Smart Service Desks and Their Impact on Your Service Organization
As technology makes its way into service organizations, teams are gradually moving away from the traditional on-call ITSM service desk approach and adopting tools and technologies that make it easy for users to log incidents and get quick resolutions to problems.
Smart ITSM service desks are increasingly becoming popular, offering the appropriate mix of people, processes, and information technology to drive improved outcomes. By providing executives processes and technologies that make their jobs easier, smart service desks are allowing them to spot trends and patterns and unearth insight from every single interaction, so the best possible solution can be provided.
What is a Smart Service Desk?
A smart ITSM service desk makes use of modern tools and technologies to streamline and automate the incident logging process, reduce the probability and impact of human error, and improve resolution time and accuracy. In addition to collecting information from users and providing quick resolutions to known issues, smart service desks also find data patterns to speed up service delivery and ultimately provide an exceptional service experience. They provide an anytime, anywhere, any platform support team that drive multichannel support and communication, meaningful metrics, and a commitment to customer-centricity.
How Can You Make a Service Desk Smart?
With 33% of customers expecting issues to be resolved in a single interaction, responding to customer requests as soon as possible is no longer an option, but a requisite for success; in fact, today, overall customer experience has become a key brand differentiator.
Although the traditional approach to service desk has long been helping organizations respond to customer requests, embracing newer, more innovative approaches and technologies to incident resolution has become a business prerogative. That said, here are three things you can do to make your service desk smarter:
Communicate With Customers in Non-Traditional Ways
ITSM service desks have traditionally been about responding to customer queries and requests through emails and phone calls. However, in today’s digital era, they aren’t the most effective. In order to engage with customers in more meaningful ways, you need to lay less emphasis on email and phone and more on capabilities that can empower your customers.
- Self-Service Portals: Enable self-service portals that are accessible through mobile platforms, so customers can log incidents from anywhere, at any time, using any device.
- Online Chat Options: Provide online chat options so users can directly interact with ITSM service desk agents; online chat is a great way to reduce the wait time that is generally associated with incident logging while providing users real-time access to agents to voice their concerns.
- Social Media Platforms: Leverage social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to allow users to get security and productivity tips through virtual open house discussions with a virtual CIO and/or service SMEs; such discussions can not only help in quicker issue resolution, they can also help in fostering stronger and long-lasting relationships with your customers.
- Communicate With Customers in Non-traditional Ways: Service Desks have traditionally been about responding to customer queries and requests through emails and phone calls. However, in today’s digital era, they aren’t the most effective. In order to engage with customers in more meaningful ways, you need to lay less emphasis on email and phone and more on capabilities that can empower your customers.
Enable Intelligent, Predictive Analytics
Using a reactive approach to resolving ITSM service desk issues is no longer a practical way of servicing requests; you need to proactively identify common service requests, send automated responses, and resolve issues before they inconvenience your customers. The realm of AI and intelligent predictive analytics can play a great role in enhancing your service desk outcomes.
- Proactive Support: Use AI algorithms to spot trends and patterns in service requests and drive proactive support, so issues are resolved in time and the ITSM service desk experience is seamless.
- Anticipate Customer Needs: Integrate machine learning algorithms into your ITSM service desk architecture and anticipate customer needs, provide instant resolutions, and enhance customer satisfaction.
- Allocate Resources: Predict common service issues and intelligently allocate resources to meet needs; this way you can ensure there is always an expert available to resolve a particular type of issue and avoid running around, looking for the right resources.
Introduce Robotic Process Automation
RPA is a great technology to embrace within your service desk organization that can allow you to automate mundane, error prone ITSM service desk tasks and accelerate issue resolution time as well as customer satisfaction.
- Compliance and Consistency: Provide automated process support for human agents, so they can rapidly analyze complex data and knowledge base, recommend actions and guide agents through approved processes to ensure compliance and consistency.
- Monitor Activities: Identify common tasks across groups of people by monitoring their activities and performing simple, repetitive tasks to free human agents for more complex work.
Improve Service Desk Outcomes
As the helpdesk software market climbs to $11 billion by 2023, organizations big and small are implementing solutions to improve issue resolution efficiency. However, no matter how experienced or skilled ITSM service desk professionals are, it is not humanly possible for them to parse through the massive volume of data that gets generated from customer interactions.
With an increasing number and type of incidents being logged in, offering the best resolution in the shortest time frame is a Herculean task. Smart ITSM service desks are a great way to improve your service outcomes. By making use of predictive, intelligent analytics, they can help you anticipate customer needs, allocate the right resources to meet those needs, and offer quick, proactive support through RPA while greatly reducing the complexities and challenges that traditional service desks have long carried.
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