Onboarding Challenges IT Service Desk Face with New Agents

The IT Service Desk is a primary point of engagement between users and an IT organization. To put it in simple terms, it is the single point of contact between the service providers and users for day-to-day activities.

Typically, a service desk manages service disruptions and service requests besides handling user communications or outages and planned changes to services.

With the expansion of digitization, the demand for help desk services is increasing at a rapid pace as well as the need for skilled IT agents

In a recent survey by Korn Ferry, 90% of executives said that recruiting experienced IT agents and retaining them is the biggest challenge of the IT service desks these days.

In this blog post, we shall discuss the significant challenges IT service desk encounter while onboarding a new agent, and how automation can make a difference.

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Inability to adjust due to lack of soft skills

There are specific skills that an IT service desk agent must-have. Alongside technical skills (part of the IT service desk training), the service agent must stay calm under pressure, be patient, and must have an eagerness to develop new technical skills. Often, it becomes difficult for IT service desks to find an agent having the perfect combination of the requisite technical knowledge and these soft skills.

Uncoordinated training

Further to recruiting new employees, it becomes necessary for the management to step forward and take the steps required to train them. They should be updated about new services, products or on any new policy change, etc. The training should be coordinated along with other work activities as this would help service agents answer and address the issues of the customers seamlessly.

Currently, the biggest problem that the industry is facing is a lack of relevant content (such as knowledge base videos or blogs that will help them understand the process, job deliverables, and expectations of the company) to train the recruits.

As a result, it leads to a failure to identify their role in the team, which could affect productivity.

Long Resolution Times

The more businesses become technology-oriented, the higher is the need for troubleshooting, which becomes immensely tricky if the service desk receives too many requests. Post recruiting new agents, it has been found that the time taken by such employees to solve one ticket considerably exceeds the industry standard, which again leads to mitigated productivity.

No Sync in the Team

After recruiting new employees, the existing team often find it challenging to understand the skills the recruits possess and the part of the projects they will handle, which leads to lower productivity.

An interesting case study reveals that with recruits, it becomes quite challenging to track individual productivity daily and the amount of time consumed on solving each ticket.

The study added that poor sync between the existing team and new joiners is the root cause behind this issue. Owing to this reason, managers often face difficulty in keeping track of the amount of work done and the overall progress of the projects.

Inability to efficiently operate new tools

Though there are tools that offer a variety of self-service features, recruits often face issues while working with them. It can be either due to a shortage of skill or inability to operate the tool used specifically by that IT service desk.

IT service desks are heavily dependent on tools, and the continuous advancement of technology has its own set of challenges. Introducing too many in a short period leads to inconsistent results and costly mistakes.

Using a tool having the ability to pull through information from a wide variety of sources, and most importantly, training the team how to operate the same can help avoid such issues.

The short tenure of recruits

Onboarding recruits for service desk is a challenge by itself but also one of the reasons that onboarding has become very important in recent times is because the tenure of agents is rather short. Hence, the team has to continuously recruit new candidates and onboard them to help individuals fit in with the team, adapt to the team culture, and stay longer in the company.

A study revealed that the average tenure for an IT agent is about 11 months. The same study showed that this high turnover is leading to higher operating costs as they need to continue to train new staff.

How Can Automation Change the Current Scenario?

According to a survey, improper recruitment and lack of specific talents are the main reason behind the demand-supply gap of human resources in the IT service industry.

As a monthly task, it becomes tedious for the HR team and managers to recruit new, skilled employees.

Studies conducted by eminent market research firms have found out that bringing the ticket ratio down, or helping them solve the tickets quickly, can help improve employee retention. The same study stated that automation is a great way to achieve this purpose.

A new addition to automation is AI.

AI-powered chatbots can help users find their answers on their own. Some chatbots are so efficient that users don’t even understand they are talking to an AI-bot, as they unknowingly solve their issues.

In other words, AI-based tools reduce pressure on the existing team and improve retention rates. This way, there is no need for companies to seek new employees every month. The net result? A drastic fall in the operating cost.

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