Artificial Intelligence is making automation possible in every field, including IT help desk management.
As your business grows, it can become challenging for your help desk staff to keep up with the increased volume of questions from internal as well as external customers.
Thankfully, AI-powered help desk solutions can help automate manual activities saving your IT service staff tons of time. It can also help increase the resolution speed from days to minutes.
Most companies have already realized the potential of service desk automation, with the key initiative being the reduction of help desk ticket volume for agents.
According to a CNBC report, between 75% to 90% of help desk requests are projected to be addressed by chatbots by 2024.
That said, it can be difficult for a business to join the bandwagon just because the numbers say so.
This article has put together crucial ways to convince you of how AI improves help desk management to aid your research and decision-making.
Before we jump into exploring the benefits, let’s look at what help desk management is.
What Is Help Desk Management?
A help desk management system (HDMS) is an enterprise-wide contact center solution that centralizes the management of internal and external IT service requests.
It provides an interface for help desk staff to work from, allowing them to record and track their interactions with customers and other staff members. It also enables managers to monitor performance and guide how best to handle customer queries.
With well-organized IT service management, agents are equipped to serve customers faster – delightfully.
Why Should You Power Help Desk with AI?
Artificial intelligence offers a bunch of key benefits that make it non-negotiable for modern businesses.
- AI automates repetitive, manual tasks without breaking a sweat – without needing to take breaks like your human staff.
- AI can improve customer experience by personalizing conversation and recommending relevant products or services.
- AI analyzes data at a much faster speed compared to human employees, making it possible for you to uncover buying behavior instantly.
- AI processes error-free calculations. Leverage this to make better decisions about your future investments and much more.
- AI maximizes your return on investment since your human staff can devote their valuable time to more complex jobs and building customer relationships.
These, in a nutshell, are benefits of AI helping the help desk. It equips businesses to form data-backed decisions and yield increased profits by ramping up the speed and accuracy of IT service desk management operations.
10 Ways AI Can Support Help Desk Management
AI is transforming not only ITSM but almost every possible arena. Let’s look at the top 10 ways in which AI can help take complete charge of your customer service experience.
1. Put Customer Support on Steroids, literally!
The most challenging part of IT service management is addressing tons of customer calls and help desk requests. Each customer wants to be served on their terms, which means brands need to be available to respond to them round the clock.
If that wasn’t sufficient, agents are pressed to reduce the resolution time for each service request. That’s because their rating is determined based on the number of requests served + how fast it was done.
Introducing chatbots in such a scenario can boost your customer support big time. Chatbots can handle multiple requests at a time without breaking a sweat, which means the first response time will also be instant.
Chatbots can service customers in real-time, addressing a large number of commonly asked questions 24/7 and without being irate! This takes a massive burden off the agents’ shoulders, allowing them to address other critical customer requests.
This puts you miles ahead in terms of increasing customer satisfaction with your delightful customer service and boosts your brand reputation, resulting in customer loyalty.
2. Auto-Segmenting & Routing Requests
This is another way AI can improve help desk. It segments, decides the priority, and then assigns it to an available and best-suited agent or team. At the point when requests come in, AI can weigh them with comparable previous cases, decide their seriousness and probable result, then route them to the fitting representative effortlessly.
Canada’s Toronto Pearson International Airport is a recent example – the AI-powered ITSM suite they have deployed has already started transforming their internal operations.
Doing this diminishes miscommunication because an AI-powered help desk management tool looks for the best assistance for each ticket, helping settle issues quicker.
Automation in categorizing tickets and then auto-routing them to the right department or agent improves the efficiency of the overall system. This ultimately helps bring up the customer loyalty score.
3. Equip Customers with Self-Help
According to research by Microsoft, 90% of customers expect businesses to have an online self-service knowledge base in place as they want to find answers themselves before reaching out to a support agent.
So the most effective way to offer self-help to your clients is by making a web-based information base available. The knowledge base must contain essential data that your clients need, such as:
- Help articles
- How-to videos
- Other DIY guides
Doing so will empower customers to find replies to common inquiries and resolve simple issues at their level without needing to contact the support staff.
You can take this approach a notch higher. Connect your AI-powered chatbot with your knowledge base so that the chatbot can pull relevant help article links and serve customers with the most suited information for their questions.
4. Leverage AI to Augment Human-Like Behavior
Thanks to AI, you need not keep your human staff at the forefront of customer experience anymore. Chatbots are capable of human-like interactions. Customers can hardly make out whether they are talking to a robot, given you designed the bot to respond the human way.
For AI to augment human-like interactions with customers, you have the freedom of designing the conversation flow in a way that replies sent out by bots sound natural.
This is a one-time effort and goes a long way in reducing a big chunk of customer service requests. This ultimately saves agents’ time that they can invest in requests that need human support.
Also Read: 5 Key Differences Between Custom Chatbots And Standard Chatbots
5. Optimize Cost & Resources
According to Gartner, IT spending across the globe is projected to reach $4.4 Trillion in 2022. Automation in service desk management with the help of AI can bring this spending down considerably.
For example, businesses can leverage automation to minimize service spending with the help of AI. It’s estimated that by the end of 2022, over 70% of commonly asked questions will be responded by AI without human support.
Image Source – startupbonsai
Deploying chatbots reduces the number of tickets raised, for the first thing, since most commonly asked questions will be answered either by a chatbot or the customer will find answers on the self-help portal.
This helps reduce agent turnaround time on business-critical tickets, helping you keep the loyal customers delighted and service costs lowered significantly.
6. Help Agents Make Smarter Decisions
Today, AI can analyze the background or context of a customer request. So when AI-powered bots forward specific requests to the human staff, they find value in the recommendations passed on by the chatbot.
Though the human staff may still want to scan a customer message or email and analyze the context themselves for accuracy, the help from chatbot certainly speeds up their decision-making process.
Many telecommunication companies employ ITSM AI that helps agents have insights into the customer journey, previously raised tickets, resolutions given, pages visited, products purchased, etc. For example, BCG, a global management consulting company uses AI in its IT operations and reported to have seen the first wave of digital transformation.
Cut to the chase. Having relevant information in hand gives agents a head start. They immediately know the seriousness of the issue and can quickly and efficiently extend relevant help to the customer.
7. Analyze Customer Sentiments
Unlike the old days, modern AI-powered support tools are capable of asking for relevant information from customers proactively without needing your intervention and analyzing the sentiments in real-time.
AI can now easily scrutinize customer thought patterns and provide them with the most appropriate resolution. AI does it instantly and has a sense of when to seek more data from the customer.
Connect your CMS with your AI-enabled tool so it can examine the information collected and decide an appropriate course of action, such as cross-sell or upsell to a customer based on their previous purchase history.
8. Personalize Customer Experiences
Weave experiences with personalization that customers rejoice in. AI can make predictive customization possible with which each customer can feel as if your product is tailor-made for them.
Power your business tools with AI so you can provide relevant resolutions and information to customers resulting in improved relationships.
AI brings clarity and transparency to transactions. Agents get to see rich insights, which makes their work easy. They can scan the entire customer journey on their dashboard, including the purchases made in the past, the page they are looking at in real-time, previous tickets and resolutions shared, and more.
To cut it short, if you can push a bit of human touch to your AI help desk software tools, nothing stops your brand from delighting customers and turning them into brand ambassadors.
9. Automate Data Mining
Prior to AI, it was a cumbersome task to mine customer data. However, AI-powered customer analytics tools equip businesses to pull actionable insights about their consumers.
Not only can AI help with data mining, but it also can scrutinize and process tons of insights in seconds. Businesses can leverage this technology to unravel information like what their customers are up to, what their interests are, and so on.
Backed by quality customer background data, businesses can tweak their brand campaigns for better results. They can also address future needs and requirements of customers proactively with these useful insights.
For example, you can rearrange your physical store and place the most sought-after items where shoppers are projected to spend more time. This strategy can help you reap greater sales and serve customers better.
10. Ease Help Desk Operations
Help Desk agents powered by AI-based systems are capable of multitasking. This has redefined the relationship between providers and consumers.
50% of customers hang up on the support staff due to long waiting lines, and the rest 50% of calls go unaddressed, says a report from IBM.
AI-powered systems are capable of scanning through information, seeking more data from customers, analyzing and searching for data, and performing redundant tasks.
The way it works is simple – AI learns from each instance, and as and when a similar case arises again, it knows what to do. Modern help desk systems that are equipped with AI are great at analyzing information within seconds without needing human effort at all.
AI is programmed to function based on patterns. It uses patterns to analyze data that human staff can sometimes miss and cause additional issues.
AI-based systems can auto-tag tickets based on the nature of the message sent by a customer. This becomes possible with the natural language processing technology that AI uses to read the text in an email, tag the ticket, and route it to the right department.
This helps make help desk management easy since AI can automatically sense the emotional aspect of a customer email and prioritize it. This automation saves your human staff valuable time, which they can invest in other critical tasks.
Takeaways
AI is no more an option – it’s a necessity. Most businesses have already realized that it’s critical to integrate AI in their help desk management system to be able to acquire, retain, and nurture customers to be their brand ambassadors.
By now, you stand convinced that an AI help desk solution can improve customer experience by delighting them with faster solutions to their issues. This ensures you are far ahead in your game.
It eases down the efforts put by your help desk staff in ensuring automated and fast responses to customers, auto-routing new requests to the right department, and more.
AI can also help speed up data mining, cross-selling and upselling products, and personalizing customer experience by prioritizing critical tickets with the use of sentiment analysis of the message sent out by the customer.
All this aid helps human support staff to shift focus on business-critical stuff.
