.

Password reset automation

Answer typical IT questions, such as "How do I update the password on my laptop" with password reset automation. Check how it works.

• A user sends out a message in an MS Teams bot chat interface

• The bot asks ‘how can I help you?’

• A user says, ‘I forget my password’

• The bot asks for an email ID

• The bot verifies the email ID in the IAM application and verifies it

• It sends a link to mail to reset the password

• A user updates her password, and it gets updated in the IAM application

• Once the issue is resolved, a close ticket will be created for the issue

Dynamic notification automation

IT functions can be automated, such as delivering outage warnings on Teams, giving asset change notifications, and more.

Proactively notify users on chat to take action at the workplace. Be it updating their passwords, filling surveys, updating OKRs, and personal info, or simply surprising them on their birthdays/anniversaries, etc., dynamic notifications, when automated, alert your employees and urge them to necessary action. Workativ provides effective bot notifications for critical IT issues and prevents outages.

Some other IT use cases include,

• Create tickets for service outages, IT failures, and service outage requests.

• Streamline IT onboarding activities such as requesting specific computers, establishing email services, etc.

MS Teams Chatbot for HR

Automate multiple administrative tasks

Answer questions about leave balances, income taxes, annual vacations, HR regulations, etc.

Say when your employees need to know about their leave balances, it is a lot of manual tasks.

How much vacation time does each employee get each year? More actionable form of requests includes applying for leaves, sending for approvals, etc. Many requests like that require an approval procedure and the use of specific systems your company employs.

You can design an MS Teams Bot for the service desk for leave management automation. Get the bot and link it to HRSM systems like BambooHR and use it as a platform for more straightforward procedures instead of manually doing leave management.

What a tweet by Matt Wade (@thatmattwade) says resonates with Workativ's assistant for HR systems.

“The natural language understanding can know what you mean and put in the request—kick off the system the way it would normally go if you’re in ADP or SAP or some other HR software. The bot can basically be doing all the hand-holding and connection between the services.”

Some other HR use cases include,

• Simplify recruiting and onboarding tasks such as document proofing, and interview scheduling with automation

• Allow workers to request time off, plan meetings, and book travel, among other things.

• Allow workers to request time off, organize meetings, submit approval requests, etc

ChatBot for Business Intelligence (BI)

• Text or multimedia retrieval of needed data from the BI app (reports, graphs, dashboard screenshots, etc.). Ex: Operational expenses in the last business quarter

• Request reports or dashboard links through MS Teams chatbot.

Intranet Chatbot

• Files, papers, and vital information can be retrieved anywhere on the company's internal network.

• Get customized and relevant search results from all internal intranet applications.

Workativ is a no-code interface solution that lets you create sophisticated, intelligent, and responsive conversational chatbots that work in tandem with Microsoft Teams. We offer customization based on your specific needs to improve employee engagement and productivity and ultimately increase ROI without needing a specialized development environment.

Use Workativ to sky-rocket your organizational productivity! To learn more, schedule a demo today.

How does the MS Teams Bot lead to service desk transformation?

MS Teams bot can integrate with service desk platforms and efficiently use automation to streamline IT support workflows for MS Teams. Employees can quickly transition from traditional service desks to modernized service desks, enhancing employee user experience through faster resolution of IT issues.

What benefits does the MS Teams Bot offer regarding service desk transformation?

MS Teams bot can give multiple benefits to service desk users. Employees can automate the resolution of IT issues through self-service capabilities, enable service desk agents to focus on more critical issues, and also foster cross-team collaborations to drive to proactive service desks.

How does the MS Teams Bot drive cultural change within the service desk environment?

The MS Teams bot can foster a cultural change through self-service enablement and empowerment for IT support users and agents. This change encourages teams to reduce common problems autonomously while also improving service desks overall.