The ultimate guide to
transforming your service
desk with Workativ’s
Generative AI

The big truth about service desks is that they are, in some way, incapable of managing the entire workflow needs.

Automation makes things easier, yet it encompasses a traditional approach.

Shift-left is ineffective in many scenarios, and SLAs rarely transition to XLAs. IT support is reactive rather than proactive.

The overall impact is a productivity decline, employee dissatisfaction, agent burnout, and attrition.

For IT leaders, Generative AI is a boon to transform the existing state of service desks.

The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) studied productivity gains using Generative AI. They claimed that the pre-trained generative transformer (GPT), the underlying deep learning technology of Generative AI, can help boost customer support worker productivity by 14%.

As per the study, if any role needs information to do a job, Generative AI can speed up their ability to find information quickly and gain success.

There is an ongoing surge for Generative AI to boost service desk processes.

Workativ, with its Generative AI-powered conversational AI chatbots, can help transform service desks toward ultimate digitalization.

The powerful features of Generative AI in Workativ’s conversational AI platform unlock huge opportunities to apply over mundane workflows and streamline them efficiently for the ultimate service desk management and growth.

What do you mean by service desk transformation?

GenAI-based service desk transformation

Service desk transformation can refer to augmenting existing capabilities or current workflows for employee support queries with extended automation.

The use of advanced AI tools and features, such as AI and Generative AI,can unlock massive opportunities to handle common and unique service desk requests along with pre-defined problems autonomously, which substantially leads to service desk transformation.

Besides managing routine tasks, service desk transformation helps address new challenges and reduces the need to create time-consuming workflows for known and unknown scenarios and seek agents’ assistance frequently.

What is Generative AI for the service desk?

Generative AI is a new subset of Artificial Intelligence or deep neural networks built on large language models to act like humans and understand NLP queries efficiently.

Leveraging billions of parameters helps GenAI multiply search functions to understand NLP inputs and create new content, texts, images, or sounds, just as humans do.

GenAI-based service desk transformation

LLMs allow GenAI to generate human-like responses, demonstrating the huge possibilities for automating service desk responses to help solve problems related to routine tasks.

Combining this search capability across its large language models, Generative AI increases the accuracy of information search better than conventional AI search and improves the service desk experience.

Why do you need Generative AI for service desks?

Service desk queries are repetitive for routine tasks. Employees and level-one agents have low productivity rates due to the prolonged time needed to address these issues.

Routine questions involving password resets or account unlocks emerge every day and deter the normal productivity of employees.

challenges of typical service desks

Automation in service desks can manage predefined workflows but has lower success rates with cross-functional tasks or unique requests.

  • - Existing automation is limited and only capable of managing predefined workflows.
  • - Self-service has limited reach due to its difficulty navigating the ITSM platform.
  • - Most tickets involve repetitive cases, rising backlog volumes, and agents being forced to manage routine and mundane tasks rather than higher-value jobs.
  • - Three days is the maximum time for employees and the service desk agents to complete a routine query.

Let’s say your employees can manage password resets for a software testing app. However, the problem arises when the company application migrates to a new testing app and the workflow is not set up.

This can hinder self-service due to limited automation, escalate the issue to the level-one agent, and take longer to resolve.

However, Generative AI can help in this situation. Other than abruptly saying, ‘Please rephrase your query, or resurfacing the same dialog cards,’ it can learn and develop cognitive intelligence to offer help.

For a fundamental level of help, it can share a link to a form that users can fill out to gain access.

On the other hand, Generative AI can directly fetch exact information from the company's knowledge base and guide users to take appropriate action.

How does Generative AI help the service desk transform?

GenAI-based service desk use cases

Generative AI utilizes billions of parameters to multiply search, find information, and create new and innovative content.

Generative AI or LLM-based service desk transformation

With the extended level of natural language understanding for massive language training, Generative AI can help with knowledge discovery and problem resolution, helping service desks transform at large. Let’s draw a comparison between a typical service desk and a transformative service desk augmented by Generative AI.

Service desk responses

Rapid collaboration and communication are needed to resolve everyday service desk issues. Employees aim to have meaningful, accurate, and fast information.

Generally, service desks merely handle complex questions.

Responses can be vague on most occasions. When asked to provide a resolution, self-service can generate lengthy articles, requiring users to spend hours finding information.

The main problem is that the traditional service desk can fetch keyword-based articles regardless of whether they match the context or intent of users' input.

As a result, delayed responses can impact service desk MTTR and compromise employee experience.

Modern service desks with GenAI properties apply patterns and algorithms in the large language models to find a match within their training data and generate responses. In most cases, Generative AI can surface meaningful responses based on intent and context.

Besides, GenAI can summarize, which allows it to instantly consolidate long articles and complex questions into contextual and concise information to resolve a common query, such as password resets, VPN settings, etc.

IT ticket resolution

Service desks aim to close as many tickets as possible.

However, typical service desks can lack understanding and have limited ability inside self-service to address tickets faster.

Generative AI can instantly surface related information in real-time, making self-service efficient in answering common to complex questions.

This perhaps boosts 5X lower MTTR and frees agents to focus on more complex issues. .

As a result, service desks can manage and resolve IT tickets faster.

End-user experience

Wait times at typical service desks are quite long. Solving an industry service desk issue takes over three days.

When used with conversational AI and GenAI, MTTR or mean time to response comes down merely to minutes.

Employees can resolve problems efficiently regardless of remote work settings and get a better service desk experience.

Higher satisfaction

Self-service is not without friction; employees have long wait times, which impacts their productivity and progress. Both service desk users and agents have a growing rate of dissatisfaction.

GenAI improves self-service capabilities with an extended level of automation that helps speed up information search and resolve problems in real time.

Introducing Workativ’s Generative AI: The ultimate solution for service desk transformation

Service desk transformation through Workativ’s GenAI features

Workativ’s Generative AI solution, Knowledge AI, is cutting-edge technology that can transform your service desk functions for employee support within MS Teams and Slack.

By extending the off-the-shelf GPT capabilities, Workativ aims to redefine employee support and transform service desks with custom answers specific to your domain.

Workativ ensures your employees can easily remove self-service friction, as observed in typical service desks, elevating employee efficiency, facilitating resilience, and boosting employee satisfaction.

Conversational AI platform

GenAI-based conversational AI platform on Workativ

How about creating engaging conversations yet meaningful enough to resolve workplace queries? Workativ’s conversational AI platform combines the powerful LLM to seamlessly integrate NLP capabilities and conversational search to help you build scalable chatbots in no time.

Workativ provides intent detection, context, and entity extraction to improve comprehension for simple to complex queries and resolve them quickly.

Knowledge AI or RAG for accelerated search results

RAG search for custom answers on GenAI-based service desk

Workativ’s Knowledge AI can be termed a hybrid NLU or Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to help extend the realm of information repository. The combination of the world of knowledge, semantic search, and authoritative resources from third-party sources enrich information veracity.

There is a rare chance that Knowledge AI fetches wrong answers. Instead, Knowledge AI helps rapidly identify answers to domain-specific questions related to one’s business functions.

At a time, Knowledge AI extends the capability of GPTs designed to retrieve answers for known scenarios while also helping surface internal service-related answers.

Shared live inbox for service desk agents

GenAI-based agents’ screen for service desk transformation

A shared live inbox is a real problem solver for agents. Workativ makes it easy for employees to get a resolution at the first contact or level 1.

Service desk agents can unify queries on a single screen and improve employee request visibility using a shared live inbox feature layered with Generative AI features.

Agents can comprehend the priority level of tickets, their status, or their progress in real-time, giving them the best user experience and enabling them to solve queries steadily.

Additionally, AI suggestions reduce the need to craft messages to share with users. The text generator can suggest effective recommendations for even novice agents, enabling them to coordinate steadily with employees.

Custom app workflows

App workflow automation on GenAI-based service desk

Workativ’s app workflow automation enables multi-step or single-step flow for various use cases for your internal business processes. The pre-built app integrations allow you to add your preferred service desk apps and manage workflows needed to streamline operations at scale.

The best thing is to create workflows for various use cases or simply allow your bot to fetch information from your knowledge bases to answer unique questions.

The magic of Generative AI can always answer and help resolve queries.

What can you do with Workativ’s Generative AI?

GenAI-based service desk use cases with Workativ

Generative AI is a business desire for organizations to transform their service desks. You can leverage Knowledge AI or Workativ’s Generative AI to implement domain-specific use cases.

1. Improved knowledge management for continuous improvement of the service desk responses

Knowledge AI improves knowledge management by allowing employees to capture accurate and contextual responses. The RAG approach in Knowledge AI enables users to search for information from third-party company knowledge resources.

Retrieval Augmented Generation, or RAG, enhances faster coordination and collaboration to facilitate problem resolution through effective knowledge management.

2. Self-service automation with zero wait time

Knowledge AI reduces MTTR for service desks regardless of HR or IT support queries and promotes zero wait time.

Employees can handle common to complex queries for password resets, VPN settings, account unlocks, software provisions, etc.

3. GenAI-powered AITSM

ITSM can easily transition to a Generative AI-powered ecosystem, meaning ITSM becomes known as AITSM. It can have better automation power to automate repetitive workflows and provide enhanced reporting and analytics to improve service delivery performance.

4. Hyperautomation for agent support

Agents can utilize a shared live inbox and AI suggestions to speed up resolutions and handle more service requests, enhancing the employee experience. Also, Generative AI can enable instant agent handover when a query seems too tough for self-service.

5. Enhanced cross-functional support

Workativ’s Generative AI uses NLP and NLU to facilitate cross-functional support and reduces the involvement of human agents.

For onboarding or offboarding-related functions, GenAI can help enable end-to-end automation for associated tasks. However, there are more use cases where Generative AI can help.

The Advantages of Workativ’s Generative AI

GenAI-based service desk advantages with Workativ

The chatbot you build with Workativ’s Generative AI can significantly benefit service desk efficiency and user experience.

1. Rapid chatbot development with enhanced automation power

Workativ’s conversational AI platform is a no-code platform that seamlessly helps you build a service desk chatbot you can use within MS Teams or Slack and gain Generative AI capabilities to streamline IT or HR support.

2. Shift-left enablement

GenAI and RAG can answer more questions about common and complex issues. This reduces dependency on agents from higher tiers and promotes self-service efficiently, ultimately saving costs.

3. SLAs to XLAs transition

GenAI capabilities inside the Workativ chatbot address tickets and carefully give rich insights to help prevent the recurrence of the same requests. Using this capability, service desk managers can promote experience-level agreements.

4. Multilingual support

Workativ’s GenAI encompasses multi-language comprehension that helps translate any language into preferred languages that users understand. Therefore, Workativ helps break the language barrier and enables them to use knowledge resources easily.

5. Increased productivity and efficiency

Workativ brings ChatGPT-like responses with the power of RAG, meaning users can gain speed for information search while ensuring accuracy and relevance for their questions and solving problems steadily. This helps reduce downtime and increase uptime.

6. Cost efficiency

Workativ’s Generative AI improves ROI for your service desks. It can save agents’ time and help save a significant amount for your bottom line that would otherwise be spent across agent hiring, training, and development.

How to get started with Workativ’s Generative AI

Steps to getting started with Workativ’s GenAI-based platform  for service desks

Workativ’s Generative AI is very simple to integrate LLMs into your workflows and gain ChatGPT effectiveness while leveraging RAG for custom solutions.

Knowledge AI provides no-code ways to easily integrate LLMs and augment your service desk operations.

1. Create your knowledge articles.

Examine to find out which IT or HR support scenarios are significant to be streamlined with automation. You can create knowledge bases and upload them to the Knowledge AI interface.

2. Prepare custom workflows

Besides common problems that self-service can solve, you must create workflows for unexpected scenarios and enable handover.

3. Deploy the bot

Once your knowledge articles are ready and workflows are set up, you can integrate them with your bot and deploy it inside MS Teams and Slack.

4. Measure and tweak

Workativ provides comprehensive data analytics to measure the performance of your GenAI chatbots for the service desk.

5. Train your people

Workativ's intuitive interface helps users adapt seamlessly and utilize its features efficiently. However, initial employee training can help your people use the interface to its potential and gain significant benefits.

In addition, Workativ also provides 24/7 support to help you get used to its interface and apply GenAI automation for service desk cases.

Also, create a feedback loop to look for your people’s reviews. This strategy can help you implement changes and improve bot interaction.

Conclusion:

Service desks gain more powerful capabilities by leveraging Generative AI, helping them transform at scale.

Workativ’s Generative AI feature, Knowledge AI, can elevate your service desks’ existing capabilities, remove self-service friction, offer better insights for improvement, and expedite efficiency and productivity.

Today, every IT leader wants to apply GenAI and augment service desk automation to streamline service delivery, improve agents’ efficiency, elevate employee experience, and retain employees.

Workativ makes it easy to adopt GenAI-powered service desks effortlessly and rapidly gain a competitive advantage.

If you increase employee support efficiency and user experience, Workativ can help you.

To learn more about Workativ’s Generative AI, schedule a demo today.

FAQs

1. What is Generative AI in service desks?

Generative AI unleashes the NLP capabilities using LLMs to generate new content and extend response automation. This is highly effective for customer support and employee experience management. Service desks can utilize Generative AI to automate repetitive tasks, enable self-service, and augment agents’ efficiency.

2. What is service desk transformation powered by Generative AI?

Unlike typical service desks with RPA-based capabilities, Generative AI drives service desk transformation by enabling users to leverage LLMs to improve response automation and implement hyper-automation to streamline employee support at scale. The service desk transformation can augment resolutions and boost agents’ efficiency.

3. What are the GenAI-based employee support use cases for service desks?

You can remove friction from existing self-service by applying GenAI capabilities to common to complex use cases, such as password reset, VPN settings, employee onboarding/offboarding, PTO enquiry, reimbursement claims, etc.

4. Can Workativ’s Knowledge AI handle custom queries?

Knowledge AI encompasses the RAG approach, allowing employees to search for information from third-party resources and solve problems outside of known scenarios.

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.