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Generative AI

Generative AI Service Desks: Catalysts for Successful Digital Transformation Initiatives

16 Jan 20258 Mins
Deepa Majumder
Deepa Majumder
Senior content writer

S&P Global Market Intelligence, in an interview with CIO on Digital Transformation, has reflected upon the incremental values of a digitally advanced outlook, helping businesses become more intelligent and improve the total experience.

Let’s consider the total experience. This aspect can be expanded into improving customer side experience, employee experience, and above the fold, the business experience by leveraging what is not accessible on the legacy side of the business operations. With reference to businesses becoming more intelligent, the comprehension is simple here 一 to remain competitive.

But how digital transformation helps improve the total experience?

Sheryl Kingston, a research director at one of the parts of SP Global Market Intelligence, explained that digitally advanced companies are better at being proactive in responding to customer inquiries in an average time, ensuring that their customers and employees are happy, gaining operational efficiency, and capturing enhanced marketing ROI than those who delayed digital transformation.

Similar to what Kingston has explained about digital transformation, Generative AI Service Desks help meet those business expectations by aiding digital business leaders to apply hyper-automation to customer service requests and employee productivity, and business processes so that businesses can achieve customer response improvement, expected employee service delivery and experience, and operational resilience and efficiency across all business processes.

Since digital transformation is about shoring up the right technologies and tools to do everything continuously and continuously reinvent and drive organizational growth or competitive strategies, Generative AI service desks aim to become a promising platform for all of these purposes.

With that, considering Generative AI Service Desks bring up the opportunity to respond to technological advancement in the present moment and gain an equal opportunity to re-engineer the existing process and innovate efficient solutions.

The core goal of leveraging GenAI service desks is to adhere to digital transformation initiatives and bring a real impact.

1. What is digital transformation driven by GenAI Service Desks?

Digital transformation refers to moving to an ecosystem that provides the required tools and technologies, especially automated capabilities, to engage with and respond better to customers, support employees by reducing manual involvement in repetitive tasks, streamlining existing workflows, and achieving business results.

An example of a simple form of digital transformation could be moving to an eCommerce platform from an offline business operation and running a business through online selling, digital payments, digital delivery, shipment tracking, digital marketing campaigns, data, and analytics.

Every digital transformation has one core objective embedded in adopting new applications, tools, and technologies, which aims to utilize them in their existing business processes and improve operational efficiency.

Generative AI-powered Service Desks that leverage the properties of deep learning techniques are a new technology addition to digital transformation initiatives, helping enterprises or organizations absorb more sophisticated AI technologies to apply across existing customer service operations, employee empowerment drive, and business growth.

Further to that, Generative AI makes service desks more responsive to customer inquiries, a performance enabler for employees, and helps gain digital transformation goals.

For example, an enterprise without a service desk digitally advanced portfolio can have customers waiting for the right solutions, employees exerting more than expected effort for an L0 or L1 support activities, costing businesses several dollars for each ticket taking more time to get resolved.

With a GenAI-driven service desk, organizations tap into improved business results by resolving user requests in reduced time and offering more help to solve queries in the queue.

2. How do Generative AI service desks relate to digital transformation?

There are three key objectives of every digital transformation initiative in the current scenario.

  • Businesses want to achieve competitive strategies.

  • Business leaders do not want to risk being overcome by competitors.

  • They seek to meet business demands with agility and dedicatedly to build customer experiences similar to startup mindsets and become known as efficient and proactive.

Digital acceleration is paramount to driving this success using tools that are available.

Capturing data for AI is as important today as it was five years ago. However, the Generative AI movement is a totally different game for business leaders, which holds massive potential to bring about successful digital transformation.

Service Desks with the capabilities of Generative Artificial Intelligence can be more of a diligent and powerful tool to empower organizations to respond to customer or user queries more efficiently and solve their problems - a significant business objective for digital transformation that every business leader aims for.

For example, if your current processes are inefficient and do not help you reap benefits as expected, they are in need of transformation and advancement, helping businesses perform more effectively and efficiently.

By enabling business leaders to develop solutions faster for their DevOps teams through faster resolutions of incidents and enablement of customer service delivery, Generative AI service desks represent an essential epitome of fostering foster digital transformation for industries.

3. How Generative AI helps in digital transformation through a reimagined service desk?

The key focus of service desks is to think about service uptime. It means making continuous improvements to the processes to reduce the time to close tickets, make services available, and provide optimal performances to the service desks. An efficient service desk aims to deliver digital customer experiences and ramp up business growth.

This is where Generative Artificial Intelligence comes into the picture, helping service desks adhere to the ITIL 4 framework, which emphasizes reskilling service desk professionals’ performance ability to handle issues effectively and provide more meaningful user or customer support.

The overall essence of this incredible capability of Generative AI service desks could easily contribute to the success of digital transformation for industry leaders in various ways.

Customer service improvement

One of the key areas to drive digital acceleration in a business function is to effectively provide an efficient communication channel to customers and enable them to gain faster resolutions to their problems.

A service desk that ingests deep learning techniques in the form of natural language processing and natural language understanding or large language models that underpin Gen AI is enormously effective in customer sentiment analysis, context detection, and ambiguity reduction through intent analysis. As a result, if there is any noise in the customer responses, the LLM-powered service desk can easily detect it and improve the accuracy and relevancy of responses.

For example, a customer wants to place an order for groceries via a self-service chatbot. At first, he placed an order for a pack of mushrooms. Later, he decided to take it down and instead go for a pack of nuts. An RPA-based self-service chatbot may misunderstand the customer's intent, place both orders and add to customer dissatisfaction.

However, the Generative AI service desk applies advanced natural language understanding to reduce disambiguation and help customers place what they look to do.

Natural language understanding application through LLM-based customer service chatbot

How it is so effortless for the customer to place an order and leverage improved customer experiences.

Other than this, an LLM-powered service desk offers multiple ways to improve customer experiences,

  • GenAI-powered predictive customer interaction channels for personalized customer service

  • Human-like customer service desks offer versatile support for more complex issues with the help of voice bots or chatbots, or AI-empowered agents

  • Self-service bots for average and common customer issues

Enhanced service delivery for employees

Enabling employees to work at their pace and get work done at an expected time is always paramount to a company’s success.

No matter what a company entails ─ product or solution-based. They have one thing in common ─ to remove bottlenecks from their employees’ work processes and help them perform efficiently.

Generative AI Service Desks come in handy to resolve not only common workplace employee issues but also mitigate critical incidents.

Say a common IT issue of account lock or password resets is quite troublesome for employees and eats up a lot of productive time for them as they need to wait for agents to get out of the problem.

account unlock automation for employee productivity improvement

LLM-powered service desks can help automate these specific IT support issues and many other issues. For password resets or account unlock, the GenAI service desk chatbot can help implement autonomous resolutions for employees via a self-service user interaction interface. It allows enterprise systems such as IAM tools or Microsoft Active Directory to integrate with internal ticketing and human resource systems and help regain access to applications effortlessly in just a few clicks and actions.

On the other hand, more critical issues such as IT operations downtime can also be automated using GenAI service desks that efficiently help automate incident response for agents through real-time triage and escalating mitigation efforts at scale.

As a result of faster problem-solving, employees can easily optimize their time and contribute better to application development or product innovation for their organizations.

Better employee experience

user provision automation

Digital transformer leaders can have improved tools and resources available for their employees as they build employee experience with Generative AI service desks.

The first and foremost thing to ramp up employee experience is to make use of self-service functionality.

It is observed in many cases that not just customers want autonomous problem solving, but employees also seek not to wait for agents and want to handle their own problems.

Enterprises that integrate fine-tuned Generative AI models inside their service desks can reap high-yielding benefits through improved employee productivity and engagement.

Generative AI service desks can essentially enhance what can be automated for employees.

Employee experience ramped up through Generative AI NLU-based chatbot

  • Time-consuming tasks such as user provisioning and asset provisioning can be automated through self-service capabilities.

  • On top of it, low-priority IT incidents such as printer issues or damaged laptop monitors can be easily handled via GenAI-powered self-service service desks.

  • On the service desk agent side, agent experiences can be ramped up too. Even with an AIOps service desk, there are fewer opportunities to interact steadily and offer meaningful replies to the users.

GenAI-powered service desks can provide an embedded conversation generation feature to generate responses and replies to the users automatically. This feature is very useful in saving time and resolving issues effectively. By allowing to upload to knowledge bases of the Generative AI model, companies can look to build a domain-specific issue resolution auto-generate chat support for agents and help them offer proactive responses.

Workativ with its LLM-powered conversational AI driven by KnowledgeAI can help enterprises automate and streamline their existing workflows.

Service desk agent flexibility with Generative AI content generation and recommendation features

Helping an agent fetch product details and create an automated response helps the user get a more empathetic response and deliver a better experience.

Enterprise service management through non-technical service delivery

Service desks can also meet the non-technical demand of enterprise service management by facilitating onboarding automation for the human resource department.

Generative AI expands what the current service desk entails to automate HR operations.

Using knowledge bases or guided knowledge resources, a Generative AI model can be built for service desks and allows self-service functionality for new employees for onboarding or other functions.

employee onboarding automation

For employee onboarding automation, an LLM-powered self-service chatbot can help surface key resources and allow access to company policies so that new employees can feel more aware of the company culture. Another way is to have new employees perform document processing in an automated way. Other than this, HR can send out greetings and best wishes to the new employee as soon as he/she sits at their desk and make them feel engaged.

Effective knowledge management

Conforming to ITIL 4 concepts means maintaining a comprehensive knowledge base or guided knowledge such as FAQs, How-tos, or other essential documents that aim at reducing email or phone call communications for ticket resolutions and helping self-service evolve at scale.

The Generative Artificial Intelligence Service desk help eliminate the challenge of creating and maintaining updated knowledge bases.

continuous knowledge management with Generative AI for service desks-driven digital transformation

With the help of subject matter experts in the initial stage, content writers can steadily draft knowledge bases and get them reviewed by SMEs. This reduces the time to create a draft and makes them available for internal or external users.

As a result, users can individually gain self-service capability and resolve their issues by reducing email or phone call interactions and helping organizations save on operational costs.

Another effective advantage of IT service desks powered by Generative AI is that agents can use incident logs, historical data, and analytics to decipher inappropriate email incident responses and resolve them effectively.

4. Challenges in digital transformation with GenAI service desks

Digital transformation driven by Generative AI service desks gains success for businesses when it delivers expected business results for specific business functions.

The obstacles are the limitations of Generative AI, including factual inaccuracies due to billions of training data fed to foundational or fine-tuned models.

Given Generative AI develops its capability to generate responses or innovative content based on unsupervised learning, chances are highly likely to surface biased responses to users in certain circumstances or lead to hallucinations that can create misinformation and impact user experience.

In addition to this, unsupervised training can also result in security breaches.

Unfortunately, these LLM models can degrade service delivery when used with service desks, making adoption challenging for enterprise users.

5. How to navigate the challenges of the GenAI service desk for digital transformation?

In a 2023 study conducted by the IBM Institute of Business Value, 75% of CEOs surveyed believed that Generative AI can give organizations a competitive advantage when they apply Generative AI to their business processes.

What are the best ways to apply Generative AI to your service desks that do not create bias or provide accurate responses?

overcoming Generative AI challenges and maximizing its benefits

Human oversight for model training

Organizations must have stringent human supervision during model training if this criterion translates to Generative AI service desks for digital transformation. By ensuring humans are in the loop during model learning and training, leaders can remove bias from the training data and only provide clean and safe data for enterprise use cases across service desks.

Cross-departmental collaborations

Digital transformer leaders, including CEOs, CIOs, Chief Digital Officers (CDOs), CHROs, or other team members such as data analysts or specialized AI consultants, must come together and contribute according to their specialization and work as per policy.

One of the significant responsibilities of these teams is to capture proprietary data and work around different responsibilities to help build a sanitized Generative AI model for service desks.

Build vs. buy 一 reevaluating business needs

You need to evaluate the build vs. buy aspect of leveraging Generative AI service desks. Whether you look to customize foundational models or fine-tune ready-to-use large language models for common use cases, consider your budget on the bottom line.

Fine-tuned or custom models are suitable for enterprises with in-house teams and massive resources to handle computational expenses or take care of only the expenses of the data analysts team - either way

Change management and adoption

Agile in-house solution development significantly helps build a successful digital transformation project compared to waterfall development.

A reactive development process provides no opportunity to review and make changes. As a result, a solution that impacts adoption and adherence to change management needs to be improved all over again.

If an in-house development solution is not your objective, no-code platforms for service desk management could be a way for fast time to market, yet leverage all the benefits of Generative AI and help your people comply with change management and higher adoption.

Workativ’s conversational AI platform is a no-code platform that syncs with familiar collaboration channels and helps increase adoption rates.

6. Key trends in digital transformation for GenAI Service Desks

IDC report on digital transformation, Generative AI service desk is a catalyst

The ̌2023 Insight Intelligent Technology report by IDC stated that 82% of organizations agree that companies must invest in digital transformation or be left behind.

When it comes to Generative AI, the emergent technology is demonstrating huge potential to transform every industry. The ability to summarize, consolidate, create new and innovative content such as images, texts, codes, etc., and review, gives industry leaders a massive opportunity to apply a wide variety of use cases to streamline their processes and achieve business success.

  • The economic potential of generative AI: The next productivity frontier by McKinsey reported that 75% of values that Generative AI use cases will create include various business functions, such as research and development, software engineering, customer operations (employee support too), and marketing and sales.

  • With the ability to understand natural language, GenAI can better understand user queries and augment knowledge workers’ performance by automating about 60-70% of workers’ time dedicated to accomplishing tasks.

These are missed opportunities for digital transformation leaders. With service desks managing all of these business aspects, GenAI could give them the advantage of winning over existing challenges and maximizing digital transformation initiatives.

7. Workativ fosters digital transformation via GenAI service desks

Smal-scale enterprises or small businesses with no option to build in-house solutions can easily gain an opportunity to foster digital transformation for their business processes using service desk chatbot automation solutions.

Workativ offers a no-code service desk chatbot with an underlying infrastructure to build Generative AI capabilities inside the platform and facilitates the automation of service desks for common IT or HR issues.

  • Adoption and change management is convenient for enterprise leaders as they no longer need to spend on employee training and upskilling, for they can build easy-to-use service desk chatbot solutions for Slack or MS Teams.

  • Users are more at comfort space to handle their queries using self-service autonomous functionalities, which reduces workloads for IT operations as well as HR operations.

  • IT incidents are easy to mitigate with real-time agent service delivery.

8. Advantages of Workativ for digital transformation through GenAI Service Desks

Workativ ensures industry leaders can draw maximum value from GenAI and the conversational AI chatbot platform they build for transforming service desks and gaining success for digital acceleration.

Generative AI service desks-led digital transformation benefits for enterprise leaders

The advantages Workativ service desk chatbot provides complement your business objectives and help you remain competitive in the age of hyper-automation brought to the front by Generative AI.

Here are the advantages of the Workativ service desk chatbot powered by GenAI:

  • Faster MTTR - Users can lower 5X MTTR by automating service desk issues through self-serve functionality, eliminating the noise from emails or phone calls.

  • Cost savings - Faster resolutions through the self-service feature can save agents time and reduce over-utilization of their time, hence saving costs for leaders.

  • User experience - Employees can independently handle common issues without involving agents or waiting long in the queue.

9. Conclusion

Digital transformation can make major changes to how businesses work and give leaders a better way to succeed in their respective business profiles.

Employee engagement is a top priority for every business because a stable and knowledgeable workforce can build a better customer experience and drive business success.

GenAI service desks ramp up employee productivity while helping align rightly with digital transformation initiatives.

If you look to build a rapid GenAI solution for your service desk and drive digital transformation, look no further than Workativ. Schedule a demo today.

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About the Author

Deepa Majumder

Deepa Majumder

Senior content writer

Deepa Majumder is a writer who nails the art of crafting bespoke thought leadership articles to help business leaders tap into rich insights in their journey of organization-wide digital transformation. Over the years, she has dedicatedly engaged herself in the process of continuous learning and development across business continuity management and organizational resilience.

Her pieces intricately highlight the best ways to transform employee and customer experience. When not writing, she spends time on leisure activities.

Deepa Majumder

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