Zendesk claimed in their report that AI’s transformative effects will be felt widely by 2027. Human agents, IT leaders, and admins will have different roles and responsibilities than they ought to in a traditional setting. For a business, this can mean leaner and more efficient teams that can handle more queries, help free up agents, and save costs.

Additionally, 77% of CX leaders think traditional CX will give in to radically different industry dynamics. It is evident that employee experience can expect this radical shift and tap into the potential of Generative AI to automate routine and even complex tasks, empower human expertise, and boost employee experience.

The bigger picture of Generative AI-powered employee support automation is that it drives cost efficiency and helps optimize IT spending.

Let’s explore how to reduce employee support costs, maximize gains, or improve service desk ROI.

As of May 2024, the shift to hybrid and remote work requires flexible work arrangements. Companies could invest quite a lot in this aspect, such as tools and applications for employee engagement and productivity, but that is not the sole area of IT spending.

The flexible work arrangements also call for seamless employee support, either for remote or hybrid employees. So, whether you want it or not, there is a growing burden of IT spending for service desks. Notably, the CIOs annual budget for IT spending sh

The stats from HDI 2021 are a mental jolt for you as they highlight the pain of expedited service desk costs, which leads to high IT spending. They include,

1. Agent salaries and expenses:

The CIO’s annual budget for service desks is only 5.9%. Unfortunately, 53.6% of the total expenditure on service desk costs is dedicated to agent salaries and benefits. This is not specific to one region; it includes the global service desk ecosystem.

2. Agent refiling costs:

The service desk experience is daunting mainly because it offers zero flexibility and uses traditional tools. Emotional burnout is a very familiar scene, leading to agent attrition and periodic replacements. A single agent hire costs up to $12,000 annually in North America for service desks. Now imagine the figure if you need to hire as many as 2-3 agents to manage rush hours in festive seasons.

3. High cost per ticket:

When supported by traditional methods of operations rather than automation or innovation tools, service desks can spend as much as $75 – $600 per ticket. This happens due to the lack of automated self-service that solves routine problems and prevents ticket escalation to L2 and L3 tiers.

Service desks with traditional systems often experience overspending while managing employee support. However, IT support automation can help decrease ticket costs and improve satisfaction levels for your global employees.

Employee support automation can drive the best value for your service desk operations by cutting costs in many ways. It lays the foundation for employee productivity, efficiency, and improved experience. These are significant components that translate into quantifiable benefits for your bottom-line growth.

However, given the right ROI on your tools, applications, employees, etc., you must revisit your current service desk operations. To accelerate the time it takes to respond to and resolve an issue, ensure the following service desk criteria are effective.

Enhance workflow automation for operational efficiency.

Service desks or IT help desks have 80% of repeatable cases, which primarily include ‘reset passwords’ or ‘unlock accounts.’ To your surprise, these repetitive cases escalate from L1 to L3 due to a lack of relevant and accurate knowledge bases and enough skilled agents. Leveraging IT support automation can help you on a large scale.

• Streamline workflows : With IT support automation, you can utilize GenAI-powered employee support chatbots and AI agents to streamline existing processes.

• Improved auto-resolutions : Generative AI in your IT support helps expedite auto-resolutions of low-complexity tickets.

• High rates of FCR : With immediate access to knowledge bases and real-time context, you can only boost FCR rates in the L1 tier.

IT leaders have already agreed that they have started reaping the benefits of automation for their service desks. Now, it is your turn to leverage IT support automation and improve process efficiency, including cross-functional activities. As a result, you can allow your employees to save time and increase productivity by leveraging 24x7 assistance through self-service platforms.

For instance, Workativ helps automate 80% of repetitive IT support issues with its GenAI-powered chatbots combined with IT workflow automation. Workativ also drives 90% success with FCR by reducing call volumes and emails.

Reduce operating costs with self-service automation.

As discussed in the beginning, IT leaders tend to spend high costs on service desk operations after agent utilization and rehiring. Surprisingly, CIOs or IT managers need help as service desk agents are overburdened with tickets. A routine service desk complaint can cost up to $700 per ticket if escalated to higher tiers.

Conversely, the cost can dramatically decrease when you implement a robust and GenAI-powered chatbot to improve self-service with advanced knowledge articles. McKinsey claims that integrating GenAI into enterprise workflows frees humans from mundane and repetitive tasks with extended automation levels.

The advantages of self-service in service desks make finding information easy for employees and agents, thus speeding up the resolution rates to reduce operating costs.

Lowered cost per contact or CPC:

Self-service provides robust support for employees looking to autonomously resolve their problems by avoiding agents’ help, which is time-consuming and subject to availability.

Since Generative AI improves intent and context detection, self-service improves productivity gains by allowing one to find relevant and domain-specific information to solve a problem instantly. It dramatically reduces costs and limits costs to $0-$10 per ticket from $12-$25.

Improved shift left for service desks:

The key objective of IT support automation is to improve shift left, reduce escalation to higher tiers, and improve first-contact resolutions at the L1 level. With employee IT support automation, the service desks leverage Generative AI, which enhances the relevance and accuracy of knowledge articles and gives context-rich information to employees and agents.

As Generative AI learns from experience and service desk interaction, it can easily understand the need to solve user queries. Or if a question is out of reach, it hands off tickets to the L1 support with complete ticket history that removes the need to repeat the same story, reducing the time and accelerating MTTR.

When it comes to improving shift left and ticket costs, Workativ efficiently manages your service desks using Generative AI chatbots and self-service. With advanced NLP and RAG approaches, employees and agents get 3X productivity boosts by enhancing domain specificity with information, which helps bring down ticket costs.

Optimize resource allocation

IT support automation for your service desk operations ensures you can use Generative AI. Integrating GenAI-powered solutions helps you experiment with massive datasets to improve the power of data analytics or predictive analytics. At times, it enables you to monitor your system performance so that you can make necessary arrangements to keep your systems in proper order during peak seasons.

On the other hand, by leveraging demand forecasting, you can detect the number of agents you may require for a challenging period ahead of time and prepare on-call schedules accordingly. The ahead-of-time resource allocation has many essential benefits for you and your IT teams.

• 24x7 employee support : Predictive analytics ensures the correct number of teams are available for employee support at all times. During rush hours or peak seasons, employees can find critical information from their service desk agents.

• Adoption of leaner service desk management : IT support automation enhances lean management for your service desks. With predictive analytics, you can eliminate the last-minute resource allocation for a sudden spike in agent demands. Demand forecasting helps you allocate only the required agents for projected tasks. As a result, you no longer need to outsource to third-party services and extend agents’ schedules unnecessarily for high pay. Thus, predictive analytics helps you implement a lean strategy for service desks and optimize costs.

Workativ’s data analytics dashboards provide rich information about employee support interaction and usage. This gives you enough flexibility to drive data-driven decisions about resource allocation for critical cases or manage your team efficiently based on different attributes such as critical tickets, repetitive tickets, and issues with high-resolution time.

Improve CSAT/ESAT

IT support automation works towards a bigger goal—improving employee or customer satisfaction. The key is to provide user-friendly tools and applications so that employees and service desk agents spend less time on training yet gain enough knowledge to auto-resolve issues and manage user calls efficiently. IT support automation improves CSAT/ESAT and cost efficiency by offering contextual assistance.

Rich insights for real-time resolutions:

IT support automation provides rich information to instantly solve routine queries by automating mundane and repetitive tasks, which ultimately helps employees improve productivity and drive efficiencies for customer service delivery. Thus, real-time problem resolutions elevate user satisfaction, ensuring you can benefit from employee and customer retention by cutting down on the costs needed for rehiring or marketing initiatives to acquire new customers.

Quick onboarding for service desk agents:

Generative AI or LLM-powered IT support automation empowers agents with the power of AI tools and automation capabilities, cutting on training costs and helping them onboard in fewer times. With service desk retrieving knowledge from LLM-powered data repositories, service desk agents in the L1 tier can easily fetch relevant information to share with users, leverage AI tools to define the meaning of unique queries, craft instant answers, and help solve problems. This also means more tickets can be resolved for $12 instead of $75-$600. While L1 agents are supposed to solve more tickets, L2 and L3 agents can focus more on creative problems and build a more sustainable service desk.

Workativ provides an agent screen known as a shared inbox to make handling user calls much easier and more flexible, giving L1 agents the ability to start instantly without spending much time on employee training yet onboard quickly to help users with their queries.

Agents can ask for instant help from senior IT leaders using mentions (@), retrieve relevant knowledge articles, find previous case history to build context and help decrease resolution time. AI suggestions, AI summaries, and AI-enabled responses improve response time for FCR and create happier users.

The right mix of AI tools and successful implementation effectively drives cost efficiency, cuts costs, and maximizes gains. Workativ obtains industry-long expertise to help IT leaders successfully onboard with the right implementation processes and accelerate fast time to market with IT support automation projects. Workativ helps businesses start with Generative AI tools and chatbots easily without breaking the bank yet reap the benefits of GenAI, which is supposed to add to huge economic boosts.

• Seamless integration with existing tools : Workativ’s conversational AI chatbot facilitates IT support automation for your service desks by allowing you to integrate with existing tools easily. This creates a hassle-free experience for your employees and agents, as they aim to create tickets, track tickets, and solve problems without creating a ticket.

• Ease of creating automation flows : Workativ provides no-code platforms that are handy for getting started with your workflows. Working on your IT support workflows does not require a deep learning curve. Knowledge AI delivers the most convenient way to add your knowledge articles and turn them into ChatGPT-like responses for user queries.

• Omnichannel deployment : Making your employees or agents work seamlessly with the tools you have for your IT support automation gives you the best return. Workativ ensures you allow your employees and agents to seamlessly adopt GenAI-powered chatbots through deployment on MS Teams, Slack, or web widgets for an omnichannel experience, which enhances engagement and speeds up resolutions.

Overall, Workativ facilitates cost efficiency by ensuring your employees and service desk agents maximize the chatbots for IT support and help each other resolve problems efficiently.

IT spending can be overwhelming for service desk leaders because it can fluctuate depending on the volume of tickets, especially during peak seasons. As per Mckinsey, Generative AI has the potential to change the anatomy of work, which means it can augment the current state of human capabilities by automating a large part of particular operations.

With that, Generative AI can improve employee experience and agent productivity through LLM-powered self-service for IT support. Another research says that Generative AI increased issue resolution by 14 percent an hour and reduced the time spent handling an issue by 9 percent.

It also reduced agent attrition and requests to speak to a manager by 25 percent. These are clear benefits of Generative AI, which provides fantastic ROI for your money.

If you also realize the value for your money by reducing IT support automation costs while building happy employees and agents, build your Generative AI solutions for employee support with Workativ. Schedule a demo today.

1. Why does IT support lead to high costs for IT managers?

IT support, mostly built with traditional or legacy systems, lacks the latest technologies or solutions to help employees find information instantly, thus raising ticket volumes to higher tiers. Ticket escalation translates to high costs due to agent involvement and resolution delays.

2. How does IT support automation encourage cost reduction and productivity gains?

By leveraging Generative AI or LLM-powered chat support, service desks can improve knowledge management by enhancing relevancy and accuracy to improve information discovery and auto-resolutions. On the other hand, Generative AI empowers agents to address tickets independently by leveraging AI suggestions or AI responses in real-time. As a result, ticket costs dramatically go down.

3. What is the ROI of IT support automation?

IT support automation delivers significant cost savings when combined with Generative AI capabilities. You derive the best return by optimizing resources appropriately and helping your employees auto-resolve problems in real-time. With that, when your people are happy, they tend to show advocacy, stay longer, and reduce the chances of attrition. It reduces the costs for refilling and outsourcing or extending agent schedules.

4. How does Workativ help drive value for your money with IT support automation?

Workativ improves employee adoption with its omnichannel deployment and empowers agents with its shared screen window. These tools provide a single pane of glass view of support information, thus allowing teams to arrange resources and drive data-driven strategy to solve problems, encouraging cost savings for IT leaders.