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Your service desk has a heavy workload and the important responsibility of troubleshooting issues submitted by customers and employees. Service desk automation can optimize their productivity by removing manual responsibilities from employee workloads so they can focus on more complex problems.
The Service Desk Institute found that most IT services desks are logging at least 1,000 incidents each month, with 17% experiencing more than 7,000 incidents on average. You can save significant amounts of time when logging incidents is an automated process rather than a manual one.
Explore the benefits of service desk automation and how you can customize it to serve your company’s needs.
What Is Service Desk Automation?
Service desk automation is a process that optimizes your ticketing system to avoid repetitive manual tasks. Automated service desk systems allow customer service agents to resolve customer issues with less effort so they can focus on troubleshooting tasks that need more time and attention. This shift is beneficial for customers and other employees alike.
Benefits Of Implementing Service Desk Automation
The global help desk software market was valued at $9.9 billion in 2021 and is projected to reach $26.8 billion by 2032, according to research by Future Market Insights. Companies, especially at the enterprise level, are investing in service desk automation offerings.
Implementing service desk automation can help you experience:
Faster Response Times
Automated ticketing systems address the reality that 80% of tickets are standard repeatable questions, or questions that have been asked many times.
An automated help desk solution collects the necessary information and routes an individual to the right employee, thus decreasing the response time for those tickets. A modern knowledge management platform also empowers workers to find the information they need. When workers can troubleshoot their own issues, help desk employees can address more complex problems on other tickets.
The overall result is faster ticket response times, which increase customer satisfaction. HubSpot research found that 90% of customers highly value an “immediate” response to customer service questions, with 60% defining “immediate” as no more than 10 minutes for support requests.
Better Customer Experience
Customers have more choices than ever before, but they reward prompt service. A Khoros report found that 83% of customers will increase their loyalty to responsive brands that resolve complaints.
Much of the automated help desk experience focuses on creating a better experience for customers through outcomes such as faster response times, reduced errors and improved communication. The employee experience also benefits from automation. An IDC survey found 85% of respondents agreed that improving employee experience and engagement led to better outcomes for customers and higher revenue.
Reduces Errors
Gartner found that poor data quality cost organizations an average of $12.9 million in 2021. Data gathering can often require manual work for companies that haven’t invested in help desk automation.
Manual processes increase the likelihood of human error, such as setting the wrong priority for a ticket. Automated workflows improve the speed and accuracy of service desk processes by reducing the possibility of human-introduced errors and inconsistencies.
Accurate Reporting
Manually measuring your team’s performance can lead to errors, bias and improper analysis. Help desk automation makes it easy to gather, analyze and present the right metrics in the right context, giving your managers a holistic view of team strengths and performance.
Improved Communication
Many IT departments can struggle with poor or insufficient communication. Service desk automation improves communication by sending ticket status updates at key points in the process. For example, these systems can send alerts when your ticket has been resolved or if you need to take action to move forward.
Customers also benefit when they can access your company’s knowledge. According to research by Aspect Software, now Alvaria, 73% of customers want to solve their own product or service issues. To do that, they need access to a customer service portal or knowledge management system. By empowering customers to access this information, you reduce the number of low-level queries previously being routed to your service desk staff.
When customers can self-service issues before contacting your help desk, there will be fewer tickets submitted. The same principle applies to internal help desks when employees can access information to find answers on their own.
For example, Starmind helped Swiss Re — one of the world’s leading reinsurance companies — increased the efficiency of customer service by consolidating the access of more than 200 corporate services on a self-service portal called ContactOne, with Starmind integration. Swiss Re achieved a 12% reduction in tickets after integrating Starmind into its platform. The benefits of Starmind compound over time, with Swiss Re seeing increased engagement and a higher volume of incoming questions and answers.
Cost-Cutting
The costs of your service desk can be calculated on a per-ticket basis across categories. Reducing the number of tickets through service desk automation can result in visible expense reduction.
Some types of tickets are more expensive than others. In North America, for example, walk-up tickets average $37.51 per ticket, while voice tickets average out to $17.19 per ticket, according to MetricNet analysis. By contrast, self-help portals cost an average of only $2.37 per ticket.
Service Desk Automation Ideas
Your most valuable asset is your employees. Tech trends such as service desk automation support that premise by automating laborious and low-level tasks. These benefits aren’t limited to time saved or specific job duties, however. You can also use automation to improve the employee experience from their first days at your company.
Consider these four service desk automation ideas for your company.
Onboarding Automation
Onboarding is how your employees are welcomed into your company, and this can leave a lasting impression that affects engagement and retention. An essential component of the onboarding stage is supplying new employees with the knowledge they need to do their jobs correctly.
However, Gallup data shows only 12% of U.S. employees rate their onboarding as successful. Almost 20% had a bad onboarding or didn’t receive any formal introduction.
Automating your onboarding process can decrease delivery time, reduce support costs and improve cost efficiency. Automation collects all the knowledge that new employees need in one place and manages low-level tasks like password resets without the need for human intervention.
Effective Knowledge Base
Employees can struggle to find relevant information through traditional knowledge systems, especially when they have to navigate multiple channels. Starmind’s 2022 Forrester Opportunity Snapshot found that 63% of employees spend too much time searching for the right people or information.
Those employees could be new hires who ask the same questions repeatedly or don’t know who to ask. Organizational silos can also lead to wasted time searching for information when people can’t locate or access information outside of their support team network.
The solution is to create a modern knowledge management platform specifically for your employees. Presenting your company’s knowledge in a self-service portal makes knowledge more accessible and less dependent on any specific employee, especially if that individual departs.
A knowledge sharing platform retains knowledge, allows for new information to be added and decreases time spent searching for information. Companies that emphasize agile transformation strategies are more likely to invest in platforms that close knowledge gaps, break down silos and foster greater collaboration between employees.
Automated Ticket Routing
A ManageEngine survey found that 59% of U.S. business executives are leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to improve customer service. Service desk automation enables the automatic assignment of tickets to the correct service desk agents or department.
An automated system can respond to tickets based on importance, then reassign tickets to customer service personnel or automatically answering service requests. Automated ticket allocation reduces average response time and can improve key performance indicators related to ticket resolution.
Automated Feedback Process
Service desk automation can improve the collection of customer feedback while also making it easier to track. Build surveys into your regular processes with automation that creates and sends surveys with less manual intervention.
An automatic feedback process also collects and analyzes customer feedback without the implicit bias that’s inherent in human-led, manual analysis. These automated insights can help you pinpoint where your service management can improve.
Service Desk Automation Is the Future
Service desk automation helps companies automate otherwise time-consuming processes, reduce errors and save money — all while improving the customer experience and employee engagement.
Starmind helps organizations retain the collective knowledge and avoid the unnecessary creation of tickets for issues that have already been asked and answered. Starmind enables self-resolution, reduces ticket volumes and accelerates employee time-to-solution.
Explore Starmind’s service desk automation solutions.
