How Gen AI Chatbots Overcome Employee IT Support L1 Agent Shortages and Improve Efficiency

Unshared knowledge costs you a significant amount. Employees find themselves stranded when knowledge is scarce for routine tasks such as password reset or account unlock. It stresses your L1 support as self-service makes knowledge discovery feel like finding a needle in a haystack.

Unfortunately, your L1 support the first line of person-to-person contact is less likely to be reliable and helpful. Also, organizations often want to eliminate L1 support for various reasons, forcing L2 to become L1. With L1 support facing shortages in agent counts, you must rethink the role of your self-service, as relying on only a legacy approach can worsen employee experience. You must focus on the relevance, accuracy, and reliability of knowledge in your self-service.

It is also essential to ensure that self-service helps knowledge become easily accessible and shareable for your employees, no matter where they are. This strategy can help your employees proactively manage problems and reduce their reliance on L1 support. In essence, when you struggle to cope with L1 agent shortages, GenAI-based chatbots can help you fill the gaps and manage everyday routine productivity challenges in the workplace. Read on.

Service desks continue to face challenges filling in for L1 support. As the first line of contact to deliver FCR or first-contact resolutions, L1 support plays a significant role in helping employees solve their problems. However, it is a massive pain for service desk managers as L1 support agents are shrinking in number for various reasons —

• High turnover rates : HDI’s old benchmark data for annual agent turnover claimed that the service desk faces 40% of agent turnover annually. The data still holds relevance in the present context. Based on the data, service desk agents can stay for only 2 ½ years, meaning inexperienced agents need to handle large numbers of calls. This translates into extreme workloads for the L1 support agents, making it a short-lived career choice for them.

• Limited automation support : Service desks leverage automation, but it has limited capacity to allow L1 support agents to use appropriate tools to do their best work. The massive workload of repetitive queries significantly impacts them, making service desk work experiences poor.

• Lack of expertise and experience : It is crucial for service desks to onboard skilled L1 agents to handle employee queries efficiently. However, most L1 support agents need training and development to improve their communication, empathy, and active listening skills. Companies struggling to find the right fit must spend money on employee training and development. To guide employees with the best strategies.

• Increased complexity of IT infrastructure : Different kinds of tools are being implemented for hybrid or remote teams. The lack of relevance in self-service can put pressure back on L1 support as employees need help with diverse technical setups for VPN or M365 suites or connectivity issues.

These are ever-evolving scenarios for service desk managers. They struggle to find the right fit for L1 support and allow employees peace of mind. Improving knowledge access is crucial since this is a prevalent challenge and will become stern with time. It is best to consider GenAI-based self-service chatbots for your support needs.

Chatbots are AI-powered. The difference is that they have specific limitations and can only answer predefined queries. Employees tap into inadequate knowledge when they need unique answers and rely on L1 support.

Generative AI chatbots are LLM-powered chatbots designed to craft unique NLP responses for user queries using their training data and previous and ongoing history of user interactions.

GenAI chatbots leverage vast data repositories via LLMs and third-party repositories to generate accurate, relevant, and valuable knowledge for your employees to help them resolve routine queries and improve productivity rates. This perhaps reduces the tickets to service desks for L1 support.

Every company has unique needs to solve workplace productivity issues. So, the one-size-fits-all concept rarely offers domain-specific knowledge to employees. Integration with off-the-shelf GPT-powered chatbots thus makes knowledge hard to find and bombard L1 support with massive volumes of tickets.

Due to the need for adequate L1 agents, the service desk needs help to address issues and help employees get back to work as early as possible. GenAI chatbots eliminate this pressing challenge, reduce the tickets, and transition to zero-touch service desks. It helps self-service become a powerful knowledge house and provides as much support as possible to lower the dependency on L1 support depending on the following attributes—-

• Domain-specific answers are independent of typical search engine results and help solve as many employee queries as possible.

• Knowledge is always fast, accurate, and relevant, which improves veracity and enhances user adoption.

• Autonomous resolutions reduce wait times for L1 support and provide continuous support.

• Service desks can encourage L2, L3, and L4 support to focus on creative challenges and gain experience.

• Self-service applies LLM or GenAI knowledge to meet user queries and solve problems.

Since Generative AI transforms knowledge management, self-service also transforms employee support and eliminates the workload on L1 support.

Knowledge is critical to improving employee productivity and experience. Inaccessible knowledge has a longstanding implication for enterprises. A report by Panopto claims that 60% of employees need help finding information from their colleagues and teams. Surprisingly, delays in knowledge sharing cost companies $40.6 million due to productivity losses annually.

But AI-powered knowledge management unleashes fantastic benefits for your company and employees. Find them below—-.

1. Digital-first employees

AI-powered knowledge management rapidly helps you transition to digital transformation without breaking the bank. As you deploy Generative AI chatbots powered by Workativ Knowledge AI, your employees gain easy access to knowledge and become more empowered to solve their problems and prevent L1 support assistance.

2. Increased agent efficiency

L1 support attrition would come down due to GenAI-powered chatbots, which enable employees to empower themselves and solve their problems. Knowledge AI reduces the mean time to respond (MTTR) for repetitive tasks, thus freeing up L1 support and encouraging them to focus on creative activities.

3. Relevant information

GenAI-powered knowledge ensures that information is relevant and accurate; thus, employees are more in control of solving their problems autonomously. When combined with Knowledge AI, it gives you the benefits of the RAG approach, which brings in the power of LLMs and current knowledge from your enterprises’ systems. This ensures you gain contextual responses and prevent hallucinations to improve response and user interaction.

4. Scalability and cost efficiency

As you expand, your service tickets can grow, too. For the good, Knowledge AI-powered chatbots boost knowledge sharing for self-service and allow employees to solve problems autonomously. It reduces the ticket volumes to service deks and eventually helps save costs.

Robust knowledge management drives employee engagement to solve more support queries in an autonomous way. Even though shortages of L1 support agents are a starking issue, you can balance it with the proper application of GenAI chatbots. It boosts self-service and resolves support problems efficiently.

Self-service needs relevant and accurate knowledge to drive employee engagement and efficiency and manage the shortages of L1 support agents. It is evident that stale or vague knowledge has employees relying more on L1 support for even a very common query. However, making knowledge readily available and relevant makes your self-service powerful and efficient in boosting employee productivity.

Generative AI transforms knowledge management at a large scale and makes resolving issues easy. Knowledge AI aims to enhance knowledge management for employee support and help build robust GenAI chatbots to elevate employee experience, including overcoming the challenges of shortages of L1 support. Want to learn more? Book a demo today.