If you are a small company, it is absolutely fine that you are not switching to modern service desk software. The problem arises when you grow, and scaling with the traditional IT support desk seems challenging. Outsourcing managed services may look relieving, but they come with their own complexities, including security challenges, staffing issues, and real-time support, among others.

To prevent repetitive manual IT ticket handling and minimize costly errors, service desk automation keeps you ahead of challenges and provides rapid L1 support capability at scale.

Simply put, IT service desk automation makes repetitive tasks faster to resolve cost-efficiently and with less dependency on your dedicated support team

Let’s learn how to empower and boost the IT support team’s efficiency using an automated service desk. Also above the cut, in this blog, we will take you through how you can maximize automation to drive cost efficiency and reimagine your IT support.

IT service desk automation uses AI and machine learning algorithms to automate the most repetitive, mundane, error-prone, and time-consuming workflows that IT agents handle daily.

By leveraging IT service desk automation, users can use many intelligent features, such as app workflows, self-service capabilities, ticket escalation, and real-time alerting, to streamline and manage IT tickets more efficiently.

McKinsey’s State of AI report reveals the adoption of AI jumped to 72% from just 50% in the year 2023. This indicates that organizations are increasingly using the power of AI for efficient business functions.

Surprisingly, AI and automation technologies are contributing45% of the global economy worth $15.7 trillion of value,according to PwC’s Global Artificial Intelligence Study.

Automation does not mean you have to shore up huge investments to automate your service desk. Many businesses are turning to chatbots to reimagine their IT support spectrum.

Conversational AI chatbots can be as easy as ABC to deploy. Also, you can harness the power of natural language processing and natural language understanding that makes it easy to customize your business rules and logic for workflow automations. No matter which vertical you operate in, chatbots can bring transformational benefits to your IT support agents and customer service in no time.

Based on your IT support infrastructure and operational processes, you can unlock many possibilities for automating your service desk, from answering repetitive queries, monitoring SLA, ticket triaging, and routing to automating employee onboarding and offboarding processes.

Here, we've covered 7 service desk automation ideas and how you can implement them. Let's dive in: 

Real-time knowledge sharing for repetitive issues

Every day, your IT support agents are overburdened with repetitive and tiring questions. Queries can include,

• How to reset password for XYZ apps?

• How to unlock my device?

• How to unlock my application?

• What is the process for provisioning a new asset?

• How can I solve printer or desktop issues?

• How long does it take a network to get back to normal operations?

And many more …

The best way to reduce IT support agent fatigue is by automating responses via chatbot integration inside your Slack or Teams. For example,

Steps to automate knowledge sharing for repetitive queries: 

• Build your knowledge base on third-party apps such as Zendesk or HubSpot

• Use API integration to connect the app with your chatbot and create workflow automation

• Embed the chatbot inside the employee communication channel

• Type a specific keyword inside the chat box, and press enter

• Appropriate URLs related to queries will appear

• Click the URL and you will be redirected to the resource page to solve your problem

A conversational AI assistant is time-efficient that saves time for both your IT support and employees.

Provide omnichannel support

You can allow your employees to create a ticket within their favorite chat channel i.e. Slack, in case the issue is tough to solve through DIY attempts. Low-code chatbot AI platform makes your job easy by enabling your team to create a ticket for ITSM tools without leaving their apps.

Steps to set up omnichannel support workflow: 

• Create workflows for possible incidents for ITSM tools like ServiceNow or JiraServiceDesk in your chatbot

• Users can create a ticket within Slack or Teams

• An on-call schedule will receive a notification via a bot within your chat

• Users can get agent help to handle complex issues like bug attacks or corrupted files

• Once resolved, the status of the incident will escalate in your channel through ‘notification’ automation

Automate ticket triaging and routing

On an average day, the service desk receives hundreds of queries. It becomes challenging for agents to prioritize which issues to address first and assign the right agent.

Service desk automation makes it easier by assessing and arranging queries based on their level of urgency and automatically assigning them to agents based on their skills and expertise to resolve such queries.  

Here’s how you can automate ticket triaging and routing: 

• Use if/then conditions to escalate issues to the experts

• Create a trigger for agent handover for specific issues

• As soon as a ticket is created, multiple option cards will appear in the bot

• Choose an agent and the agent will be notified and added to the conversation

• Interact and provide more context to the agent

• Get help and resolve this quickly

• Get the status of the ticket in the channel raised in your ITSM platform

• Close tickets

Automate SLA monitoring and compliance

Service desk automation frees your team to focus on more critical business operations. Service level agreement is one crucial aspect for stakeholders to maintain compliance with regulations and keep pace with changing business norms.

How to automate SLA monitoring and compliance: 

• Set alerts using app triggers

• Choose your condition (i.e. send an alert if security is compromised)

• Get an appropriate team member to take action

• Connect with vendors and resolve

• Close the conversation in your conversation channel

Automate agent feedback

Call handles and the volume of tickets may be a reason that takes a toll on your agent’s health. An automated service desk helps you capture agent feedback and streamline your operations so agents can prevent the fatigue that comes with first contact resolution (FCR) management. 

As you leverage an automated service desk, it is easier to add a human touch to the employee experience and bolster your IT service desk. Prefer automating agent feedback or agent wellness surveys twice a year.

Here’s how you can automate agent feedback: 

• Create automation for agent feedback

• Choose your dialog (for example, you can ask for training preferences, career pathing, and coaching)

• Create conditions and connect apps to send and receive a response

• Trigger alert to request feedback submission

Automate ticket responses

When users submit a query, they expect an instant response acknowledging their query and resolution timeframe. But, when support agents manually handle responses to a large volume of tickets, it becomes challenging to reply instantly. This makes your users feel neglected, affecting the overall user experience. 

Automation of the service desk allows you to set personalized automated responses for each query stage. Regularly updating your users shows how dedicated you are in helping them and improves satisfaction. Here’s how you can automate ticket responses: 

• Create a templated response for each stage of the query, such as submission of the query, a message for updating progress, and a message upon successful resolution.

• You can configure the service desk platform to add a personalized touch to each message with the user name, ticket ID, and issue summary. 

Automate employee onboarding and offboarding

For onboarding new hires, service desk agents are responsible for creating new accounts, providing access to documents, and setting up assets. Similarly, for offboarding employees, the agents are responsible for deactivating accounts, deprovisioning of assets, performing security checks, and transferring data.

You can automate these tasks through service desk automation for smoother execution and to free up service desk agents to focus on solving important issues.

Steps to automate employee onboarding and offboarding processes: 

• Create specific workflows to onboard new hires, such as account activation, email creation, software installation, etc. 

• Create workflows for offboarding employees, such as data backup, deactivating accounts, and running security checks.

• You can automate the tracking of company assets, such as laptops, keyboard, mouse, etc.

Here are some reasons why you should automate your service desk.

Maintain your IT budget

Automated service desk automation you nurture through conversational AI chatbot integration prevents you from going over budget for IT resources.

• Save costs by avoiding in-house development of chatbots.

• Eliminate additional costs associated with legacy infrastructure, such as software upgrades, maintenance, and the risk of data loss.

• Avoid hidden costs related to the total cost of ownership by eliminating the burden of employee workloads, additional training, and periodic downtime.

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Provide better employee engagement and satisfaction

When not automated, the service desk can add to friction and dissatisfaction for your IT support employees. 

As a result, agent turnover is inevitable if you try to maintain a high FCR. A study shows that when agent involvement approaches 70% - 80% for FCT, it increases agent fatigue and burnout, leading to agent turnover, which inadvertently adds more hiring, onboarding, and training costs.

IT service desk automation can quickly reduce email and call volumes and allow your team to resolve issues more effectively.

For example, using the conversational AI chatbot platform Workativ Assistant can dramatically help you reduce call volumes by 40% in the first year of deployment. Much to your surprise, Workative Assistant offers instant auto-resolution to reduce 90% of first contact resolution. On the other hand, you can easily achieve a 20% Y-O-Y call reduction.

Increase employee productivity

The best thing about a conversational AI chatbot-powered service desk is that you can offer your employees self-service problem-solving capabilities. This means your employees gain more flexibility to resolve DIY issues faster, reducing agent involvement.

• Employees need not toggle between apps to get IT support help

• Users get assistance through their familiar chat channels like Teams and Slack through automated response

It means your IT support team no longer needs to be involved in labor-intensive work. Instead, they can save time and be relaxed.

Surprisingly, Workativ Assitant can help you reduce service desk labor by 20%-30% through automation within the first year of chatbot deployment.

Enhance customer satisfaction

AI-powered chatbot with auto-resolution can help your IT support scale their productivity. As a result, you can experience less downtime, faster resolution of IT incidents, and rapid restoration of operations. In addition, it becomes easy for your employees to increase customer service.

• Your team across various departments can perform at scale and respond to customers quickly

• Product development will happen at a rapid space Customers can get service on time

• Customers can get service on time

If you seek to elevate your customer experience, you must reduce mean time to resolution to seconds. Workativ Assistant empowers your IT support team to achieve 5X lower MTTR. In addition, Workativ also allows you to improve your CSAT by 4 points.

Drive data-driven decision making

All IT support interactions are captured in the dashboard. It is the simplest way to monitor the number of call volumes, and agent interactions and categorize incidents that may require enhanced IT support. By leveraging actionable insights through a chatbot platform embedded in your service desk, you can make a data-driven decision, improve performance, and move from a reactive to a proactive approach in managing a better IT support team and providing a personalized agent experience.

So far, we’ve discussed service desk automation, its use cases, and its benefits. Now, you must be wondering how exactly you can get the maximum benefits while automating processes at your service desk.

We’ve compiled 6 best practices you can follow while automating the service desk through chatbot integration:

Measure what you want to achieve

It's true that chatbots help reduce costs and improve ROI. But customer success also matters. Make sure your chatbot initiative produces greater customer-oriented results.

Seek cross-organization inputs

Service desk automation tends to transform every department in your organization. Make sure you get feedback on use cases every department may seek. Have someone monitor the process and report to the CIO.

Involve the service desk in designing initial workflow automation

Categorize workflow automation based on ticket volumes and the type of incident requests your IT support team receives daily. Your IT team can help you build user-friendly templates, set the intent for chat interaction, and more.

Reduce agent workload

Know how to take control of similar incident handling, categorize incidents, and manage escalation through chatbot app workflow automation to free up agents for solving complex issues.

Optimize your IT budget

Ensure your budget allocation provides you with better optimization capability that helps you choose tools and features to accomplish service desk automation.

Leverage free trials

Make use of free trials to experiment how you can leverage the tools and features to help bring automation to your legacy service desk. For example. Workativ offers an excellent opportunity to try out AI conversational chatbot platform to build your app workflows and automate service desk operations.

Automation is more than nice to have. Instead, it is essential to transform your service desk operations. Most CIOs may stick with a reactive approach, thinking adopting an automated service desk may cost them huge.

But, if you evaluate your ongoing expenses around call costs, growing IT burden on security patches and software maintenance, agent turnover rate, and not to mention total cost of ownership, you tend to spend more on your CAPEX and OPEX.

In times of volatile economics, Workativ Assistant offers a cost-effective solution that enables you to leverage its low-code platform to get started with your service desk automation project in a few weeks.

Workativ competitive advantage

The Workativ low-code platform has extensive features to help you automate your IT support activities. Features include,

• Chatbot builder

• FAQ bot builder

• Chatbot automation

• Chatbot approvals

• Live agent handover

• Chatbot marketplace

• Chatbot analytics and performance

When you integrate Workativ Assistant with your service desk, you can leverage extensive benefits to transform your service desk.

• Automate 60% of tickets before it hits your Service Desk

• Prevent back-and-forth login and logout of your ITSM tools by unifying platform functionalities inside your chatbot

• Get AI and app workflow automation with Workativ Assistant, which you otherwise miss out on with most ITSM tools

• Instantly get chatbot feature, which is accessible in ITSM tools through expensive pro plans only

• Automate 80% of repetitive IT support issues

• Reduce inquiries by 40% the in first year and achieve YoY 20% increase in call reduction

• Available in a SaaS-based model, so do not bother with upfront costs

Want to know how you can automate your service desk with Workativ Assistant? Schedule a free demo today

What is service desk automation?

Service desk automation refers to using AI and machine learning algorithms to automate the most repetitive, error-prone, and time-consuming workflows that IT agents handle daily.

By leveraging IT service desk automation, users can use many intelligent features, such as app workflows, self-service capabilities, ticket escalation, auto-resolution of queries, and real-time alerting, to streamline and manage IT tickets more efficiently.

What impact does automation have on a service desk?

Automating the service desk frees agents from repetitive tasks, helps provide multichannel support, prioritizes tickets and assigns them to the right agents, monitors SLA and compliance, and automates ticket responses and employee onboarding and offboarding processes. 

This enhances employee and customer satisfaction, increases productivity, enables data-driven decision-making, saves costs, and drives operational efficiency.

What are the benefits of service automation?

Here are the benefits of service desk automation:

• Enhanced employee and satisfaction

• Increased productivity

• Faster resolution of queries

• Improved decision making

• Reduced organizational costs

• Streamlined operations