If we’ve learned anything from the rise of digital transformation, it’s that organizations often struggle to keep pace with the increase in requests on the service desk. Year over year, organizations are taking on more end users, applications, systems, and devices.
As the enterprise continues to embrace digital services and ESM, IT must get better at processing requests in a timely and efficient manner. And while hiring more IT staff and help desk technicians certainly helps, increasing the amount of hires of workforce staff is not always a realistic solution in effectively scaling the IT department along with the rest of the business. Sometimes it’s much better to try to maximize the efficiency of the tools, people, and processes operating on the service desk.
Read on to discover four great ways to reduce IT service desk workload and run a more efficient ITSM operation.
Chatbots have been rising in popularity among enterprise service and support applications in recent years, and it’s easy to understand why. According to Gartner, organizations that have implemented virtual customer support assistants have reported a 70 percent reduction in call, chat, and/or email requests, while also improving customer satisfaction.
Implementing chatbots and virtual agents can be a huge benefit for improving end user engagement of self-service resources, while reducing tier 0 and tier 1 requests, freeing up the service desk to work on more complex issues.
Intelligent automation built on AI and machine learning can help to minimize small, but time-intensive routine tasks that can add up to hours of increased productivity on the service desk. These automations can be as simple as something like a password reset, to more complex processes like ticket routing and capturing IT change records. The more your organization can lean on automation to speed up processes or reduce bottlenecks, the more it will have time to focus on the issues that warrant the most attention. This increase in productivity can go a long way to clearing workload for IT staff and saving cost for the business over time.
How much time does your tier 1 help desk staff spend on a request before deciding that it should be escalated? It is important to establish clear guidelines for staff to know when to solve or escalate the ticket so that no unnecessary time is wasted. HDI recently gave some recommendations regarding this issue in a report examining common ITSM challenges: “Issues that can’t be resolved at Level 1 should be immediately escalated so that the customer isn’t kept waiting. The list of L1 Solvable issues should be frequently reviewed, so that appropriate solutions can be added to the list.” Working proactively to identify ticket types by their complexity and escalating accordingly can save tons of time and minimize workload in the long run.
Supporting and maintaining strong governance for Knowledge Management is one of the best ways to utilize common knowledge resources for a more rapid delivery of solutions. By using methods like Knowledge-Centered Support (KCS) and self-service portals that deliver easy access to end users, Knowledge Management can help to reduce tier 1 ticket volume while improving the speed and effectiveness of staff who use it.
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