Automating IT Help Desks to Support Digital Workforce
IT help desk organizations have been designed and staffed for a small number of steady remote workers, with the bulk of telecommuters doing so primarily as a day-extending convenience. As the threat of coronavirus continues to spread, businesses around the world are all establishing a digital workforce – also known as Work From Home (WFH) policies.
With hundreds of thousands of workers connecting now remotely to IT resources like applications, file sharing, email systems or databases on private networks via a VPN, today IT infrastructure faces unprecedented challenges. For the majority of organizations that haven’t migrated yet their infrastructure entirely to public clouds like AWS, Azure and Google Cloud this requires extra network throughput, VPN hardware capacity, number of user licenses for VPN software, and more. Furthermore, many on-premise applications and services may require special configurations to be remotely accessed, as well as remote support tools need to be added or activated. The current high demand put IT infrastructure under an unprecedented pressure with high risk of fracturing.
For most employees being plunged into a full-time remote environment is both personally disruptive and technically challenging. The inability to “drop-in” to fix their typical puzzling problems, coupled with the unfamiliarity with the nuances of remote connectivity, the absence of the technical help and guidance provided by the more tech-savvy surrounding colleagues, leave frustrated employees with only one option: call into IT Help Desk or Service Desk.
What Your IT Service Desk Lacks
IT Help Desks and Service Desks are feeling the stress and are ultimately impacted by those challenges, now daily flooded with incoming calls for support. They have been designed to absorb average loads of incoming calls and service tickets … not peaks. Despite service agents be constantly overworked in extenuating shifts around the clock, waiting times and time-to-resolve are growing as the frustration level of the remote workers.
With little to no time to act, enterprises are left with not many options to overcome those challenges. The soundest – if not the only option actually left – is to accelerate the digital transformation of today’s IT Service Desks with the full adoption of modern AI Service Desk or AI Help Desk.
AI Service Desks Support Remote Workforces
AI Service Desks blends together cutting edge-technologies of AI, Automation, Cloud and Conversational Experiences to immediately deliver to enterprises a virtual workforce of fully trained agents, available 24/7 and — because offered as a SaaS — scalable dynamically to rapidly adjust to IT Service Desks demands.
AI Service Desks interface directly with a digital workforce with one goal in mind: auto-resolve their problems, in the shortest time possible (Time to Resolution or TTR) and forging in the remote worker the highest degree possible of satisfaction… and they never came short of those expectations with market well-known proved statistics of an average auto-resolution rate of 50%+ and TTR less than a minute.
Delivering Consumer-like Service Experience
The “consumer-like experience” delivered by AI Service Desks cannot be down-played neither with remote workers capable to engage immediately (no waiting times) and using the channel and device of their choice – very consumer-like experiences. AI virtual agents come live at the click of a mouse or whisper of a word and capable to carry-over human-like, multi-turns conversations with a digital workforce. Conversing with AI virtual agents is like interacting with real service agents…this is how much Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Natural Language Understanding (NLU) technologies have improved over the last few years.
AI virtual agents can be sympathetic to users while thorough in understanding their intents, and very effective in automating the end to end resolution of their problems, either by serving them highly-relevant knowledge in response to their requests, also known as conversational AI, or triggering directly from conversations simple to complex multi-domains workflows, end-to-end, also known as conversational RPA. With such technology, most of today’s incoming demand to IT Service Desks can be offloaded and auto-resolved by AI virtual agents and leave the physical IT Service Desk agents (humans) to triage and resolve the fewer but more challenging problems.
AI Service Desks bring tremendous value to the overall ecosystem of employees (internal and working remote), service agents, and customers; and it achieves it without any increase in enterprise OPEX spend — the more requests it can auto-resolve, the lower will be the total costs around IT support and customer services. Furthermore, the SaaS nature of AI Service Desks make them an ideal solution for times when no time is left for actions; it requires zero infrastructure to get up and running, and hence it can be quickly implemented and customized to meet any enterprise needs.
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