A Complete Guide on Service Desk Automation

Automation is evolving day by day and now it has become a central part of every organization’s strategic plan.

The biggest myth about introducing automation into the business environment especially for ITSM (IT Service Management) is that it reduces human capital.

Automation standardizes mundane processes and allows IT employees to focus on more productive activities that require their attention, skills, and knowledge.

Well, like all the other industries, IT, has also gone through a rapid digital transformation due to COVID-19 situations.

During this pandemic, a perfect ITSM platform such as Motadata ServiceOps with in-built service desk automation features can add tremendous value and enhance efficiencies.

What Is Service Desk Automation?

Service desks were designed to reduce the efforts employees do for mundane tasks and help businesses reach their core goals of providing excellent customer service.

Still, you will see many customers complaining – “We are always stuck with a long queue of tickets.”

To avoid such complaints, businesses need to upgrade their Service Desks and replace them with automated services. Why not take full advantage of AI capabilities and use most of them for business growth?

Service desk automation simplifies the ticketing process and eliminates the repetition of manual tasks.

Useful automation minimizes the efforts of service desk technicians in resolving incoming tickets.

They can assign and escalate tickets, send, and receive automated notifications for certain tickets, share automated emails for a survey, and a lot more than you can think.

Why Should You Consider IT Service Desk Automation?

Automation in the ITSM space can help you unlock value by:

• Providing prompt resolutions to requests or incidents
• Offering better communication at each step
• Saving Costs
• Eliminating pricey, timewasting human errors
• And thus, Improving User/Customer Experience

Out-of-the-box Automations with Motadata ServiceOps ITSM platform

Automation is not a new thing that no one knows about it. The best example of this is the industrial revolution when manufacturing operations and other operations transitioned from hand-made operations to the automated machines. Now, this automation comes to the service desk and help desk solutions as well. Here we have listed the most effective service desk automation ideas that will help you implement better services.

A service desk automation allows businesses to make their supporting process streamlined that requires minimal human intervene. Here are 10 ways businesses can easily automate their service desk and get the most out of an automated service desk software.

#1 Autoclassification, Assignment, and Routing of Tickets

In IT support teams, tickets get assigned to the wrong technician all the time. Moreover, technicians spend some time triggering and assigning new requests. This not only wastes time the support team’s time but also elongates the response and resolution times, negatively impacting the customer experience.

Motadata ServiceOps provides intelligent ticket routing capabilities supported by a smart load balancing algorithm. As soon as a new request comes in, the platform automatically assigns the ticket to the right technician based on the level of expertise, priority, availability, department, location, and workload of the technician. This makes ticket allocation more precise and reduces the need for dedicated resources just to manage tickets.

#2 Automated Workflows

Since automation works across tasks that are often redundant, the cost savings from deploying such initiatives is not very tangible. However, such endeavors’ actual benefits are indirect and long-term as the employees become available to work on more complex, value-producing tasks.

The Motadata ServiceOps ITSM platform can help you automate standard requests by enabling you to easily create automated workflows through a codeless workflow designer. Furthermore, the ITSM solution transforms the standard requesting procedure into an e-commerce-like experience where users can simply go to the platform and access the services they seek. All the requests are empowered by supporting workflows in the backend which ensure relevant permissions and automatic rule-based initiations.

With Motadata ServiceOps, you can make sure that all the services your organization has to offer are standardized and integrated with the right workflows, approvals, and SLAs to ensure efficiency without risking operational compliance and all tickets are automatically lodged, prioritized, and resolved using backend workflows. This way, the need for human intervention gets eliminated.

#3 Email Forwarding

When an ITSM platform like Motadata ServiceOps is integrated with a Network Monitoring Tool like Motadata IIP, the tool can be configured to generate and send emails with relevant set request fields and custom error notes in the email content to the ITSM platform, when an issue occurs.

This gives your IT support team a heads-up and enough time to respond and start the resolution process even before a user reports the issue. Tickets raised directly from such monitoring tools not only streamline ticket response management for IT issues but also end up saving your team’s time.

Moreover, Motadata ServiceOps ITSM enables your technicians to allow or disallow emails from certain domains and create and respond to tickets through phones when they are working remotely and do not have access to the ITSM portal.

#4 Automated Alerts & Notifications

To provide instant support and offer seamless customer service, you need to keep your representatives active as well as keep your customers notified about the same.

What is the purpose of alerts and notifications of the service desk? 

Notifications are predefined automated alerts, messages, or responses sent to the customers and staff members when a certain condition is met. These notifications can be sent in the form of emails or text messages and enable users to track the progress of a ticket.

An automated help desk software provides multiple conditions under which you can send and receive email notifications. Here are some popular types of notifications:

• Auto-Response to Customer on New Ticket Creation
• Alert to Customer on User Response
• New Ticket Notification
• Alert to User on Customer Response
• Alert Received by users on Internal Note
• Ticket Assignment Notification

#5 Escalate Incidents

Every customer wants to escalate the incidents as soon as possible to resolve their problems at the first phase either by contacting an agent or sending an email. However, every time it might not be possible to get the resolution at a faster speed due to the complexities of some issues.

For that, you might need agents to escalate tickets to senior representatives when they do not have the required expertise, knowledge, or authority to tackle a customer problem by themselves.

Now, handling manual ticketing escalation can create many problems than resolving them. 

Some of your representatives might not know the steps they need to take while escalating issues, or whom they should assign the issues in the first place. That is where automation can help in escalating major issues to the right people at the right time. By implementing automation, you can create ticket escalation rules for aligning the incidents to the appropriate team members in your operational hierarchy.

For example, if a customer has requested maintenance, it can be automatically redirected to the maintenance service manager who has the authority to assign a maintenance team.

#6 Effective Knowledge Base

When you create a self-service knowledge base it is considered as one of the best service desk automation services. The effective knowledge base functions as a centralized hub for creating, storing, and sharing relevant content with your employees and customers.

“77% of customers have used a self-service portal to resolve their issues.” –  A Microsoft Study

An effective knowledge base can enhance your customer service process in many ways such as:

• Customers and employees can resolve their basic issues on their own
• It can reduce the ticket volume and save the valuable time of the agents
• It also ensures the smooth and delightful self-service experience

For a more enhanced customer experience, you can always optimize your knowledge base as per the keywords. This optimization will help customers in finding self-help articles and FAQs that will be more relevant to the issues they face. Moreover, an automated recommendation facility will also show them the results based on their past histories, which initially enhance their self-service experience.

#7 Canned Responses through a Smart Chatbot

Let’s first understand what canned responses are. Canned responses are predefined answers or messages for the commonly asked questions such as queries related to sales, looking for some marketing material, or seeking customer support.

Such canned responses are used to engage customers while ongoing conversation to deliver quicker and reliable responses.

With canned responses, agents can provide accurate information quickly that makes the conversation with the clients more effective. Using such responses accurately also improves the agent’s productivity. These responses can be used for chats, messages, or emails through intelligent chatbots for boosting teams’ key performance indicators.

Chatbots nowadays has been an important part of any website. Either it is an ITSM service platform or one independent website. Chatbots are designed to have relatively sophisticated and point-to-point conversations.

Business owners can’t rely completely on the programmatic nature of traditional chatbots as out-of-the-box questions can start to give random answers. However, with time, Chatbots have become more intelligent and more casual.

The AI-driven chatbot comes with improvements and benefits. The responses and questions are programmed based on the previously asked questions. Intelligent chatbots also learn from the questions and answers customers provide.

These chatbots are designed to communicate giving a human touch independently without any human intervention.

The best way to use chatbots is for canned responses to guide users with frequently asked questions and help them navigate through the platform.

#8 Automated Updates & Backups

All the platforms that are integrated with IT infrastructure require efforts to manage the software installed and maintain the data backups as well. In this case, the ITSM platform also needs to take care of background operational needs. Automated updates through Patch Management can help businesses in being up to date with their installed software.

Not only this, but automated backups are also equally needed to save your valuable data and keep it safe from any virus attacks.

#9 Get an Accurate Understanding of User-Experience with Automated Feedback Process

While certain resolution processes have been automated, they can still be optimized using customer feedback. In most organizations, customer feedback is often replaced by proxy measures such as cost per ticket, average time-to-resolution, etc. These measures are often indicative of technician performance, but they do not paint the complete picture. E.g., if your teams have high-resolution rates but low-resolution times which the teams attained by closing unresolved tickets, then the extent and degree of tickets that were not resolved are not reflected using such measures.

While feedback surveys are a more accurate way to gauge customers’ experience, they are not always a high priority for your technicians who are always bombarded with more urgent service requests and new incident tickets.

Motadata ServiceOps makes it easy to capture feedback! The platform can help you create workflows that will automatically trigger and send feedback surveys to the customers as soon as your technician resolves a ticket.

Your IT Service Desk teams are loaded with several tasks and processes, every day. Many of which can be easily automated through an intelligent ITSM platform like Motadata ServiceOps. Motadata ServiceOps ITSM software provides adaptive functionalities for you to automate the most redundant, resource-consuming, yet important tasks to enhance your technicians’ productivity and save resources and costs.

To see what value our ITSM platform can bring your organization, download Motadata ServiceOps today!