Enterprise service management is a broad niche to maintain, with all critical operations tied together across the business process. It is not all about taking care of IT infrastructure only. Instead, it goes beyond simple IT service management and encompasses all critical business areas like HR operations, facilities, customers, supply chains, and other departments.

In enterprises, the employee size is enormous, and operation processes are complex, so cost-effectiveness is a top priority. The downside is not every enterprise leverages sophisticated software tools and capabilities to derive real results, i.e., cost efficiency, operational resilience, and efficiency.

An enterprise service desk is instrumental in streamlining large business operations and offering capabilities to optimize employee and customer experience.

To further define it more clearly, an enterprise service desk is an extension of what we know as ITSM with the best practices derived from ITIL infrastructure. Just as IT services streamline its operations for IT resources, the enterprise service desk aims at making every work process seamless and more rewarding for end-users at every touch point.

Below, we will uncover the best side of an enterprise service desk and ways to optimize this tool to unleash ultimate benefits that ramp up your operational efficiency and save you operating costs.

According to Forrester Director Charles Betz, “an enterprise service desk translates the common service desk into a robust system. It helps formalize existing requestable services and workflows (IT and non-IT) through automated workflows built on a low-code or no-code technology platform is an enterprise service desk.”

For example, ServiceNow, BMC, Jira, Freshdesk, Ivanti, Solarwinds, and more tools offer integrations and capabilities to help with incident management with end-to-end ticket lifecycle management.

Additionally, the ESM help desk comes with self-service functionality to lessen the MTTR time to satisfy both employee and customer expectations and demand.

In the digital-first ecosystem, holding onto legacy infrastructure could mean disarming your help desk's support of necessary tools and capabilities and complicating situations.

On the other hand, an enterprise service desk has one core principle to help end users resolve issues efficiently at scale.

Service requests and incident management are more complex for enterprises than small and mid-sized businesses. So, a basic legacy help desk system would not suffice what enterprises need to manage the growing volume and burden of service requests or incident tickets.

Here’s how it differs for SMBs and Enterprises:

• Small business has fewer than 100 headcounts with $50 million annual revenue

• Mid-sized business consists of employees between 100-999 with annual revenue up to $1 billion

• Enterprises have more than 1000 employees and with annual revenue more than 1 billion

In terms of employee size and operation levels, IT infrastructure and customer queries generally are not as complex for SMBs as the enterprise does have.

From an IT management perspective, SMBs are more concerned about day-to-day IT operations than driving business resiliency.

In contrast, enterprise focuses on IT integration into business objectives objectives for long-term business growth.

This comparison apart, overall IT budget is massive for Enterprises. As per the 2023 State of IT, 64% of enterprises want to increase their IT budgets, whereas only 45% of SMBs express the same interest.

Also, as enterprises demonstrate responsibilities for customer and vendor relationship management, they must have a strict business policy to maintain user-centricity and employee experience. Rather than a legacy IT infrastructure, they need anenterprise service desk to transition to a modern workplace and expedite operational resilience.

In the table below, let’s showcase how an enterprise service help desk keeps you ahead of challenges brought to the forefront by a legacy system

Despite the downsides of legacy approaches in service desk, SMBs continue to work with traditional systems such as a spreadsheet or shared email boxes to track interactions. The reason could be that they prioritize internal operations over long-term business goals.

However, according to a Salesforce blog, COVID-19 forced many SMBs to personalize support using digital tools such as messaging tools and self-service add-ons.

On the other hand, enterprises need more sophisticated tools due to a broad spectrum of operational models. An enterprise service desk complements its business objectives by helping them keep pace with internal and external operational efficiency.

An enterprise service desk eliminates the need to leverage separate tools for organize-wide operations. Instead, it brings every process to the same platform, unifies them, and improves support delivery for users and employees.

Simplify onboarding for HR operations.

Extending the ITSM principle that usually is used to resolve a common IT-related issue for employees seeking help in device provisioning or de-provisioning, HR operations can also follow suit.

By leveraging enterprise service desk tools, designing an automated workflow to manage employee onboarding is easy. Instead of making the employee wait for welcome wishes or an organizational catalog to learn about company culture and policy, automated HR operations can keep everything ready ahead of time.

Allow self-serve for customers.

An enterprise help desk seamlessly provides solutions to self-serve customer care support. By using knowledge bases, FAQs, and chatbots on the web pages, customers seemingly are eager to auto-resolve their issues rather than escalate them to the agent. Because they know an agent interaction might require explaining everything to them repeatedly, which is utterly irritating.

For internal support, organizations can extend the enterprise service desk features and capabilities to help IT support teams. With auto-resolution capabilities, teams are more empowered to solve their issues and perform at their best.

Maintain workplace governance

As you tend to maintain workplace culture, it is mandatory that your facilities are safe to work in. An enterprise IT help desk can pull up resources for facility managers to seek advice and apply it to fix any issues.

For example, providing a hygienic place during a pandemic is paramount to ensuring employee safety. A regular opt-in health survey that allows employees to provide personal health-related information can help organizations track and eliminate the risk of contamination.

Simultaneously, an IT help desk triggers automated alerts to help trace contacts, further allocate resources for sanitation work in the facility, and help build a sustainable workplace.

Free agents for critical tasks

Most often, L1 support takes 2-4 days for agents with manual follow-ups, resulting in enormous problems for enterprise service desk agents.

• The same agent does not always handle the ongoing issue

• Manual follow-ups lose context due to lack of data

• Call routing to someone less capable can increase backlog

It takes just about nothing to create workflows as they use an enterprise service desk. These automated workflows help easily pull up data and refer to previous conversations while improving contextual awareness.

Also, workflows designed to parse complexity levels and pass the requests to the most capable agent effectively reduce wait time and improve employee and customer experience.

There is little doubt that the enterprise service help desks aim to cut costs and improve the service experience. AI-powered automation, built-in chatbots, workflow automation, self-service functionalities, analytics, and other benefits make it a necessary tool for organizations.

However, there are some trailing expenses you need to allocate in your IT budget alongside paying for enterprise service desk tools.

Here’s how an enterprise service desk could add more expenses to your balance sheet 一

• Self-service functionality comes at a cost - ITSM platforms such as ServiceNow and others do not offer the capability of self-service in their lower packages. Instead, as an enterprise, if you want to leverage the flexibility of virtual assistants and gain the ability to offer self-service, you need to upgrade to the Professional License package. It is quite an investment for companies amidst the high inflation and recession.

• Extended time to deployment - Most enterprise service desks with core principles of ITSM infrastructure are a complex ecosystem, which is difficult for your in-house team to configure and deploy at scale. It means you need to hire someone with extensive expertise across developer resources to help you design, orchestrate and re-platform your workflows.

  Not just that, if you need to implement the ESM principle to cover all service areas like HR, Payroll, supply chain, customer service, facilities, and legal, it takes you longer to implement workflows across these areas.

  Slower deployment can shoot up costs as your employees still handle tasks manually.

• Slower adoption backfires at the organization-wide mission - the complexity of the device interface hinders faster adoption. Users take time to adapt to the working nature of an enterprise service desk system. The problem gets more complicated when it offers multiple options for one specific action. As a result, the intricacies of the service desk platform cause device abandonment and forces them back to the manual procedures.

  Another concern is that employees dedicate their time to training and development, impacting productivity and delaying project delivery.

With the current scenario forcing CFOs and CIOs to look at ways to harness control over costs, optimizing your enterprise service desk is a way to satisfy your financial goals

Real-time workplace collaboration tools are an answer to optimizing your enterprise service desk systems.

With that said, Workativ virtual assistant makes it simple to bring conversational AI flexibility to your very own Slack or Microsoft Teams and transform how your teams work with a service desk.

Adding a virtual assistant to your enterprise service desk seamlessly increases communication and collaboration via Slack or Microsoft teams across your organization.

As per Mckinsey, real-time communications can increase productivity by up to 30%, unlocking $100 billion in value for organizations.

In a hybrid workplace, digital collaborations are indeed significant in improving coordination. Slack and Microsoft service desk bots dedicatedly help you achieve these ambitions.

How virtual assistants help you unlock riches

• Self-service functionality with no additional cost - Use a no-code platform to build your virtual assistant or conversational AI platform to deploy to your Slack or MS Teams. Pay only for subscription charges or a custom fee without going for the enterprise license package and spending on external developers.

• Faster time to market - Most virtual assistant platforms are no-code. You no longer need to hire developers or spend much time orchestrating your workflows. Use a drag-and-drop feature to create and automate your workflows for ESM across your organization.

• Rapid adoption rate - A conversational AI platform sits seamlessly inside your business comms channels like Slack or MS Teams. As your employees are already familiar with these collaborative tools, they do not need additional training to adapt to the enterprise service management ecosystem. All they need is ask a question no matter which department and auto-resolve their issues for repetitive requests

Unlike the enterprise service desk, which requires back-and-forth logins and outs, a chatbot for Slack or Teamsremoves that bottleneck. It accomplishes the same level of dexterity in ensuring enterprise service management.

Some critical use cases include,

Leave management for HR

Using an automated and intuitive chatbot, it is simple and fast to deploy leave management automation.

How it works:

• User requests for a leave in the chatbot

• Chatbot fetches information from the HRSM tools and allows user to apply for leave

• User applies for a leave within a chatbot, and the information escalates to the HRMS tools

• HR manager receives email notification

• HR manager approves the leave

• Achieve 5X lower MTTR for repeated service desk issues

Password reset for IT

Password reset is most tiring repetitive and manual tasks for IT support. By automating password reset activity, IT teams can free time and focus on the most critical tickets.

How it works:

• A user requests in a chatbot to reset her passwords

• A chatbot will ask for an employee email ID

• A pre-built workflow will verify email IDs in the IAM platform

• Ask the user to verify OTP via the chatbot

• A user receives an email to reset her password

• The new password will get updated in the IAM application

• Auto-resolution will lead to the closing of the ticket for the password issue all within the chatbot

To increase enterprise service management efficiency in your organization, you can efficiently use a conversational AI platform and automate the most mundane and repetitive tasks for other areas also.

Create app workflows for your chatbot and harness rapid control over operations across facilities, legal, and supply chain.

Workativ offers a no-code conversational AI platform to help you design and orchestrate your app automation workflows that seamlessly integrate with any industry-leading enterprise service desk ecosystem and transform your workplace experience.

For example, Workativ virtual assistant can offer AI-based self-service automation for the following platforms and many others,

• ServiceNow chatbot with automation

• Jira Service Desk chatbot with automation

• SolarWinds chatbot with automation

Also, with the Workativ virtual assistant, organizations are capable of reducing a potential amount of operating costs. See how Workativ helps you maximize your enterprise service desk capabilities with chatbot and automation.

Cost savings by up to $21,000 monthly

Chatbot and automation help you auto-resolve simple to complex issues at scale, bringing down costs to $21,000 monthly compared to $45,000 a month when chatbot and automation are not used together for an enterprise with more than 3,000 employees.

Call volume reduction by 40%

A conversational AI platform from Workativ helps you reduce email and call volumes with instant auto-resolution by 40%. Also, it improves first contact resolution by 90%.

20-30% reduction in labor

Workativ brings a significant reduction in labor with chatbot and app workflow automation in the first year of deployment.

Rapid deployment with multiple options

With the Workativ conversational AI platform, it is easier to get started with chatbot and app workflow automation. There are three options such as,

• On-premise connector

• API-integration

• Marketplace downloads

To know how you can maximize the benefits of your enterprise service desk and optimize operational costs, request a demo today with Workativ product experts at sales@workativ.com