Consider a situation where IT support and HR teams spend valuable time resolving employee queries and requests over calls, chats, or emails. Even simple requests, such as a password reset, incident status check, or salary details, consume time.

The result? Lost productivity for the support team, and employees keep waiting for a long time for a resolution. Sometimes, even the response can go wrong due to manual intervention. Picture this–a support agent copy-pasting a troubleshooting guide from the knowledge base in response to a query.

With self-service automation, you can automate repetitive requests and frequently asked questions, avoiding the need for IT support and the HR team to resolve them manually. Additionally, self-service automation enables employees to resolve most queries independently in a DIY(do-it-yourself) mode that gives them a sense of satisfaction.

In this article, we’ll explore self-service automation and learn how you can implement it to automate different workflows.

Self-service is the process of performing actions and resolving queries without the support team's involvement. Self-service automation uses AI/ML tools to automate and streamline processes through integrations and app workflows. Self-service automation helps people complete tasks, solve problems, and boost productivity and efficiency without looking for human intervention. By enabling autonomous resolutions of common issues, automated self-service platforms reduce the dependency on emails and other forms of traditional communication channels to a large extent.

A robust self-service automation enables self-serve options for employees and customers by helping them resolve queries independently without connecting to the support team.

Non-AI employee support, built with a knowledge base, FAQ pages, and community forums, is largely manual. It takes a lot of effort for employees to complete a task, even for a simple query. In most instances, it urges ticket escalation. Unfortunately, agents are busy with tickets, and response is slow. Hence, it needs to be more efficient.

Let’s take a detailed look at the drawbacks of non-AI employee support:

• Manual search is time-consuming: Manually searching the knowledge base for information is time-consuming for the support team and prone to mistakes. Moreover, a scattered knowledge base hampers support.

• Inability to scale productivity: The support team spends valuable time fulfilling repetitive requests. Their productivity is lost in mundane tasks rather than focusing on critical issues. Providing support for hundreds of queries over a traditional chatbot is difficult.

• Non-conversational flow: Communication is not optimized to have a natural conversation flow, which might lead to gaps in data flow and hampers the experience. This leads to longer waiting times and employee frustration.

• Unable to answer all queries: Traditional chatbots are not intelligent enough to handle and respond to all kinds of queries that employees might have, leading to the escalation of tickets. Moreover, it doesn’t integrate well with other apps to execute complex workflows through automation.

Why Gen AI-powered self-service automation is better

To solve the problems caused by non-AI support, you can use Gen AI-powered self-service automation as a Gen AI chatbot. It provides a full-fledged employee experience.

A Gen AI chatbot can understand the intent of a query to resolve it–it understands what to do and how to process the query using NLU and NLP. It also has contextual awareness, which can handle sudden context switching.

Unlike traditional chatbots, Gen AI chatbots allow employees to resolve issues in real time. They can provide precise answers from the knowledge base. Being conversational in nature, they can help answer queries and fulfill requests easily. They can execute various workflows through end-to-end automation.

Here’s an overview of comparisons between traditional chatbots vs. GenAI chatbots:

Traditional chatbots vs. Gen AI chatbots

The comparison table gives enough insights into how AI-powered self-service is efficient and powerful in augmenting the self-service experience and elevating productivity and efficiency.

Self-service automation requires certain features to provide full-fledged employee benefits and workflow automation. When you are looking for a chatbot that provides self-service automation, check if it has the following features:

No-code flexibility: A no-code chatbot builder can help develop different chatbots according to business needs without the involvement of the IT team.

Gen AI-powered responses: Generative answers produced through LLMs or GPT layerings can handle multiple scenarios by fetching data from company repositories. GenAI drives personalizations in responses and amplifies the rate of problem resolutions.

Knowledge management: AI-powered chatbots encompass the knowledge management feature to combine scattered business information in a centralized location. GenAI-powered knowledge management comes with the ability to update its existing content through self-learning from past and ongoing interactions and helps provide relevant information to solve problems at scale. 

Pre-built templates from the marketplace: Pre-built templates for chatbots are convenient for common use cases and get started with minimal effort. It saves time, allows you to create workflows instantly, and helps your employees get real-time assistance autonomously.

App workflow automation: It is critical to have app workflow automation to customize business processes for self-service. Gain a no-code approach to get started quickly and streamline repetitive workflows. Check if you have the flexibility to add your preferred apps from the marketplace and implement workflow automation for several dozen use cases, such as password resets, software upgrades, onboarding, etc.

Live agent handover: GenAI-powered chatbots encompass advanced NLP capabilities to understand the context and intent of a user’s input. So, it is easy for self-service chatbots to understand when to transfer the chat to a live agent. Check if you can access the live agent handover feature for seamless self-service automation. 

Role-based access management: Look for role-based access management features. This is critical to implementing role-based access and distributing responsibilities only to eligible people. With role-based access management, it is easy to ensure data security and privacy by preventing unauthorized access and preserving data integrity through proper security controls.

Enhanced reporting and analytics: Consider having actionable insights and advanced reporting capabilities in your self-service automation tool. A robust tool like Workativ provides comprehensive visualization dashboards to analyze various metrics, such as agent performance and ticket status to name a few, to help derive data-driven decisions and optimize the employee experience.

Dynamic notifications: Leveraging dynamic notifications allows for mitigation of service disruption ahead of time. Prioritize that your self-service automation tools encompass a dynamic notification feature so that you can set up a trigger and send out notifications when something needs immediate action to prevent disruption. Bot notifications are great for reminders to take action and improve productivity. apps 

Self-service automation provides multiple benefits for enterprises and businesses of any size. With the recent advancements in AI, businesses are poised to realize significant benefits from the ROI aspect and the great employee interaction side. Self-service automation bots unlock several benefits for business leaders. Here are the benefits of self-service automation for employee support.  

24/7 real-time employee support: Due to robust knowledge management and generative answers, employees are independent in finding answers to their queries and solving issues autonomously at any time they want to. This has dramatically reduced the need to escalate calls to the service desk. 

Improved ROI and cost-efficiency: Automated self-service improves self-service capabilities by providing domain-specific answers and fulfilling employee questions. As a result, the service desk can easily reduce the volume of tickets to L1 support and improve FCR. Also, due to enhanced productivity and efficiency, businesses can automate responses, which reduces the Mean Time to Response and fosters zero wait time, which is highly beneficial for cost-efficiency. 

Empowering employees: GenAI-powered self-service empowers employees with comprehensive tools to discover knowledge and solve issues independently, helping them increase productivity and be able to work more efficiently rather than waiting for long hours to get agent support. 

Enhanced employee experience:  GenAI-powered self-service can offer consistent experiences by fetching information from a single source of truth, say, one integrated knowledge management tool, which encompasses relevant and accurate data to maintain consistency and relevancy. On top of it, the integration with business systems enables self-service to personalize answers based on employee needs and help resolve problems at scale.

Self-service automation can automate various workflows for business use cases to improve efficiency and productivity by resolving problems at a great speed. Service desk managers can implement various use cases from IT to HR and help their employees resolve routine problems efficiently. Let’s explore different examples of self-service automation across various business functions. 

IT support 

Self-service automation can easily automate common IT support issues employees face, such as password resets, account unlocks, asset management, and user provisioning. These are everyday common issues that automated self-service can automate seamlessly. 

Integrations with ITSM apps such as Jira, Zendesk, Fresh Service, SolarWinds, and ZohoDesk enable the IT support team to implement powerful IT workflow automation that can handle various simple and complex IT workflows.

Using self-service, it is easier to facilitate ticketing automation, troubleshooting, and repetitive IT requests, among others. 

Here’s an example of password reset automation:

HR support 

Self-service automation provides significant advantages in automating HR support issues. While it allows you to auto-resolve frequent employee queries related to salary details and leave policies, your HR teams can automate dozens of common HR processes, such as employee onboarding and offboarding, to save time and focus on critical admin processes.  

Automated self-service tools can integrate with various HR apps, such as BambooHR, Zenefits, Workday, and Zoho People, to execute employee workflows and enable seamless interaction.

Some effective use cases include leave management, updating employee details, employee onboarding, employee training, employee offboarding, and accessing company policies.

Here’s an example of managing complex tax issues:

Customer support 

Self-service automation helps elevate the customer experience by removing the need to send emails, start a chat, or escalate a call to the help desk or service desk. This is highly efficient in boosting agent efficiency and resolving more numbers of issues. 

Some use cases to streamline repetitive customer interactions include return and cancellation, tracking orders, cross-selling and up-selling, filing insurance claims, web check-in, and enquiring product details.

Here is an example of automating customer queries related to order delivery:

How you proceed with building a self-portal depends primarily on its purpose. Let’s explore how to build a self-service portal and examine the steps to develop and deploy it easily.

• Identifying the use cases: Find use cases that need self-service automation such that they solve problems. Determine customer needs and employee roles.

• Gathering data: Obtain enough data from the sales and support teams to help build the workflows for use cases. You can use the past chat history of live agent support

• Building an interface: Start by creating a web portal that provides an interface for support. Then, implement knowledge management. Your portal can list knowledge-based articles if required.

• Choosing the right tools: Choose the right self-service automation tool to help automate your business workflows. For example, you can use the Workativ employee experience platform to automate employee self-service.

• Performing configuration: Configure the tool and interface according to employee needs and required use cases. Also, configure integrations with different apps as well as app workflows.

• Training from data: If you’re implementing an AI-based chatbot with knowledge management, train it using the latest knowledge base.

• Ensuring access control: Implement role-based access and permissions for heightened security.

• Testing the self-service chatbot: Extensively perform usability testing and check the accuracy of the chatbot's responses for different use cases.

• Deploying the chatbot: You can deploy the chatbot in any business communication channel, such as Teams or Slack.

Let’s consider some questions that you need to ask yourself after you implement self-service automation:

• Is your self-service automation tool helpful to end users? Does it help them with their requests?

• If they do find the answers to queries, does it actually help resolve their issues?

• Does your self-service automation fulfill all the use cases that you envision?

You can find answers to these questions through analytics and the chat history of the chatbot you build as a part of self-service automation.

If no is the answer to any of the above questions–it’s time to review.

Here are some possible reasons for the poor implementation of self-service automation:

• Insufficient knowledge coverage

• Difficulty in knowledge discovery

• App workflow not present

• Conversation intent not configured

• Not involving end-users as stakeholders

• Issues related to people change management

• Improper planning of scope and purpose

• Not selecting the right platform or vendor

• Lack of adoption

To help solve these problems, check the following checklist to optimize self-service automation post go-live event. 

The ultimate checklist for optimizing self-service automation

You can use this checklist to continuously optimize the self-service automation you have implemented to reap the maximum benefits and simultaneously cut down on the problems listed in this section.

In this article, you have explored how self-service automation can benefit employees and how you can implement it in your organization. Before starting with self-service automation, you must understand the possible use cases and integrations–this will help you achieve the desired ROI on chatbots.

Workativ provides an employee experience management platform that automates most employee requests and queries. By enabling workflow automation for IT support and HR through integration with various tools, Workativ saves hours of time for the support team while empowering employees to solve routine queries autonomously. 

To build self-service automation for your employees, connect with Workativ to schedule a demo today!

What is the purpose of self-service automation?

Self-service automation enables repetitive tasks and common queries to be automated and provides personalized responses.

How does self-service automation help IT and HR teams?

Automating repetitive IT requests, such as user provisioning and unlocking accounts, enables the IT team to focus on critical issues.

You can automate common employee requests, such as leave requests and salary details, and HR processes, such as training and onboarding. This enables the HR team to work on more productive tasks.

What is customer self-service automation?

Customer self-service automation is the process of automating various queries and requests that customers might have, enabling them to resolve queries independently.

What is an employee self-service portal?

An employee self-service portal provides options for employees to perform actions and ask queries independently. Responses are automated.

How can I implement self-service-based helpdesk automation​?

You can easily implement helpdesk automation for employees using a chatbot. For more information on implementing, check out the points mentioned in the preceding sections.