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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Most often, L1 support takes 2-4 days for agents with manual follow-ups, resulting in enormous problems for enterprise service desk agents.
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
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.
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,
Using an automated and intuitive chatbot, it is simple and fast to deploy leave management automation.
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.
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,
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.
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.
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%.
Workativ brings a significant reduction in labor with chatbot and app workflow automation in the first year of deployment.
With the Workativ conversational AI platform, it is easier to get started with chatbot and app workflow automation. There are three options such as,
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
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.