The future of IT Service Desks is Conversational AI
Build best-in-class AI Assistants for your teams to take instant action, automate workflows across multiple enterprise applications, streamline repetitive tasks, and enhance decision making for exceptional experiences.
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Introduction
Increasing operational efficiency has become a priority for CIOs as the digital landscape evolves. They have adopted advanced ticketing systems, expanded IT capabilities, and outsourced to lower-cost regions to maximize operational efficiency. Service Desks have been bombarded with inquiries, complaints, and requests as a result of the proliferation despite these efforts. Due to this surge, company resources have been stretched, causing Service Desk departments to be under-resourced and in a difficult position to cope with the increased workload.
Image 1: Dissecting Service Desk for a 1,000-employee Enterprise.
Investment: 10 service agents.
Efficiency: low employee productivity and overworked service technicians with an average 6 to 8 hour time-to-resolution (open, routing, assignment, analysis, closure).
Cost: high support cost, with an average $700k to $1.5M per year to resolve repetitive Level 1 and Level 2 service tickets in a typical 1,000-employee enterprise. This generates an average 35,000 to 40,000 tickets per year, with a typical breakdown of Level 1 ($20 per ticket) and Level 2 tickets ($40 per ticket).
How does Conversational AI benefit you?
Conversational AI offers a multitude of possibilities for disrupting and transforming IT support:
According to Work Market Insight Report, employees engaged in automation report a 69% increase in job satisfaction, while 78% of business leaders affirm that automating tasks enhances productivity across the organization. The repetitive nature of IT support issues and the lack of stimulating challenges can diminish the focus and motivation of support agents. High turnover in IT support staff often arises due to these challenges. Enter AI Assistants, swiftly addressing repetitive service requests. Rather than replacing human support, these AI Assistants handle common issues that frequently come to the IT Support. This strategic approach allows human agents to focus on more complex and engaging tasks. For instance, users are sometimes hesitant to solve their own technical issues, despite having access to solutions.
Enterprise knowledge bases fail to meet employee expectations when it comes to search capabilities. IT support usually hires individuals to add keywords to knowledge articles, hoping to increase search relevance. However, these efforts often prove ineffective because employees tend to describe their issues using symptoms. As a result, this approach frequently leads to employees creating service requests or contacting the IT support.
By leveraging advanced NLP (Natural Language Processing) to grasp the intent and context behind users’ questions, AI Assistants enable them to independently resolve the most common queries. They achieve this by selectively extracting and presenting relevant information or snippets, even from complex, unstructured support materials. However, Conversational AI’s capabilities extend well beyond simple information retrieval.
Integrating AI Assistants into backend enterprise systems such as configuration management, application access, service catalogs, identity management, and workflow orchestrators allows service requests to be managed seamlessly. The technology allows them to automate repetitive tasks such as unlocking accounts, resetting passwords, and resolving complex issues such as email troubleshooting and resolving VPN connectivity problems.
In addition, these AI Assistants operate 24/7, and scaling to meet increased demand is handled by adding computing power, not by adding additional employees.
Several large enterprises are now quietly implementing Conversational AI on a global scale after CIOs began to recognize the benefits of automating level-1 support.
