Artificial Intelligence tools are extremely good at eradicating human errors. Since humans have a tendency to stray from standard processes, the risk of errors is always ever-present. The same humans, when assisted by AI-powered tools, can drastically improve their efficiencies. Since intelligent bots can only take decisions that are in accordance with defined standards, they provide consistency to human operators, irrespective of the field or industry. One of the biggest benefactors of these AI-powered tools is IT help desk departments. These departments of IT professionals are overworked and undervalued in most companies.
Even worse, these IT specialists often have to deal with low-value service desk activities such as resetting passwords every day of their professional lives. Adding AI capabilities to these IT departments can eliminate the manual overheads associated with high-volumes of such low-value tasks. That’s why numerous companies have started using AI-powered IT service management (ITSM) tools. These tools are allowing IT professionals to be freed so that they can focus on higher-value activities while AI-powered software tools take care of repetitive tasks.
The Urgent Need for AI-powered IT Service Management (ITSM) Tools
Manually overseeing IT help desk tickets is a rigorous and highly expensive process. Some organizations report spending as much as $22 on handling each help desk ticket. These costs can easily spiral out of control, especially for companies that don’t have large IT budgets. An AI-driven help desk or an AI-powered virtual assistant software can drastically bring down the average costs of ticket handling for these organizations.
More importantly, most small-scale companies have severely under-staffed IT departments. Most experts agree that companies with single operating systems, consistent hardware standards that operate on different networks need to have an overall employee to help desk ratio of 70:1. For organizations that use different operating systems and operate on different networks, the ideal employee to help desk ratio is 45:1. Most small and mid-scale companies cannot afford to have such comprehensive IT departments. As a result, their IT departments are overworked, and the average response time for tickets is over twenty-four hours! Hence, there is an urgent need for companies to start using these AI-powered IT service management (ITSM) tools.
How Artificial Intelligence-Powered Software Can Help IT Help Desks of Small-Scale Businesses
AI capabilities can help any businesses of all scales that want to automate their help desk functions. However, similar to how smaller businesses were the firsts to jump on the cloud adoption bandwagon, they’re also likelier to take risks and start automating their help desk functions before companies with deeper pockets. Thankfully, the risks that many small businesses have taken by introducing these advanced AI-powered help desk software tools into their workforces have been rewarded with –
24×7 Support from Virtual Agents
The best AI help desk software will ensure that there’s always ‘someone’ available at help desks, even if that ‘someone’ is a virtual agent. Virtual agents and chatbots can now do much more than apply NLP algorithms (Natural Language Processing) to initiate conversations. They can search for answers in data bases and recommend helpful actions to employees who need IT assistance.
Most IT help desk experts are more than happy to deflect simple queries or requests to these virtual agents. Simple tasks like accessing encrypted folders or resetting passwords don’t need physical interactions with IT, support agents. This constant de-escalation of support requests can save IT specialists, a lot of time. They can depend on their virtual compatriots that are tailored specifically to provide IT support and assistance in various scenarios.
The best AI-powered help desk software tools are extensively customized. They can resolve complex requests in real-time. More importantly, they and build and update their skills. Over time, their efficiency at handling tickets improves by considerable margins.
Efficient Prioritization and Routing of Tickets
Top-quality AI-powered help desk software tools are also driving the automatization of processes like prioritizing or categorifying tickets. These tools also ensure that incident and service request tickets are routed to the correct IT professionals in a timely manner. These tools can also make suggestions on which ticket requests require more urgent attention.
Human operators can overrule these suggestions. The authority to resolve, categorize and prioritize ticket requests is still in their hands. These AI-powered help desk software tools simply help them work more efficiently.
Build Valuable Insight
AI tools can help IT help desk departments build sets of insights that can be useful in the long run. For instance, AI tools can track the most popular types of IT-related problems that employees face. This data can help IT departments understand the weaknesses in the hardware and software systems used in the company.
Using this data, IT specialists can either improve their own performances or share the insights revealed to them by the AI tools to the rest of the workforce. For example, if the AI tools discover that password resetting issues are common occurrences for many employees, the IT department can hold a meeting discussing the best solutions for these problems and finally put an end to the high frequency of such requests.
