In today’s digital scenario, businesses are striving to do more with less, turning to artificial intelligence to drive maximum output with minimum expense. Companies widely use chatbot technology to accommodate the immediate attention that customers need from businesses. However — while channeling all their efforts into serving customers better, which makes the most revenue sense, companies overlook the needs of “internal customers” or employees.
Chatbots could immensely benefit IT service management and technicians who are constantly enabling the smooth running of internal operations.
The Role of Chatbots in IT Support
A survey by Gartner states that 55% of all large enterprises will deploy chatbots to increase work efficiency by 2020. An internal help desk has the same characteristics as an external one. We all need information, whether we are customers making a purchase decision or employees trying to solve customer problems. As a technology that has already enhanced customer service, chatbots have the potential to transform the way internal help desk works, turning conventional manual processes into efficient autonomous operations.
How IT Support Can Be Transformed With Intelligent Chatbots
Chatbots Can Reduce Recurring IT Issues
Traditional communication channels like emails and cloud call centers can be efficient in solving issues but at the cost of several disadvantages. Traditional channels are:
- Time-consuming and monotonous
- The wait-time for responses is high
- Too basic to offer a solution for recurring simple queries
Experts estimate that about 30 – 50% of tier-1 internal tickets are repetitive in nature. Most of these are resolved in a single interaction. But since the traditional support channels don’t have any algorithms to streamline tickets based on complexity and priority, employees end up waiting the same amount of time as any service request. The result is an otherwise productive day wasted in the form of Google searches and GitHub forums. Chatbots can help you solve repetitive questions by mapping customer queries to the internal knowledge base and fetching the right answer immediately.
Chatbots is the Best Form of Internal Self-service
Let’s face it. You will have hundreds of IT tickets coming every day, and your support team will be pressed for time. You can either hire more agents or turn to proactive self-service to prevent most tickets from getting created. Hiring may not help, as you can’t increase the number of agents in proportion to the number of tickets. It can be painfully expensive.
Chatbots are the best alternative here. You can use chatbots to deflect trivial queries and faqs being raised to live agents. When employees face problems like password reset and access provisioning, they need not wait around for 24 hours. They can use instant chatbot messaging to find a solution. Chatbots also use machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) to learn from past interactions, leading to fewer unique queries and lesser human intervention in the future.
Chatbots Make Manual Ticket Management a Thing of the Past
Manual ticket management is slowly becoming obsolete, and for good reasons. Ticket categorization and assignment can be time-consuming and recurrent. This is where chatbots become more than a walking knowledge base. By introducing AI bots into your IT service management, you shift the focus of agents from tactical manual processes to meaningful higher-value tasks. You automate the grunt work.
End-user: Create ticket -> Enter details -> Wait for response
Agent: Categorize ticket -> Assign ticket -> Respond or resolve -> Close ticket
Chatbot: Ask -> Get
Chatbots are not just for solving problems that are too trivial for human agents. They have a host of other use cases. Even when a support chatbot can’t solve a query, it simplifies the agent’s work by intelligently processing the ticket’s nature and routing it to the right agent with automation workflows. With everything handed on a plate, agents can get started with the tickets at once.
Chatbots Enhances both Internal and End-user Experience
Organizations that don’t leverage technology for IT service desk are paying skilled IT professionals to perform mundane tasks on loop. More so than it is a waste of time and money, it is a waste of talent. Even when they are not typing the same answer over and over, they are stuck moving the ticket from one status to another, setting notifications, inviting people to collaborate, and categorizing tickets. By bearing away the grunt work, AI chatbots empower the technicians and administrators to put their skills into action with work that tests and expands their knowledge.
In the absence of AI-powered technology intervention, the grunt work takes a toll on both service agents and the end-user. As for the end-user, the wait for information impedes productivity, resulting in a substantial decline in the quality of output. Worse, the rate of employee churn could go up. So, it’s not just the IT personnel who are impacted, but your entire workforce. In addition to this, virtual assistants also work 24×7 and give quick solutions in real-time, enhancing all crucial aspects of your service delivery.
The Crowd Favourite: Chatbots Save Money
What do you get by increasing the deflection rate, encouraging self-service, implementing automation, and cutting down labor and recruitment costs? Money, of course. Chatbots are instant messaging apps that could fill the voids in your system — The time it takes for the user to create a ticket and wait for the response, the time taken to get back on track, and also the time the service agent takes to process the ticket manually. However, this is just the indirect expenditure. Calculate the cost per ticket in terms of the eliminated tier-1 support tickets and labor recruitment costs and you will learn the real monetary effect of chatbots on your bottom line.
IT is Much Easier with Chatbots
A chatbot is a holy grail solution for businesses that strive to give all their end-users better and easily accessible support. One important thing to note is that human agents will still be involved in tier-1 and tier-2 requests, so replacing is not what chatbot platforms are for. Chatbots complement the agents to do their job better, and as a result, save phenomenally in terms of time, money, and efficiency.
HappyFox Chatbot for IT support is purpose-built for businesses distinct in nature but similar in purpose – to provide stellar support experiences. Get a HappyFox Chatbot demo to discuss chatbot placement in your IT help desk with a product expert!
