Service desk chatbots are an advanced AI-based self-service solution for ITSM teams to help expedite ticket resolutions for employee support. However, the basic ticketing system limits benefits such as automation, workflow management, and self-service capabilities.AI-powered service desk assistants or chatbots deliver more than CIOs or IT leaders could expect from their digital transformation objectives in ITSM.

Read on to learn about service desk chatbots and business benefits.

A service desk chatbot is a computer program that acts as a single point of contact to manage ITSM queries and resolve them for ultimate employee support.

A chatbot for the service desk works in a certain way to deliver real-time information and help users, unlike the traditional or basic IT ticketing system.

• Service desk chatbot improves intent recognition and contextual awareness with conversational AI capabilities

• It is fast and straightforward to eliminate confusion as and when conversation volume scales by leveraging NLP and NPU

• Users can gain the ability to leverage accurate answers within their familiar business comms tools such as Slack or MS Teams.

• No extra effort is required for users to toggle between an ITSM platform and other internal IT tools.

• IT help desk chatbot unifies all tools and simplifies ticket handling and resolutions without the users leaving their comms tools.

In the current scenario, organizations face ticket-handling challenges. This is mainly because of a massive shift in work culture; however, the existing challenge continues to impact user experience.

Current work culture challenges

According to the State of Hybrid Work in IT: A Trend Report, hybrid and remote work options significantly strain IT departments.

• Leaders need to keep pace with delivering hybrid work questions to support changes

• Most respondents surveyed agreed that as much as 54% of service desk support is maintained

• 35% of respondents agreed to meet the needs of hybrid work

However, as per the survey report, the non-traditional models seek more attention, tools, and leadership from their organizations to perform from anywhere and anytime successfully.

Traditional service desk challenges

Addressing IT support problems using traditional service desk chatbot has many downsides—

IT support tracking via emails

• As per a survey by TechValidate, 43% of IT help desks track requests or tickets via email.

• Most tickets land up in inboxes and often lose visibility

• Wait time gradually increases for users for manual interventions

• Organizations do not possess the necessary communication channels for IT support

Requests tracked through phone calls

• Ticket handling costs increase when IT support receives phone calls to address tickets.

• It gets tougher to track and sift through requests with phone calls

• Phone calls are time-consuming, causing long queues

• The resolution is lengthy for the IT support desk

Less visibility into requests

• According to the global IT research and advisory firm Info-Tech Research, IT leaders are not able to harness the essential information required to increase visibility across service desk performance due to their continual reliance on traditional metrics, causing increased user dissatisfaction.

• A lack of visibility restricts improvement capacity for tickets that are repetitive and recurring

• Root cause issues remain unresolved, taking up more time to resolve the same issues over and over again

• As time increases with a ticket resolution, money also goes wasted in addressing the repetitive issues

• Issues that can be solved using FAQ-based resources increasingly show up for help desk service

• The service desk addresses these over and over again

• Most common issues involve

• Password resets

• Account unlock

• Restore network issues

• Handle printer issues

• Device provisioning

• These issues take up 20-50% of help desk calls to resolve

High costs to handle tickets

Ticket handling costs also increase with time.

Say a company with 3000 employees receives about 5000 tickets monthly.

For L1 support, per ticket costs $15. So, the monthly cost is $45,000. Based on the calculation, the price also increases with support escalation.

Back-and-forth sign-ins in ITSM tools

Modernized ITSM systems come with sophisticated automation tools and a built-in chatbot, so IT help desk communications can be seamless. Some limitations, however, impact user experience.

• What about those overwhelming volumes of tickets?

• Will it be easy to repeatedly log in and out of the tool to address the issues in real-time?

• What if your team member works off-site and needs to log an issue instantly when credentials are inaccessible?

A chatbot for the IT service desk that syncs with your business comms channels seamlessly works 24x7 to provide help.

Business leaders can leverage help desk chatbots to design and customize workflows for their business needs. Every organization can implement various use cases to manage repetitive and time-consuming tasks.

Helpdesk chatbots to help with ticket lifecycle management

Although a modern ITSM tool involves several manual steps, ticket lifecycle management needs active monitoring.

An IT help desk chatbot allows you tocreate app workflows and ticket lifecycle management automation within your communication channels, such as Slack or Teams.

• If your employee creates a ticket to fix a printer issue, she can do it right within Slack or Teams.

• She gets the ticket details instantly in her channel or the IT help desk bot.

• An approver gets the details from the same channel.

• Requests can be resolved without leaving the channel.

• Confirmation of a ‘close ticket’ gets landed in the channel.

An ITSM leader can easily obtain a complete view of the ticket lifecycle from initiation to completion with full details from the requester and approver. At the same time, complete visibility into the ticket lifecycle helps track issues and prepare solutions more flexibly.

Rapid incident management with an IT help desk chatbot

Auto-resolutions speed up ticket deflection rates and help resolve issues at scale. You can easily create knowledgebase articles with historical data from your service desk and enable self-service automation to provide solutions when needed. As a result, you allow your employees to handle routine tasks such as password resets, printer troubleshooting, device provisioning, or simple account unlocking.

Let’s take an example of creating app workflow automation for account unlock.

• Create a workflow to design your step-by-step conversations

• Use a template to ask for an email address from an employee

• Verify employee details in Identity and Access Management (IAM) application

• Send and verify OTP via a message service app

• Unlock employee accounts in IAM apps such as AuthO, OneLogin, MS Azure AD, etc

• Create a ticket in the resolved state for “unlock account request”

Instant agent escalation with a service desk chatbot

A live agent handover is critical to satisfying your employees and transforming their experiences. If a service desk issue is beyond the DIY capacity, a live agent handover automation seamlessly solves a requester’s problem in real-time without repeatedly explaining the history.

Workativ Assistant is a conversational AI platform that helps IT leaders easily create agent handover automation. It just takes a few simple steps to create workflows for an agent bot and deploy them to MS Teams or Slack.

With Workativ Assitant, you can use the chatbot builder. Choose agent handover and set your workflow automation by creating your conversation.

Automate notifications for your service desk chatbot

By enabling organizations to create a bot notification mechanismfor the service desk chatbot, IT leaders can take self-healing capabilities to the next level. It is usual for organizations to take care of various workplace policies, and an automated notification helps keep pace with compliance for such policies.

For example,

• if you have an influx of IT tools, keeping an eye on these tools to maintain SLAs is mandatory. An automated notification bot can notify your IT team to keep these tools up to date and upgrade as they approach expiry or end of life.

• Not every employee's software expires at the same time. Bot notifications help keep every employee informed of system requirements and updated about when to reset system passwords.

• Bot notifications enable organizations to carry out surveys to collect feedback about workplace culture, which further helps build workplace harmony and employee empathy.

• Also, it is easy to celebrate special moments like work anniversaries or employees' birthdays. This is a better way to improve employee engagement and retention, as these warm gestures give employees a sense of value.

Using the virtual assistant platform from Wokativ, you can set up notifications using app triggers that can nudge bots to take action for a specific event in the apps.

Leveraging a service desk chatbot delivers many benefits.

Employees love auto-resolutions

A service desk chatbot seamlessly sits with your business communication channels, such as Slack or Teams, removing the friction between user conversations and the IT help desk.

This helps improve auto-resolution through app workflow automation and thus enhances employee experience.

Time-saving for critical issues

Auto-resolutions through self-service capabilities quickly solve 80% of repetitive IT support tasks. So, business leaders can save time and dedicate their efforts to solving more critical and complex IT issues.

Cost-efficiency

With a traditional service desk, it takes organizations $45,000 to solve L1 support issues monthly (this is in reference to an organization with 3000 employees). However, with a service desk chatbot automation, this monthly cost comes down to $21,000 per month.

In addition, chatbot automation for the IT help desk drives down the cost of ticket handling. No matter the business size, it reduces costs from $25 to less than $2 for L1 support.

24x7 employee support availability

When you start embracing hybrid and remote work culture, self-service-level solutions with a service desk chatbot provide 24x7 accessibility to information and help. This is effective when you need to increase your employees' adaptability to change management. Your IT support can handle a backlog of overwhelming IT requests.

Integrations with multiple ITSM tools

A service desk chatbot automation effortlessly works with any ITSM tools and their infrastructure. If you want to embrace digital transformation, you no longer need to spend money separately to buy a new license. An IT helpdesk chatbot from Workativ Assistant allows seamless integration with as many ITSM tools as required and creates your app workflows and automation.

Service desk automation is necessary rather than a nice-to-have drive. So, consider some essential facts when addressing the growing IT support challenges with chatbot automations.

Know your goals: Your automation project might have multiple business objectives. Decide what you want to accomplish 一 user experience, cost efficiency, and other business results.

Audit IT support history to create your workflows: Connect with your IT support team and analyze the IT requests your team receives daily. Prioritize workflows and create app workflow automation for repetitive processes.

Start small with the most relevant IT issues: Create your workflow automation for the most pertinent issues. Track the performance, customize, and improve the process. If you are successful in your attempt, launch workflow automation for other IT processes, too.

Workativ offers a conversational AI chatbot platform to help you build your personalized service desk chatbot. With Workativ, leveraging all the capabilities to build a service desk chatbot and integrating it with your communication channels like Slack or Microsoft Teams is easier.

• Create your chatbot without writing a single line of code

• Just play around with your chatbot with a drag-and-drop interface

• Reduce call volumes by 40% in the first year with your IT support

• Get significant labor reduction with Workativ service desk chatbot by 20-30% in 1st year

• Reduce the need to opt for an enterprise package for ServiceNow to avail chatbot facility

• Achieve 5X lower MTTR for repeated service desk issues

To learn more about how Workativ can unleash immense benefits for your IT support team through its service desk chatbot automation, schedule a demo today.

1. Can you drive maximum benefits with a traditional chatbot?

Traditional chatbots limit automation and seem rudimentary. They are mainly rule-based or keyword-based. When a unique question arises, the conventional chatbot forwards the same repetitive answers, offering no real help or employee support.

2. Does a traditional chatbot meet service desk objectives?

Service desks receive differing employee requests, which can turn overwhelming for traditional service desk chatbots. As a result, simple employee requests pile up in the queue for agents, eventually increasing the resolution time.

3. What is a service desk chatbot automation?

A service desk chatbot with AI/ML capabilities works as a single point of contact to automate mundane workflows and help resolve employee service requests for ITSM.

4. How does a service desk chatbot work?

An AI-powered chatbot provides exceptional automation capabilities that help improve intent and context understanding using NLP and NLU. Implementing self-service and automating employee support requests for service desks is the best approach.

5. What routine employee support tasks does a service desk chatbot enable?

A service desk chatbot uses automation to streamline routine tasks such as password resets, account unlocks, software installs, user provisions, etc.