Cutting Costs, Maximizing Gains: How Employee Support Automation Optimizes IT Spending

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.