Artificial intelligence (#AI) is revolutionizing the way businesses operate, and you are certain that IT support is no exception. In fact, experts see AI becoming a key component of the help desk in the years to come, as it is helping organizations become more efficient and productive. This is why in a recent pulse report focusing on the top IT service management (ITSM) strategies, 62% of respondents are considering implementing AI in the form of chatbots for ITSM, and 46% indicated they are actively researching AI solutions to meet their needs.
IT #helpdesks are essential for providing technical support to employees. They are responsible for managing and resolving employee inquiries, troubleshooting technical problems, and providing timely assistance. However, managing a helpdesk can be a daunting task for you due to the sheer volume of employee IT requests: the 100th password reset request you are asked to perform can definitely turn your work day into a nightmare! And this is where AI comes in.
AI-based IT helpdesk solutions are designed to reduce the burden on helpdesk personnel and enable them to provide better employee service. AI can have a significant impact: it can remove the manual overhead associated with “high-volume, low-value service desk activities”, offer round-the-clock assistance to employees, and enable incident/request routing and knowledge curation.
The Benefits of AI-Powered IT helpdesks
Let’s see in more detail how AI can actually help your helpdesk work.
1. Offer 24×7 support with chatbots
In an always-on, work-from-anywhere world, you know that your employee IT requests won’t stop just because the helpdesk work hours where you are based are over. The truth is that employees can encounter an issue anytime and would expect your team to help. Chatbots can fill in when your IT team members are unavailable, providing support whenever a user may need it.
2. Automate routine tasks and auto-resolve IT problems
AI can be used to automate and auto-fulfill routine IT tasks, such as onboarding new employees and troubleshooting technical problems. It can also automatically resolve a great % of their requests, such as joining an email list, resetting a password, accessing folders and calendars – those are just a few examples of the great capabilities AI holds. This can help reduce the amount of time spent on mundane tasks and allow your IT helpdesk personnel to focus on more complex issues instead of manually handling all requests. Furthermore, your employees can receive solutions to their requests on their own, without having to ask or wait for your IT team to get involved.
3. Prioritize, categorize and route employee IT tickets
When you receive tons of employee IT requests it is easy to feel overwhelmed and lose track of important issues. AI can assist you by categorizing, prioritizing, and routing tickets. When requests come in, AI can compare them to similar past cases and automatically assign tags for better categorization. It can also determine their severity, prioritize them accordingly and route them to the appropriate employee at the right time. Doing this reduces miscommunication and seeks the best help for each ticket, helping resolve issues faster.
4. Facilitate and inform your team’s decision making
Even when tickets are passed on to your team, AI can still provide value. AI can analyze large amounts of data very fast, then provide insights so that your team makes better decisions. By analyzing similar tickets and requests, it can provide the necessary context to help your IT staff make the right decisions quickly. AI can also be used to analyze employee data and provide personalized recommendations, such as their preferred communication channels, the best time to contact them, and customized responses. This can help improve their satisfaction and reduce wait times.
5. Curate knowledge
By understanding the employees’ questions’ context and meaning, AI recommends solutions based on what has and has not worked before. It can also share knowledge base articles that answer employee questions and offer the most likely solutions. AI can also identify gaps in the knowledge base, by analyzing the most common questions for which there is no answer yet in your knowledge system. Thus, it can help you optimize your company’s knowledge base, or start building one.
AI-driven knowledge curation can also help your IT teams on the job. By making use of prior and current incidents, problems, known errors and knowledge bases, AI can suggest relevant information to IT service desk agents and help them resolve tickets faster, and be more productive and efficient.
6. Address small IT infrastructure problems
AI in ITSM can be used to make improvements behind the scenes. If the underlying infrastructure has any issues, AI is able to identify and fix many of them so that your IT team can focus on other tasks. With AI being able to process data at a quicker rate than humans, it can detect and diagnose network or infrastructure issues faster. If these problems aren't too complex, AI can take care of them automatically, thus avoiding further disruption of ITSM services. If they are more complex, AI can alert the relevant staff to take care of the issue.
By employing AI to make these infrastructure improvements, IT teams can devote more time to addressing users' needs. These quick fixes will potentially lower ticket volume, as they are able to prevent problems before they become more noticeable.
AI-Powered IT helpdesks are the future
The above features illustrate how AI can improve your IT helpdesk management through virtually every stage of the process. AI helpdesk solutions not only streamline processes but also increase your agents’ productivity and efficiency by automating workflows, analyzing queries to deliver faster resolution rates and auto-resolving problems. They enable your helpdesk personnel to provide better service, automate mundane tasks, and improve accuracy. Companies that implement AI effectively can see dramatic changes in their employee satisfaction and team productivity. If you would like to do so, please contact us for a demo .