4 Ways Artificial Intelligence Can Improve Help Desk Management – Toolbox
As digital infrastructure’s role in business grows, IT service management (ITSM) has become increasingly crucial. In many cases, this trend has resulted in IT help desks facing more demand than they can efficiently handle. Artificial intelligence (AI) can help.
Many businesses have already realized AI’s potential in this area. As of 2019, 62% of surveyed comp…….
As digital infrastructure’s role in business grows, IT service management (ITSM) has become increasingly crucial. In many cases, this trend has resulted in IT help desks facing more demand than they can efficiently handle. Artificial intelligence (AI) can help.
Many businesses have already realized AI’s potential in this area. As of 2019, 62% of surveyed companies were considering implementing AI in ITSM, with 46% actively researching these solutions.
Still, simply knowing that other companies are pursuing this technology is insufficient evidence for its effectiveness. With that in mind, here are four specific ways AI can improve help desk management.
1. Providing 24/7 Support
The most straightforward way to integrate AI into ITSM is through chatbots. With more than 3 billion virtual assistants in use worldwide, these solutions are widely available and largely effective in their roles. Perhaps the greatest advantage of chatbots for help desks is providing around-the-clock support.
Users may encounter an issue at any time, but most IT departments don’t have enough workers to staff the help desk for 24 hours. Chatbots can fill in when human agents are unavailable, providing support whenever a user may need it.
Chatbots today are sophisticated enough to handle many basic issues. So they can resolve many IT service tickets autonomously. If an issue requires the nuance of a human worker, the chatbot can field it and pass it on accordingly.
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2. Categorizing and Routing Service Tickets
Another way AI can improve help desk management is by categorizing, prioritizing, and routing tickets. When requests come in, AI can compare them to similar past cases, determine their severity and likely outcome, then 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.
The Toronto Pearson International Airport is an excellent example of this use case. The airport deployed an AI ITSM solution to better serve its 50 million annual passengers, and it created impressive results. By learning from past tickets and agent behavior, the system categorized and routed tickets more effectively, decreasing the mean repair time from 2.4 hours to 1.39 hours.
This AI could also provide instant solutions for 30% of repetitive tasks, reducing IT staff workload and further improving their productivity. All of these improvements resulted in a customer satisfaction score of 96.5%.
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3. Informing Worker Decision Making
When these AI solutions pass service tickets along to human workers, they can still provide value. By analyzing similar situations, AI can provide the necessary context to help IT staff make the right decisions quickly.
Telecom company Rogers Communications experienced this first-hand when they implemented their ITSM AI. The company uses its system to provide a better picture of each user’s situation, including how long they’ve been a customer, what services they use, their customer journey, and the severity of the issue. All this information helps provide the right help faster.
Rogers Communications saw a 53% decrease in customer complaints in a year of using this AI solution. When IT staff have more context to understand a ticket and its potential solutions when they get it, they can solve it more effectively and efficiently.
4. Resolving Minor Infrastructure Issues
AI in ITSM can also make improvements behind the scenes. If the underlying infrastructure of a help desk’s platform or the system they provide help for has issues, it will take more than a customer experience call to fix it. AI can detect and resolve many of these problems while IT staff members focus on other tasks.
Since AI can handle more data faster than humans, it can detect infrastructure or network issues faster. If these problems aren’t overly complex, it can then automatically address them and solve them before they cause further disruption to ITSM services. If they are too complex, AI can alert the appropriate staff so they can fix the issue.
By automating these infrastructure fixes and improvements, IT teams can spend more time addressing users’ immediate needs. These quick patches will likely also reduce incoming tickets by preventing issues before they cause noticeable differences.
IT Help Desks Today Need AI
IT help desks will grow increasingly busy as digital services become more important in daily work and life. As that happens, these teams will need all the resources available to resolve issues quickly. These teams will need AI.
These four improvements illustrate how AI can improve help desk management through virtually every stage of the process. Those that implement AI effectively can see dramatic changes in their customer satisfaction and team productivity.
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