How agile are your IT support services? It is essential that CIOs or IT leaders evaluate the capabilities of their IT support. Because today’s IT, infrastructure is evolving at scale with the huge influx of applications across the board. So is the growing volume of support tickets at the IT desk.

To gain faster time to market, your employees must be agile, flexible, and connected. That’s the secret recipe you can try to transform customer experience and build long-term customer relationships and loyalty.

The possibility, however, lies within how you view IT support transformation. Your dependency on a traditional IT support model may fall short of your expectations.

Is your support team experiencing a massive gap between receiving requests and responding to service delivery? If they do, it is not an unfamiliar experience for them. Today’s IT infrastructure is evolving at scale with the huge influx of applications across the board. So is the growing volume of support tickets at the service desk. IT support automation brings a transformative shift to the support ecosystem for employee support.

According to a report by Gartner, 91% of organizations are keen to adopt AI to gain operational efficiency over the next three years. Process efficiency and employee productivity are essential to cope with high customer demand and expectations.

Preparing for IT support automation is crucial because the change is highly likely to be disruptive, whether you accept it or reject it.

This article will discuss IT support automation and the business-oriented results that can be accomplished through the transformation.

IT support automation is the use of tools to enable employees to perform routine tasks autonomously without manual interventions. Simply put, automated IT support means alleviating the workloads of the IT help desk by streamlining processes for mundane activities with digital workflows and automation.

IT support automation can highlight eliminating repetitive and error-prone activities that would otherwise take your team days or weeks to solve tickets, impacting overall employee productivity and efficiency.

Automation in IT support reduces manual intervention, saves time for the help desk to optimize operational efficiency and operating costs, and boosts customer experience.

There are a variety of ways in which you can make use of automated IT support to get work done faster without adding to employee frustration or increasing wait time.

Leveraging help desk automation, you can access multiple automation tools to automate IT support for your internal stakeholders. All you need is find business cases for internal processes and turn them into workflow automation while elevating support experiences. Here are some essential use case examples you can learn about and implement for process efficiency

How to automate critical incident response for the service desk

Automate incident management process 

IT support plays key responsibilities in keeping a check on its digital portfolios, enabling a variety of lines of business to access and use tools as they need to complete a task. The pain point is that digital platforms are dispersed, and they work in silos across the organization. A fragmented IT infrastructure delays progress as information is not easily accessible.

• Automation brings these tools onto one single platform using end-to-end digital workflows.

• Take advantage of integrations or custom scripting you can apply to get a unified or single pane of view of the digital tools.

• With enhanced visibility into a stack of tools, your IT support can provide help faster.

• Minimize the need to log into fragmented tools and save time since they are available in one automation platform.

A proactive incident management process is critical to eliminating the time to toggle between various systems to communicate with the help desk and ultimately get help. 

Enterprise chatbots efficiently connect with your ticketing systems and business comms platforms, allowing you to provide support in one place and manage the ticket lifecycle from creation to resolution. 

If your internal employees have issues with login access, face bug issues in software systems, or might need a new application to manage their role-specific tasks, they can easily create tickets within Slack, MS Teams, or Web Widget until the issue is resolved.

However, besides creating tickets, a conversational AI chatbot plays a key role in translating autonomous help into a super-rich experience for your employees. By

Manage incidents rapidly

Hardware troubleshooting automation 

As with traditional IT support, assistance is unavailable outside business hours. It throws up enormous challenges for your team, especially when they push hard to adapt to a hybrid and remote culture. If your people wait for hours or days for IT incidents that are common and repetitive, your organization loses significant productive hours.

Your employees may need help troubleshooting equipment or hardware systems for printer problems, desktop power problems, VPN issues, etc. IT support automation makes it easy for your internal employees to tackle hardware failure issues by automatically bringing the problem to the help desk and implementing troubleshooting steps in real-time. Conversational AI chatbots provide easy access to troubleshooting guides to follow and implement. If these guides are not resourceful enough, an instant ticket can be created for agent handover.

IT support automation makes information and solution available 24x7

Provide help for everything that can minimize downtime and improve the restoration of operations

• Help with software security installation

• Enable your employees to recover or reset lost passwords

• Help unlock accounts

• Provision of new digital assets

• Provide configuration help for computer hardware, networks, printers, and software upgrades

• Provide support to repair IT assets

Power of IT Helpdesk Chatbot with App Workflows

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Using the Workativ self-service automation bot, you can provide your team with 24x7 IT incident management capabilities to manage IT risks independently. Problem categorization becomes easy with natural language processing.

So, IT issues outside of the self-service capability can be escalated to the agent using app workflow automation. So, your team can create a ticket and instantly get help from the help desk agent.

Asset provision automation  

Your employees need apps or equipment at any time you never know. IT support automation ensures that employee productivity never gets wasted as your employees need to wait for a new tool with traditional support. By raising a direct request for a new tool or equipment through a chatbot inside the communication channel, your employees get what they need to work efficiently.

Empower your employees with useful resources Automate knowledge access

Automated IT support can serve as a platform for creating a content-rich knowledge base for your employees. Through API integration, you can bring the resources to the omni-channel self-service platform. For example, if your knowledge base is built on Hubspot or other platforms, your employees can ask questions, get help, or solve a particular problem. As soon as they type a keyword or command, a user-led chatbot can provide a relevant link instantly for accurate information and help.

The convenience is that your chatbot can seamlessly sync with your Slack or MS Team and improve the employee experience.

Workativ chatbot builder provides flexibility with dialog management so you can optimize your conversation as per needs for Hubspot.

Maintain service level agreement for a suite of tools Proactive device management 

IT automation increases IT tool management scalability by dissolving the fragmented and siloed infrastructure. This makes it easy for your IT support team to improve visibility into tools and digital portfolios. Also, as your team gains more time by eliminating manual interventions, they can keep track of service level agreements and make software or tools available for your employees, helping you achieve business expectations.

One of the best things about automated IT support is that you can instantly alert your employees about any upcoming threat to their devices. This allows them to proactively manage risks before they impact their productivity and continue to perform at their best capacity.

Automation in IT support unleashes some top benefits for your organization. The most critical aspect of IT transformation is that you can make your IT support recession-proof with chatbots and automation.

Reduce operational costs on IT support

Inflation is four-decade high now. And the looming recession will impact CFOs or business leaders in the second half of 2023. Amidst this financial turmoil, CFOs can shift a load of operational costs off the balance sheet by adopting automation.

• According to Gartner, 70% of organizations will implement automation for operational efficiency and flexibility by 2025.

• As per the Gartner 2021 I&O Leaders Survey, leaders are looking at automation to optimize cost.

With IT support automation, you can quickly shift the responsibilities for low-priority tasks from your people to users through chatbot workflows.

• It helps you free your team to focus on more critical business operations and provide instant help for the restoration of business operations.

• You need not to compensate for those lost hours that cost over $500,000 for every hour of downtime.

• On top of it, the SaaS-based architecture reduces your liability to pay for maintenance, software upgrades, or infrastructure costs.

Your investment in chatbots and AI automation pays in the long run and gives you actual value on ROI.

Save cost on employee training and upskilling

With traditional support, it is evident that you must always be mindful of employee training and upskilling if your business grows in complexity. They must learn new and specialized skill sets to combat complex issues.

Automated IT support reduces the need to allocate additional budget for employee training and upskilling. As a reason, we can say that teams are more empowered to handle complex issues as they free themselves from repetitive, error-prone manual tasks, which they can manage through automated workflows.

Deliver employee experience, and satisfaction

IT automation support gives an omnichannel experience. Your employees no longer need to log into different tools to complete a task. Instead, they can get information and solution through a platform where they spend most of their time 一 the communication platform like Slack or Teams through chatbot integrations.

• Information is accessible on one platform

• Information is available anytime and anywhere

This flexibility gives employees more time to focus on tasks and increases efficiency.

Improve customer experience

IT automation can be an integral part of your IT support. It reduces the burden on your employees and enables them to be highly productive and efficient. Organizations can utilize human resources to solve critical operations and achieve success at scale. So your business can get more and deliver on customer expectations.

Achieve the ease of IT adaptability

The best part of automated IT support is that you can achieve operational efficiency as quickly as possible. It does not require your legacy IT infrastructure to change its core. Instead, technologies like API integrations or custom scripting make it easy to bring the change and help you be automation-ready instantly. For example, you can implement a conversational AI chatbot into your IT support system and get going instantly.

Implementing changes to IT support can never look easy, especially when you want to introduce automation to your employee support. While IT support automation brings many benefits, its implementation brings some critical challenges. 

Implementation complexity: Setting up logic or business rules for automation can be challenging. It requires careful planning and AI expertise for integrations and 

Budget constraints: Initial investments can be too heavy for many organizations as they need to shore up various tools and hire AI experts. 

Continuous monitoring: AI responses are susceptible to privacy threats or misinformation, which necessitates continuous maintenance and monitoring. 

How can you succeed in IT support automation: Essential tips 

IT support automation is the best thing to streamline processes for your people. But getting the best benefits depends on how you get started. 

Choose a robust help desk software

The first step to ensuring IT support automation is to choose a powerful help desk automation solution. The right tool ensures you can use the software in the right proportion and streamline processes that burden your team with unnecessary repetitive tasks. 

A powerful help desk software can combine AI self-service, knowledge base, flexible integrations with third-party systems, workflow automation, and many more. 

Workativ conversational AI platforms allow you to build a powerful chatbot to complement your help desk and easily streamline support operations. 

Build your help desk 

Once you have your help desk software, the next step is to customize processes for your team and employees so that they can easily adapt to the new changes. The help desk processes involve setting up new roles to create workflows based on business cases, categorizing workflows depending on L1, L2, L3, and L4, and customizing the interface for ease of interaction. 

You can best use the Workativ chatbot to manage ITSM and streamline processes efficiently through self-help, agent handover, SLA management, ticket routing, etc. 

Create workflows 

The next step is to customize workflows. Prepare use cases for employees to handle queries quickly using integrated knowledge bases, NLP, or LLMs capabilities. Other than routine help desk queries, ensure you set up escalation workflows for complex or multi-step queries so that they can reach the right team. You can implement workflows for use cases such as onboarding, offboarding, password reset, software installs, and so on.

With Workativ, you can easily implement workflows via the marketplace and reduce L1 tickets to the help desk.  

Monitor performance 

It is essential that you monitor the performance of your IT support automation tool regularly. Check analytics to make informed decisions about improving help desk performance. 

Workativ has an embedded analytics dashboard that does the heavy lifting for you. It allows you to check chat sessions, ticketing resolution time, and unresolved and resolved tickets to make a detailed report and recommend the best ways to improve help desk performance.  

IT support automation tools 

As you embark on your journey to leverage IT support automation, you must ascertain that you have effective help desk automation tools to streamline tasks. There are many tools out there in the market. It can be challenging to make an informed decision when getting one. Here is what you should take note of. 

Help desk automation 

Flexible IT support automaton needs a robust help desk software platform to centralize communications and coordination data. Since it is the first point of contact for employees to get support, help desk software ensures agents can have tools to manage operations by categorizing tickets and prioritizing requests to speed up the resolution. 

Workativ conversational AI provides comprehensive support for help desk platforms by allowing agents to centralize support ticket information and perform an action based on needs. An embedded agent screen, Shared Live Inbox, pulls up ticket information in one integrated place and accelerates problem resolutions.  

Workflow automation 

Choose an automated support tool that enables you to implement workflow automation easily. Workflow automation is effective in routing tickets, streamlining mundane processes, and reducing agents' workloads. 

With Workativ, you can use a no-code platform to create workflows, integrate with third-party systems, and deploy them on your business comms channels like MS Teams and Slack. 

Prebuilt conversation templates 

For routine queries such as password resets, account unlocks, and others, you can choose prebuilt conversations to build your dialogs and get started quickly without hard work. While this improves self-help, you can also reduce the time to resolve routine problems. Also, check if your help desk software allows you to use canned responses for agents to surface during conversations with employees. 

Workativ’s chatbots offer prebuilt conversation templates for self-service. Your agents can quickly use AI suggestions to reply to employees’ queries alongside FAQ-based questions.  

 Advanced AI capabilities 

IT support automation can be highly effective with advanced AI tools and innovations. AI/ML, NLP, NLU, and NLG technologies, including Generative AI and LLMs integration, can make your help desk powerful and empower your people to handle and resolve queries effectively. Advanced AI technologies can help you automate response, analyze critical data, leverage predictive analytics, and nurture a proactive service desk ecosystem. 

Workativ offers many AI tools, including Generative AI power, AI/ML, and others, to ensure effective ticket handling and rapid MTTR. 

Integrations 

Effective integration with business systems allows for efficiency and productivity enhancements for organization-wide operations. By integrating with your help desk platform, you can take your IT support automation objectives to the next level and streamline communications for system-related queries. 

Workativ provides seamless integrations with more than 100 apps and streamlines processes efficiently. For example, you can easily automate onboarding through integration with BambooHR and bring communications directly to your favorite channel, such as Slack or Teams. 

To make your automation project for IT support successful, you must have some best practices in place. Here are what you can evaluate to optimize automation for your IT support services.

• Business resilience and continuity - Evaluate if your existing IT support can handle high-volume tickets. You can segment your team based on task priorities and allow the more eligible and skilled employees to take the complex job. Ensure your team can handle incidents and adapt quickly to maintain business resilience and continuity.

• Ease of use -Thousands of vendors have a wide range of solutions. Check which solution fits your business needs. How flexible or user-friendly they are for your employees.

• Unified view of tools -one place. You must monitor and manage your IT processes with a unified view of your systems. Ensure IT automation provides flexibility with API integration and customizability so that your team can employ the solutions per different use cases and achieve a rapid solution.

• Identify critical areas of automation -determine what process you want to automate. Evaluate the number of repetitive or error-prone task lists on a day-to-day basis. Create workflows for simple, manual tasks. Also, decide if you need to automate the critical processes. Prioritize your operation areas and choose workflow customization.

• Ask a vendor for a free trial -Take your time before your test all the best possibilities an automated solution can provide. After you evaluate your preferences, connect with vendors and use the free trial. This gives you a better understanding based on your business expectations and goals.

Let’s get back to the fact that 91% of organizations plan to invest in AI to achieve operational efficiency. And self-service automation brings that paradigm shift in the support area. Gartner says in its report that customer-led bots can help users raise a massive volume of tickets, as high as billions by 2030.

The fact is users want more independent solutions without engaging others to resolve their problems. This will be a massive transition for IT support, given the scenario where “Do-It-Myself” takes over the “Do-It-Yourself” concept.

AI-conversational chatbots are a great technological innovation to support this cause. Leaders are twice as likely to leverage automated chatbots to drive value by optimizing IT support performance and efficiency.

Chatbots are indeed a game-changer for your IT support transformation. Delaying the deployment means neglecting huge benefits you can leverage through IT support automation.

Workativ stands out as a powerful conversational AI service provider that supports legacy service desk or help desk objectives through its chatbot capabilities. 

Workativ has many tools to make handling IT support operations easy for both employees and service desk agents. Here are some key features of Workativ for IT support automation. 

Automation 

Workativ gives an easy way to leverage automation with the power of Generative AI, LLMs, and AI/ML capabilities through chatbots. A no-code chatbot takes minimal time to deploy to automate ticketing and self-service for employees. 

Integrations 

Seamless integrations with multiple business systems are foundational to building an exceptional service desk experience. Workativ allows you to automate workflows for over 100 apps and streamline mundane processes such as password resets, employee onboarding, etc. 

Knowledge AI 

To give you the ability to connect with LLMs or Generative AI power for response generation using knowledge bases, Workativ’s Knowledge AI efficiently surfaces generative AI answers and helps solve problems with consolidated and relevant answers. 

Shared live inbox 

Workativ chatbot automation tool offers an extensive suite of tools for agent efficiency. Its Shared Live Inbox makes interaction with employees convenient by integrating all ticket information into one place, allowing agents to use AI suggestions, AI summaries, and instant reference articles to speed up resolution time. 

Customization 

Workativ has various templates to use for customization so that you can get started instantly. Workativ’s pre-built FAQ templates, and pre-built chatbot dialog templates are easy to download and edit as per your needs. These templates are easy to use for your use cases such as internet issues, VPN issues, login issues, etc. 

Reporting and analytics 

You need to capture essential KPIs to improve your service desk performance. IT support automation chatbots from Workativ bring built-in chatbot analytics to monitor user interaction and ticket resolution progress. With these analytics, you can improve overall efficiency and service quality for your service desks. 

Self-service portal 

Workativ's integration with MS Teams or Slack ensures that your employees can easily use the service desk platform without all the training and guidance. It makes self-service a breeze by allowing your employees to instantly access the knowledge base, FAQs, and other key information. By offering flexibility, Workativ reduces L1 support queries and ensures everyone's satisfaction.

Workativ offers an extensible chatbot builder with the flexibility to create FAQs, dialogs, app workflows, and omnichannel integration. Also, it comes with extensive custom features to help you craft your information cards, enabling you to provide more suggestions to your users for a particular problem.

With Workativ, it is easy and fast to create and deploy your chatbots using our low-code platform. It means you do not need to write a single line of the script, yet you can launch your bot. With that said, the omnichannel integration makes it easy for you to integrate your bot with Slack, MS Teams, or widgets.

So, it is more time for your employees to engage in work as they get answers within their familiar communications channels and can get the job done faster. Learn how GoTo improved employee experience through automated IT support solutions built on the self-service model.

Want to transform your workplace IT support in minutes? Book a demo today.

What is IT support automation? 

IT support automation is the concept of using computer vision programs or tools to minimize human intervention and streamline workflows for IT service delivery. It basically involves automating password resets, software installs, and other routine tasks. 

What are the benefits of IT support automation?

IT support automation increases employee productivity and efficiency, removes workloads from the service desk, improves cost efficiency, and hastens ROI improvements. 

What are essential tools for IT support automation?

IT support automation can be effectively expedited with tools such as self-service chatbots, knowledge base integration, FAQs integration, app workflow automation, customization, and reporting and analytics. 

How does Workativ help with IT support automation?

Workativ helps with rapid adoption to the service desk environment using its conversational AI chatbot that easily sits within MS Teams and Slack. Without the need to build training and upskilling, Workativ allows its users to create tickets, check their status, follow up with ongoing tickets, and get resolutions rapidly.