The possibilities that come with Artificial Intelligence (AI) are immense, and you can see it not only in the services offered to customers, but also in how it solves day-to-day business operations. Business leaders are investing in AI solutions as they find a number of use cases that improve the overall productivity of the organization.

According to a study titled ‘Conversational Business 2020’, by Aalen University, only 17 percent of companies use AI. If companies want to exploit the potential of chatbots, AI-powered conversational chatbots, voice assistants, etc., then they need to embrace these technologies. 17% is a sorry figure, and businesses should do more to empower their IT infrastructure.

While there are a number of AI-powered services and products for a variety of uses, if you were to choose a technology specifically to empower your IT help desk, then a conversational AI chatbot is your best bet. In this article, we are going to talk about the importance of using conversational AI chatbot for IT help desk.

There are a number of challenges that the IT helpdesk faces everyday. Starting from having to answer the same set of queries over and over to delays in resolving queries to not tracking assets properly, these issues can be highly stifling for an organization that wants to work seamlessly.

The State of Service Research report by Salesforce states 77% of agents believe that automating routine tasks helps them focus on more complex tasks. With most employees working in different time zones, their issues cannot be handled on time. Having an IT help desk address issues 24*7 is not a cost-effective strategy either.

A conversational AI chatbot does the following:

1. It automates routine tasks

2. Solves issues in the shortest time period imaginable

3. Has the ability to handle complex tasks

4. Provides a superior support experience for employees

5. Carries out tasks non-judgmentally

6. Saves a lot of money and time for the organization

The last few months has seen an uptick in the adoption of support automation with the help of virtual assistants. Let us look at some of the reasons for this change.

The IT help desk faces a litany of challenges in its day-to-day operations. Even something as simple as identifying the issues that need to get addressed immediately can be a huge challenge. Relying only on help desk agents will introduce you to a number of bottlenecks. Thankfully, we have automation in the form of conversational AI chatbots which can get a lot of things rolling.

From providing a proper infrastructure to answering queries in an automated fashion within the shortest possible time, a conversational AI chatbot can be the panacea for most problems faced by your organization’s IT help desk. Let us look at some of the challenges that conversational AI solves for the help desk team.

1. Increases employee productivity:

Most mundane activities carried out by the IT department are solved by using conversational AI. This creates more room for the employees to work on complex tasks that would require the help of a human mind. Instead of spending precious hours on answering oft-asked questions, your employees will be able to contribute directly to activities that will affect your bottom line.

Low-effort tickets will be taken care of by the conversational AI, and the employees will work on solving critical queries. This will also help them feel satisfied with their jobs. According to an article by Bloomfire, employees spend 16% of their time in internal communication and collaboration while 19% of it is spent on researching and gathering information. Conversational AI can reduce the time that they spend on these activities and give the employees what they want immediately.

2. Remote working in hybrid workplace:

A hybrid workplace is where employees function remotely, or sometimes from the office premises. It can be highly challenging to get work done seamlessly, especially because of Covid-19 and the impending lockdowns, when your entire workforce is scattered in different places. Thankfully, conversational AI chatbots work from anywhere and assists with business continuity no matter which type of environment you are working in.

3. Scaling IT help desk operations:

Imagine getting hundreds of queries a day. How’s it possible to expect your help desk team to get back to all of them within a short time? There was a period when businesses could safely respond that they would get back within 48 to 72 hours. That won’t work anymore.

Your employee is busy working on their core tasks and wants to get instant resolutions. Instant means within a few hours. This is where chatbots can make it insanely easy for you to scale your operations as much as possible.

No matter how many queries you get, your conversational AI chatbots will not fatigue nor would it be stymied by the number of questions. It can respond to thousands of queries simultaneously. They can even operate 24*7 with nary a hiccup. Isn’t it a dream?

Most IT help desk agents require anywhere from 10 to 80 hours of training every year, says SDI. There is no onboarding process for a conversational AI chatbot. You can set up the bots within seconds. It is not necessary to help them up to speed by training them either. They come pre-trained. It knows the what and how of taking care of your IT help desk team at scale.

4. Optimizing workplace support operations:

When you are working with a conversational AI for your IT helpdesk, your employees can reach out through any channel. The Workativ platform even allows you to message directly from MS Teams or Slack. It means that your employees will not have to waste extra time trying to figure out how to reach out.

With conversational AI, if there is an issue that requires the intervention of a human agent, it transfers the query. This blend of automation and human agents optimizes the workplace support operations to the next level.

5. Cost Savings:

There is a huge financial incentive that you get when you switch to conversational AI to take care of your IT help desk. The size of your IT help desk team will reduce because the bot will take care of most concerns. Not only that, you will receive tons of data from the conversational AI platform which you can use to optimize your operations.

Let us give you a rundown of how much you could potentially save. Let’s say there are 500 employees on your payroll. You would need at least four to five agents to take care of these employees. Each agent might put you back by about $4000, not to mention the other overheads. Therefore, it would require at least $20,000 and above a month for your IT help desk. Conversational AI chatbots are incredibly cheaper, and more effective.

Your conversational AI chatbot can not only do general activities such as automating access provisioning or resetting passwords, but also offer personalized assistance to queries. Let us look at some of the use cases of conversational AI chatbot in the IT help desk space.

An automated onboarding process, knowledge management that standardizes complex tasks, resetting passwords and unlocking accounts on automation, forwarding tickets to the right agent, frequent status updates for queries, escalating major incidents, closing dormant tickets automatically, automated collection of customer feedback, and gathering metrics to focus on the team’s holistic performance are some of the tasks that conversational AI chatbot does.

Even simple tasks such as sending notifications, handling printer/Wifi issues and answering frequently asked questions are features that make conversational AI chatbots an incredibly attractive addition to your IT help desk. The number of issues that it can solve and the kind of productivity that it brings to the table is unmatched.

As we have already mentioned, it will take at least $20,000 to run your IT help desk with the help of five agents. The above assumption is for an organization that has 500 employees.Workativ's plan starts at $299, and it will not only do everything that your IT help desk team does, but it can also handle any number of tickets simultaneously with more accuracy and at a faster speed.

$299 is spare change for an organization, isn’t it?

According to Freshservice’s State of the Service Desk report, the average time to resolve a ticket is about 10 hours. The same report says that the ratio of tickets to technicians is 120:1. There is no doubt that the average IT help desk agent is overworked. With a conversational AI tool like Workativ, the ROI that you get is not only in terms of increased cost-savings, but also in the number of hours that gets saved for both the organization and the employees. 10 hours to get resolution for an issue is a lot of time, and it will certainly affect the productivity of the employee.

Your employees spend over 3 hours a day on tasks that are easily automatable, says Business Standard.Imagine the number of employee-hours that you could save with the help of a conversational AI plus workflow automation tool like Workativ Assistant.

Most of the chatbot solutions in the market are built only for customer support, and they do not offer much for workplace support. To make sure that they ably support your needs, it has to undergo a lot of customization.Workativ combines the best of conversational AI and workflow automation, and it is designed for workplace and support automation, thereby providing the right fillip for IT managers to solve workplace-specific challenges.

Service desks are becoming lean, and one of the main objectives of the IT team should be to support cost optimization, streamlining operations and revenue generation. One of the pivotal tools in your arsenal can be your conversational AI chatbot. With a high churn rate in most organizations, training new resources is going to be even more difficult. Conversational AI ensures that the learning curve is almost zero. Multiple other solutions that conversational AI chatbots provide for businesses make it all the more important to embrace it wholeheartedly, especially for your IT help desk requirements.

If you are looking to empower your IT help desk with an intelligent automation platform, try out Workativ's Conversational AI Chatbot. Our chatbot solutions are customized according to your specific IT help desk needs. It isn’t a run-of-the-mill product that has a standard set of features. Your unique business requirements are taken into account when developing the chatbot for you.