Today, quite a number of companies heavily rely on an IT support system to help keep their computers, applications, stores, networks, and data functioning—while ensuring that their workers are productive.

But, for many organizations, IT service management (ITSM) and support are quite expensive to operate. Businesses and their third-party ITSM organizations are now turning towards AI and automated help desks like SysAid to help make their IT support operations more cost-efficient.

By using AI-enabled systems to create an automated help desk, enterprises can now streamline their IT support while predicting, managing and solving common user challenges.

IT self-support and self-service

Typically, between 20% and 50% of IT support ticket requests are related to either resetting passwords or administrating user management requests.

According to Forrester, “the average cost for a standard password reset call is $70, and it typically takes an IT organization 24.2 hours to respond to a single support ticket." This can amount to significant costs for large organizations who have thousands of employees.

However, by utilizing an AI-enabled assistant, a large percentage of these somewhat ‘trivial’ tickets can be fully automated and the process a lot faster. With more and more IT organizations now deploying chatbots, this would provide employees with round-the-clock assistance for basic, yet urgent, IT support requests. Chatbots are becoming more intelligent and can perform quite a number of tasks, from resetting passwords to provisioning IT resources to providing on-demand support.

Furthermore, about 95% of all IT support issues can be categorized as ‘regular and predictable’, so much so that they can be easily automated by intelligent assistants that understand the content of IT support tickets.

Using natural language processing and other machine learning-enabled technologies, IT organizations are now taking advantage of solutions that can read ITSM application support tickets, chat messages, voicemails, inbound emails, and photographs to aid them in understanding the nature of the requests and automatically handling support inquiries.

Automatically detecting and handling IT support challenges

AI in help desk systems are getting better, and they now possess the ability to detect problems and automatically open troubleshooting tickets based on inbound requests. They can even carry out these tasks without passing through an established IT support channel.

With an AI-enabled automated help desk, organizations can easily monitor IT support email addresses, phone numbers, and messaging channels to instantly intervene and automatically create support tickets whenever they are required.

However, these systems go beyond simply responding and initiating support tickets. Advanced AI-enabled ITSM systems can take it a step further and identify IT solutions to appropriately resolve problems based on previously observed patterns. A typical example would be programming AI-enabled ITSM to automatically configure user accounts and systems. They could also be trained to respond to requests in a conversational manner.

In addition, AI systems have the ability to detect issues before they occur.

“Through machine learning-enabled predictive maintenance, AI-enabled automated help desks monitor for potential issues and are able to either pre-emptively resolve the problems or generate tickets to escalate support to those who can resolve the issues,” said AI enthusiast, Ronald Schmelzer in a report.

“These proactive systems are already being used to avoid the potential for catastrophic problems. AI systems can help with demand planning by predicting which IT resources will be needed to address capacity issues, resolve problems or mitigate existing support issues.”

Strengthening human support

Even for an organization with a structure that places humans as the primary contact for handling all IT support related issues, AI systems can still provide an added advantage.

Using predictive algorithms, AI enabled help desk systems can help users identify tickets that follow a particular pattern, learn how similar support items were previously resolved by human personnel and then recommend the most effective response to IT support staff.

Additionally, automated help desks can also help support incoming support tickets by performing a sentiment analysis of the users. Based on the results of that analysis and by observing past support resolution patterns, the AI-enabled ITSM system is then able to help identify the best individual capable of handling a particular incoming ticket.

Enhancing reporting accuracy

According to research by Forrester, it is reported that “enterprises have achieved only 20% of the benefits of automation as its implementation is limited.”

However, automating the workflow in an organization greatly improves the accuracy of help desk statistics by avoiding human errors and common inconsistencies in data entry. Additionally, it also relieves managers of manual processes required to collect data and correct errors.

With an automated help desk system, field defaults, auto-routing rules, and required fields are all essential tools to ensure every incident reported is properly handled in exactly the same way. This increases data accuracy for reporting purposes while improving service simultaneously.

Building collective knowledge

Having a knowledge base makes it much easier for support technicians to document fixes they have implemented—both the successful and unsuccessful attempts—so their colleagues can learn from their past experiences and avoid investing time and effort on a futile solution.

However, when a particular solution has been found to be helpful, the help desk technician can now generate a knowledge base article from the resolution in the help desk ticket. The knowledge base would then be searchable by both technicians and users, but it would equally provide a means to hide more-complex solutions from users. This ensures that they don’t attempt complicated fixes on their own.

Having a knowledge base helps the team provide consistent answers to users while making it easy and fast to respond to frequently asked questions (FAQs). Therefore, automated help desk processes can save your team time, improve speed and accuracy, and help the organization to minimize costs.