ITSM CHATBOT

Use Cases and Benefits Explained

As we pace through massive digital acceleration, it is significantly essential that all our tools and applications work at their best capacity. IT service management provides the processes and capabilities to handle IT operations. The question is how efficiently your IT help desk can handle the overwhelming IT queries and enable their teams to work steadily.

According to the InformationWeek IT Resource Drain Study, 58% of organizations state that their team dedicates more than five hours per week to handling repetitive IT requests. While this is concerning, 98% of survey participants agreed upon the higher attrition rate and low employee morale due to repetitive and manual IT tasks. Automation is key. ITSM chatbots are quick to handle repetitive tasks and answer user queries steadily using natural language understanding.

Let’s learn how chatbots for ITSM can deliver more than your ITSM tools in silos.

What is an ITSM Chatbot?

The ability to transform your IT service management workflowswith end-to-end automation through virtual assistants is referred to as an ITSM chatbot.

Chatbots for ITSM infrastructure, like that of the Workativ virtual assistant, can always bring information to your employees’ fingertips and help them work efficiently. The most significant capability is self-service which you enable through integration with familiar business comms channels such as Teams and Slack. As a result, it reduces dependence on your IT help desk and resolves about 80% of repetitive tasks for your ITSM.

You can bring the convenience of ITSM chatbot to your service desk teams in many ways. You can either leverage integrations or spend more than your IT budget to get it through an embedded feature inside an enterprise package.

Automate Your Employee IT Desk with AI Chatbot.

Why do you need an ITSM chatbot? (Current scenarios across with ITSM environment)

The Information Week IT Resource Drain Study states that repetitive tasks are draining time and effort for highly skilled ITSM workers. More insights from the report are as follows:

Manual and repetitive tasks are overwhelming

Organizations struggle with overwhelming repetitive tasks. The most mundane and repetitive tasks include,

  • Password resets
  • Onboarding/offboarding
  • IT ticket closing
  • App or software provisioning
  • Overseeing credential management.

One in five says that these routine tasks take ten hours on average, which are highly subject to automation. Unfortunately, most organizations follow manual processes.

Mundane and repetitive tasks add to job dissatisfaction

Organizations today have a proliferation of applications and point solutions. 80% of all organizations deal with 50 or more applications 一 or 53% of organizations have more than 100 applications. The growing challenge is to handle repetitive tasks to empower teams across various departments.

  • Among several IT ticket requests, 47% of ITSM queries or tickets are about password resets
  • 43% of IT tasks are about onboarding/offboarding management
  • 42% of IT support involves handling credential management

Since these tasks are repetitive, service desk pressure mounts every day, resulting in handling the same issue all over again for the lack of visibility. The high volume of repetitive tasks is such that they cause job dissatisfaction and attrition.

Excessive admin effort raises costs

A ticket that needs more time to handle increases the admin effort. That also means increasing ticket handling costs.

  • Ticket handling costs vary by demographics
  • A 10-minute ticket may cost $10 for a service desk, whereas the same may cost $25 for a different service desk
  • Sometimes, with 50% agent utilization, if the handling duration is longer than expected, it even costs $50
  • Higher agent utilization reduces ticket costs, but that is also susceptible to risks such as absenteeism, turnover, and higher investment to complement the capacity shortfall
Ticket costs in ITSM

Also, there is a significant investment across agent utilization, including coaching, career path, and training through salaries, benefits, incentives, bonuses, travel, and technology expenses.

As a whole, if ticket handling time increases, costs increase too, given the scenarios that tier 1 passes through several tier levels 2 or even higher.

ITSM lacks capabilities that impact agent experience

The AXELOS 2022 ITSM Benchmarking Report highlights a 50:50 ratio between organizations that count on ITSM success and those that need more significant capability improvement. The report also identified that smaller and largest organizations are most likely to achieve ITSM success. Based on the survey report, some sub-optimal obstacles restrict ITSM success.

  • Lack of collaboration across teams (10%)
  • Lack of skills and training (8%)
  • Poor communication (7%)
  • Lack of effective tools (4%)

ITSM tools with conventional infrastructure may lack these capabilities, denying straightforward communications with the right team.

  • Wait time increases as teams need to use emails or calls to get back the response
  • Team members log in and out of the ITSM tool and toggle between business apps and enterprise apps as and when they require service desk help (predominantly a challenge for field employees who need to log the incidents),

ITSM derives commonly employed metrics

ITSM success can be restricted by shallow or commonly employed metrics. This prevents stakeholders from harnessing deep insights. As a result, business leaders only focus on creating and handling services rather than what they achieve through the ITSM platform. It ideally improves your ITSM when prioritizing performance metrics more than service utilization.

To serve business needs and move through the current ITSM challenges, ITSM chatbots can help you take better control of your service desk management and drive success.

What are the effective ITSM Chatbot Use Cases?

Businesses can efficiently utilize chatbots for ITSM for a wide array of use cases. They include ー

Handoffs to live agent

Chatbots for ITSM use conversational AI, meaning they can parse information using natural language understanding to get a deeper knowledge of the incident.

Say your employee raises a complaint about a troubled printer. But, the pre-built FAQ-based suggestions or knowledge base have common answers - not valid for the specific issues. Your ITSM chatbot instantly suggests ‘agent handover.’ Your employee can choose the option, and the call will be routed to the right agent.

Workativ’s virtual assistant can easily recognize the need to transfer to the agent. It also eliminates the need to repeat the same history for contextual awareness by providing a real-time view of the chat history.

Monitor assets and maintain service level agreements

The proliferation of apps and tools is such that ITSM needs to ensure app performance and accessibility always-on. Unfortunately, your IT team quickly loses track of the stacks of tools and applications, leading to the expiry of SLA or assets being out of order.

Creating an ITSM workflow automation to work with your chatbot can help increase visibility across your tool stacks. It further enables you to replenish your inventory with optimal assets and ensure SLAs are met to allow round-the-clock employee productivity.

Avoid annoying and repetitive conversations

Employee experience is as necessary as employee experience. It is a significant drain on your employee experience if they need to tell the story again and again. As a result, the call time can increase. Conversational AI chatbots provide the convenience of configuring rules and conditions to train the bot and to improve situational awareness. This further enhances contextual understanding. With the ability to launch and align predefined conversation templates with the queries and store chat information, your team does not need to re-explain the issues. So, it is easy to improve interactions with an agent with no drop-off in the conversation flow.

Derive intelligence in solving issues faster

ITMS chatbot learns across the service requests and employee experience to create its knowledge management repository. When an unusual service request arises, ITSM workflow can suggest solutions by taking cues and analyzing the previous incident handling examples. This is especially relevant when your IT service desk is off duty and the incident needs immediate agent help for faster resolution.

Resolve internal threats like cybersecurity

You can create ITSM workflow automation for your chatbot to ensure software upgrades are current. With no automation in place, you likely neglect to oversee the networks of hardware and software.

Consequently, patchy software becomes the soft target of cybersecurity threats. The advantage of the ITSM chatbot is that you can create workflow and trigger notifications when software or hardware is nearing expiry. By receiving email or chatbot notifications from your ITSM tools, you can keep your assets updated and digital harm at bay.

What are the benefits of ITSM Chatbot?

With so many use cases to leverage and more to brainstorm with your ITSM chatbot, your IT help desk can work more efficiently.

Transform employee experience

ITSM chatbot minimizes workloads of your IT help desk teams by automating repetitive tasks. It saves them time and energy to carefully and dedicatedly handle business-critical incidents at scale.

Bring self-service flexibility

ITSM chatbots to make users more independent in resolving queries independently. Although the enterprise tools have the self-service capability, they work alone rather than in your communication channels. But, chatbot integrations with your familiar business comms channels such as Teams and Slack give more flexibility to solve problems in real-time. Plus, ITSM chatbots that sync with your communication channels offer higher adoption rates and user flexibility with 24x7 availability.

Reduce operational cost

You can shift the additional cost of maintaining on-prem infrastructure off your balance sheet. On top of it, the ITSM chatbot deflects service tickets with automation, thereby reducing the costs of ticket handling and agent utilization.

Provide omnichannel experience

No matter where your IT team is. With the ITSM chatbot providing the flexibility to work inside your familiar communication channels, you can ensure your help desk is available everywhere. The chatbot integrations with Slack, Teams, or Widget enable this flexibility.

Scale as you grow

IT workloads increase as you grow. Using conversational AI chatbots for ITSM tools ensures you can fetch real data that gives a view of performance metrics and business results. By analyzing the ticket volume, you can prepare for future incidents that are likely and therefore stay ahead of time.

ITSM chatbot data analytics and reporting

Workativ Conversational AI gives visibility across a sheer volume of data that can be utilized to create your workflow automation and ensure rapid resolution of incidents and more free time for IT agents.

Enhance customer experience

You empower your IT help desk team to handle more business-critical issues. This allows your DevOps or product development teams to develop products at scale. Thankfully, you do it by integrating ITSM chatbot into your business comms channels, resulting in you meeting TAT efficiently, avoiding agreement infringement, and producing more happy customers.

After researching 5 different chatbot solutions, we decided to go ahead with Workativ for its’ easy integration with systems that we use internally at GoTo.

Gabriel Grecco

Global Manager - IT Service Desk

Read GoTo Case Study →

How Workativ ITSM chatbot helps

Workativ provides a no-code platform to help businesses create and customize their chatbot needs. The low-code model does not require a single line of code to build your chatbot for ITSM service requests and resolution. With Workativ, you can leverage multiple tools and features to create your conversational dialog for workflow automations. Workativ also ensures you start small before jumping with significant iterations so as to avoid chatbot mistakes and investments by training your chatbot for ITSM.

ITSM chatbot training

How to build your ITSM chatbot with Workativ

Workativ offers a variety of ways to make your chatbot for ITSM.

Build app workflows for ITSM chatbot

ITSM chatbot with app workflows.

Create single-step or complex multi-step workflows for your ITSM chatbot easily. With Workativ, it is easy to trigger app automation from a chatbot. You can also build your app workflows through built-in app integrations.

Build an ITSM chatbot from the marketplace

It is fast to start with Workativ when you want to avoid significant overhauls. No matter which apps you use for your business process, Workativ provides a pre-built chatbot for almost every app. Download from the marketplace and get started.

Download ITSM chatbot from marketplace

Create ITSM chatbot via on-prem app connect

Workativ provides an on-prem connector to sync between workflows and on-prem apps. When there is a trigger in your on-prem apps, Workativ escalates automation and performs a task without your agent being involved.

on-prem connector to create workflows for ITSM chatbot

Advantages of using Workativ Assistant

Workativ improves business outcomes by empowering your IT service desk. A variety of benefits include

  • Reduce call volumes by 40% in the first year
  • Automate 80% of repetitive tasks
  • Facilitate YoY 20% increase in call reduction
  • Achieve 20-30% of labor reduction with automation in 1st year
  • Drive superior, personalized and contextual support based on persona/profile – improve CSAT by 4 points
  • Get affordable chatbot support for your ITSM, which is unlikely with enterprise tools like ServiceNow

Conclusion

IT workloads are overwhelming for agents. The traditional approach creates obstacles rather than providing a solution. Your IT team needs a straightforward solution to move through obstacles and empower your team to resolve tickets quickly. ITSM chatbot brings solutions to your familiar communication channels such as Slack or Teams. In addition, ITSM chatbots have one significant initiative to simplify your access requests for ticket handling. Chatbots for ITSM builders like those that you leverage from Workativ make it easy to create chatbot workflows and dialog with ease to ramp up employee experience.

What’s more interesting for your IT service desk is that they can solve queries faster by employing generative AI or ChatGPT. Retail businesses have already started implementing the ChatGPT model inside their service bot to improve DIY capabilities. It is time to look at the massive potential of ITSM chatbots that can benefit from generative AI. What’s more, if you want to unleash ITSM success, Workativ can help you. Schedule a demo today.

Auto-resolve 60% of Your Employee Queries With Generative AI Chatbot & Automation.

Deepa Majumder

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.