IT, the cornerstone of digital transformation, brings benefits and concerns. Complex or trivial, every IT issue is a hindrance for employees to be productive. Only organizations with really efficient IT support methods can meet employees’ demands and address the pain points they find most frustrating. What’s equally crucial in IT support is process compliance.
What is Process Compliance?
Support teams have their own unique processes and policies to adhere to. Larger organizations tend to have tighter guidelines for internal support. Process compliance is the regulation and maintenance of these guidelines when executing the support processes. It helps you keep things in order and ensure risk management.
Why is Process Compliance Important?
IT support ranges from resolving a simple query to more complex requests involving hardware/software issues. Many of these issues depend on vendors, procurement teams, and other stakeholders, making transparency and audit management crucial. Process compliance helps you ensure that every step involved in a process is accounted for.
Process compliance is more crucial than ever in remote and hybrid-remote work environments. Employees prefer ad hoc messaging on apps like Slack to seek real-time support. Say a whole organization is on Slack or Microsoft Teams. Employees may find it easier to message someone for help than to raise a ticket. Process compliance takes a hit when support processes become unofficial and lack accountability.
How Process Compliance Impacts IT Support?
Employees demand organizational support that is fast, frictionless, and efficient. Creating a ticket is a drawn-out process. Once created, it takes time for the ticket to get routed to the right agent. Then comes the waiting time, interactions, and resolutions.
When strapped for time, your employees will likely seek support in the easiest way possible, like ad hoc messaging on Slack. But many a time, they can’t reach an agent on Slack. And the other times, they can’t reach the right agent. Surveys reveal that, employees are also happy with a handy article or intuitive self-service, as they need not rely on outside help. Agents may miss Slack notifications, as they already have loads of official tickets to work on and due to the hassle of complying with business processes on Slack.
Business Process Owners create stringent processes and guidelines considering aspects like best practices, compliance to norms, and ease of audit maintenance. They set the rules a support team member should follow when executing the support processes. Process owners also take up the role of auditors to perform regular check-ins. Process owners and support agents are responsible for ensuring that every support activity in the organization follows the predefined norms.
IT Support Agents are the ones who carry out process compliance. Their performance is evaluated by the quality of responses, the speed of resolution, and their adherence to the process checklists. IT teams benefit the most from successful process compliance, as they bear the most brunt of Slack IT support going wrong. Some of the common pain points they face are:
- Unaccounted Effort: Since everyone is a text away in ad hoc messaging, employees tend to reach out to support agents without creating a ticket. It puts them in a delicate spot. If they respond, it causes additional effort. If they don’t respond, they risk a good employee CSAT.
- Systems Updates: Many a time, IT issues need screen-sharing and closer interactions. Ad hoc messaging makes this easy. However, support agents need to transfer all the information onto the helpdesk for future reference during system updates. Sometimes, agents would have to retype every response from the ad hoc interaction in the emails, particularly when audit officials consider email the only official communication mode. Unless agents do this, they have no single source of truth to rely on when a problem arises.
- Manual Ticket Management: For the sake of compliance, after every conversation, support agents have to change the status of the ticket in the helpdesk.
- Unregulated Ticket Flow: Ad hoc messaging on Slack often mandates support agents to respond within a short period of time. They get every issue together, small or big, unregulated. They also can’t configure Slack to triage or deflect common support tickets and FAQs. Agents may feel frustrated and unproductive in the end.
You need the right solutions to bring the accountability of a help desk to ad hoc messaging so your teams continue to manage support on Slack without breaking process compliance.
How to Manage Compliance When Doing IT Support on Slack?
Slack messaging can be quick and efficient, but whatever time your employees save will quickly evaporate through unaccountable errors and failed processes.
Conversational ticketing can help.
Conversational ticketing solutions can deflect common tickets with AI-powered deflection and allows agents to handle issues within collaboration apps like Slack and Microsoft Teams. By adopting conversational ticketing, you can make process compliance a priority by bringing the best of help desk software to Slack. You can enable your employees to raise a ticket within Slack with a simple message and an emoji. Every ticket, every interaction, and every step is documented, so if there is a problem with process compliance, you can find what went wrong easily.
MetricNet survey says that the average service desk spends 68.5% of its budget on staff and only 9.3% on technology.
The difference shows that some companies are still not on board with modernizing IT support, probably due to the fear of process compliance failure. But with a conversational ticketing solution like HappyFox Assist AI, you can easily manage compliance when doing Slack IT support.
How HappyFox Assist AI Helps you Manage Process Compliance?
The benefits of Assist AI transcend process compliance. It helps you drive service metrics that matter to your business.
1. Audit Maintenance
Assist AI captures every activity involved in a resolution. With all information documented and synced up, half of the agents’ work is done in managing process compliance. They can finally address Slack requests with their effort accounted for.
2. Best Resolution Times
You can provide better first response and resolution times. Assist AI deflects repetitive tickets with AI-powered bots and integration with your internal knowledge base. When bots can’t deflect, they escalate the ticket to a support agent. Since end-users can handle ticket creation, interactions, and resolutions in one platform, the resolution times speed up.
3. Agent Satisfaction
Resolving non-ticket requests on Slack can be exhausting. Your agents may feel demotivated, especially when the additional effort goes unrecognized. With Slack integration, Assist AI records every effort taken by your support agent and adds it to their day-to-day target. This ensures an even distribution of workload to your agents. They won’t be haunted by Slack ticket notifications anymore.
4. Employee Satisfaction
Assist AI – Slack integration makes Slack support a breeze for employees. They can easily convert a direct message into a ticket by adding an emoji (🎫). They get self-service articles and guides right in the inbox or get access to an agent, depending on the issue’s complexity. Assist AI essentially improves employee engagement, resolution speed, self-service quality, and consequently, employee CSAT.
Assist AI has more coming on the way. Currently, your agents need to manually update certain ticket information outside Slack before closing the ticket. With added workflow automation capabilities and use cases, you can enable your agents to make changes in the ticket right from the Slack channel. This can save them time and make ticket management easier.
Takeaways
Employee expectations around IT support are evolving over the years. Some organizations place their entire focus on providing stellar customer support as it makes the most revenue sense. But delivering sound employee support is just as important to business growth and to create an environment of happy, empowered employees.
Good IT support is the cornerstone of employee success. With HappyFox Assist AI, you can provide IT support within Slack, reduce agent workload, improve resolution times, all while managing process compliance. You can also ensure data consistency across platforms and achieve exceptional IT support well within the organizational norms.
Schedule a HappyFox Assist AI demo to transform Slack IT support for your employees and agents!
