How AI Can Improve Help Desk Management
What is Help Desk Management?
Help desk management is the process of managing, overseeing, and administering the activities and operations of a help desk or support center. It entails managing and coordinating the support delivered to customers or internal users, to address their inquiries, issues, or requests for assistance.
The Gartner Glossary defines help desk management as a group of services that provide centralized information and support management service to control a business’s internal or external queries and operational problems about IT-related processes, policies, systems, and usage. The services typically encompass product support capabilities, including essentials of hardware and software support, logging of problem issues, and results analysis (scrutinizing the results of calls taken to resolution of those calls for entry into self-help database, problem trends, and suggested permanent fixes); dispatch of service technicians or parts; training coordination; and other IT-related issues.
A help desk is the original point of contact for customers and employees alike. When a customer needs answers or encounters an issue interacting with the company, the help desk is where they turn. Likewise, when a company employee needs assistance to upgrade security on a laptop, troubleshoot a printer, or provide them access to a new system, it is the help desk who responds.
The fundamental aim of help desk management is to deliver timely and effective resolution for customer or end user problems and inquiries while preserving high levels of customer satisfaction. It encompasses a variety of tasks such as ticket management, assignment of support agents, monitoring performance metrics, optimizing workflows, and advancing the overall support experience in a cost-effective, efficient manner.
A Help Desk Professional may be called upon to:
Mount new technologies and teach end users how to operate them.
Provide remote technical support via the internet or phone.
Backup and restore files.
Sustain operating systems by repairing hardware and configuring software.
The top three skills need to be a successful help desk professional are:
Extraordinary Customer Service - More and more organizations are now choosing exceptional customer service skills over technical ability, with the idea that technical skills can be learned, whereas customer empathy, more often than not, cannot.
Fast Aptitude for Learning – While it is easy to require a computer background or technical skills, driven individuals with a natural curiosity and are quick studies are often more successful here. People that enjoy conducting strong research and an adeptness to combine and view data in a unique way.
Exceptional Interpersonal Skills – Active listener that needs to be able to “walk a mile in your customers’ or your end user’s shoes” to understand their needs and be able to empathize with the situation.
Why Integrate AI in help desk management?
AI-powered virtual assistants and chatbots supply important, round-the-clock support, ensuring consistent and prompt responses to user queries.
They also empower intelligent automation and efficiency gains in help desk management workflows. Machine learning algorithms can rapidly evaluate historical data to identify patterns, predict ticket volumes, prioritize, and route incoming tickets for faster resolution.
By employing AI in help desk management, it allows businesses to streamline operations, enrich customer experiences, and improve agent productivity. It also facilitates quicker response times, slashes costs, and allows support teams to focus on providing high-value support where human expertise is needed.
AI has helped businesses prevent repetitive tasks, boost productivity, offer 24×7 support, and delight customers with the personalized interactions they seek. AI with virtual assistants has taken a lot of pressure off agents’ shoulders, providing more time for them to focus on other urgent tasks. Similarly, AI is also helping support teams by automatically routing, setting priorities, and sorting help desk tickets.
Utilize Chatbots
A chatbot is a sophisticated computer application that can sustain human-like conversations with website visitors. Bots can be built to generate leads, assist customers, or help internal employees with their queries. Bots can also engage a paid or free text-to-speech tool, enhancing the user experience by transforming text responses into spoken words for seamless communication. They also use text to identify specific words and phrases, share smart responses, and take appropriate follow-up actions.
AI-powered chatbots can process common and repetitive customer queries, providing instant responses, freeing up support agents for more complex issues. But how exactly does it work? AI chatbots exploit natural language processing and machine learning algorithms to fathom and respond to user queries. They analyze text input, identify user intent, extract relevant information, and generate appropriate responses.
The bot also continually learns from each interaction using training data, user feedback, and historical conversations to improve its comprehension and distill its responses, enabling a more personalized and efficient user experience.
Customers can face issues during any time of the day or night, so a 24/7 AI Chatbot can assist in solving frequently asked questions whenever your customers need a response.
Incorporate Knowledge Base Articles
A knowledge base is a compilation of resources that allows customers to answer their own questions about your product or service. AI can also create self-service knowledge constructs by automating the process of organizing and updating information. Natural language processing and machine learning algorithms are used to analyze and categorize content, making it searchable and easily accessible to users.
AI can also recommend relevant articles or solutions based on user queries, enhancing your customer experience, and reducing the need for more service agent intervention. A simple example is when a customer types the words “refund policy” in their query, AI can automatically choose relevant refund-related articles, FAQ pages, video tutorials, and share them with the visitor.
Additionally, AI can assist by continuously revising and improving the knowledge base by dissecting user feedback and behavior, ensuring that the information provided remains correct and up to date. This is the ideal approach for making sure your customers have the most accurate information they need at the moment of their query.
Analyze Sentiment
AI harnesses natural language processing and machine learning methods to determine the sentiment or emotional tone communicated through text. This course of action involves probing the text for sentiment indicators, such as words, key phrases, or even emojis, and assigning positive, negative, or neutral labels predicated on these indicators. Machine learning models are educated on large datasets with labeled sentiments to learn patterns and make accurate predictions.
Sentiment analysis tools help your business better grasp customer opinions, reactions, and brand perception, allowing you to gain valuable insights, make data-motivated decisions, and improve customer experiences.
Improve Ticket Routing
AI can review incoming support tickets and categorize them based on urgency, complexity, or other specific criteria, ensuring faster response times and efficient resource allocation. During the analysis AI collects historical ticket data, extracts relevant features, trains a machine learning model, and predicts the category and urgency of new tickets.
This aids in assigning tickets to the right teams or agents and ensures timely resolutions, boosting efficiency and customer satisfaction. This is a terrific way to help your agents concentrate their efforts where needed and improve the efficiency of your help desk. The benefits of improved ticket routing are:
Regulate Large Volume Requests from a Centralized Location - An effective helpdesk ticketing software allows the business to record and regulate incoming support requests. Agents can then influence the system to ease the management of support cases while making sure that all customer concerns are addressed. Advanced ticketing systems available today also prioritize tickets, enabling support agents to sort requests and determine which they should handle first.
Maintains Customer Support Standards - Some ticketing systems can integrate SLAs (service level agreements). SLAs are answerable for stating customer expectations clearly and informing them when their queries will be responded to. Further, your customer support team can utilize SLAs to establish goals they should be working on, enabling them to accomplish outlined service targets and offer the best possible service.
Unifies Interactions into a Single Thread - Ticketing systems are designed to operate with minimal effort in the current multiple channel industry. When delivering customer support to customers through a wide range of channels your team can leverage the best helpdesk ticketing system to unify customer-related communications into a single thread. With this system, your customers can use any channel to reach your customer support team. All interactions will be logged in the same location, regardless of the channel they employ or the agent they reach.
Delivers Past Customer Interactions - According to a recent survey, over 75% of customers believe that customer service representatives should be aware of their past purchases and interactions. More than half of the people who participated in the survey stated that only a few customer reps had the data available to solve their problems effectively. Service agents can leverage an automated ticketing management system to access all the information of previous communication with each client. This way, the history they require is always readily available, allowing them to offer a smooth customer service experience. Customers do not have to repeat their issues with each new contact.
Enhanced Agent Productivity and Efficiency - Automated ticketing systems heighten organization, enabling the agents to handle tickets based on their level of skill. Further, they can identify tickets that need fast resolution based on their prioritization. Adopting advanced systems makes the team more productive and efficient, accelerated response times, and leaves little room for error.
Fosters Smooth and Adequate Team Collaboration - An effective ticketing software facilitates ample cooperation among your team of customer service representatives. It provides comprehensive collaboration features like dispatching tickets to more experienced members in the team, incorporating internal messaging, and attaching personalized notes on tickets visible to the support agents only. This shared visibility feature on ticketing systems enables different agents and supervisors to collaborate on the same issue or discuss how to solve issues fast.
Enhanced Communication with Clients - By centralizing interactions in a single location, ticketing management systems facilitate communication between support agents and clients. Clients can receive the ticket via email and communicate with their assigned agent. When there is a need to transfer the interaction to a different customer rep, the subsequent rep will have the previous communication ready to ease the process.
Voice Recognition
AI-powered voice recognition technology is already a common tool used to improve help desk efficiency. When you call a large company, you are often welcomed by an interactive voice response (IVR) that asks you certain prompts to help you or direct you to an agent who can. IVR is an automated phone system that greets callers with a prerecorded message and even provides menu selections for routing their calls to the appropriate department. IVR can also support multilevel menus, allowing for gathering and noting additional information before routing the call to a specific team. IVR can also be used for self-service options, such as answering simple questions or taking actions that would otherwise require human assistance, and for payment processing.
Often, IVR gives the caller the option of speaking or typing their response. Speaking your response is much faster than typing. You can voice an answer three times faster than you can type it and the result is more accurate.
If you have had reason to call your cable provider recently you probably were greeted by an interactive voice system. The AI bot used your phone number to access your contact information and then used a voice-activated keyword to direct you to the right service department.
Other simple applications of voice recognition include Siri or Alexa. You can use Siri to find a recipe for you while you are cooking or ask Siri to phone your friend or turn on the lights for you.
AI-powered IVR can aid your business cut costs by automating routine calls such as appointment booking inquiries, order confirmations, and frequently asked questions. Moreover, AI can detect high-empathy calls, prioritize them, and automatically route them to the right agent. IVR can improve your help-desk efficiency by eliminating easily automatable tasks. This is yet another way AI can prioritize complex calls and assign them accordingly.
Today, speech to text conversion is also being applied to compose emails quickly and efficiently, provide helpful notes in the form of transcripts from meetings and events or to provide access without a key.
Utilize Help Desk Automations
By using AI, helpdesk automation tools a business can manage customer inquiries and resolve emails, phone calls, tickets, and other support
chats. AI is already having an impact on helpdesks, especially for company support teams in HR, IT, or Customer Service roles. Helpdesks powered by AI and automation become smarter because they continuously learn from humans. The best helpdesk automation tools can deflect around 90% or more of the basic questions.
As customers and employees field more questions via chat and email, automating responses that do not require human intervention saves a business a ton of time and money. Instead of adding more help desk agents, automated service desks can manage FAQs and route customers to the right place without ever having to wait for a live chat agent or an email response.
AI can also analyze incoming support tickets and categorize them based on urgency, complexity, or other criteria, ensuring faster response times and efficient resource allocation. The AI collects historical ticket data, extracts relevant features, trains a machine learning model, and predicts the category and urgency of new tickets.
This helps assign tickets to the right teams or agents and ensures timely resolutions, improving efficiency and customer satisfaction. This is a great way to help your agents focus their efforts where needed and improve the efficiency of your help desk.
Better Agent Routing
This feature’s usefulness depends on how many service tickets your business receives. For larger businesses with small teams, managing hundreds of tickets is just not feasible.
AI can route support tickets to the most appropriate support agent based on their expertise and workload, ensuring faster resolution and better customer experiences.
Most businesses are staffed with agents with varying degrees of experience and expertise. Given that fact, it makes sense to route different customers to the agent with the knowledge and skill set to manage the specific call appropriately.
Better agent routing allows simpler queries to be directed to less experienced agents, while more complex issues can be directed to agents with far more experience under their belts. Further, AI and computer analytics can help determine whether a live agent is needed at all even before a call is routed to an agent.
Predictive call routing also helps in reducing hold times, preventing the necessity to pass on customers to another agent, and improving the overall customer experience. Predictive call routing will also produce higher first contact resolutions, reducing queue, agent overload, and refining contact center efficiencies. Over time, AI becomes more adept at matching customers or end users to the right agents, allowing for better responses to customers and a more optimal experience.
Future Applications
There already has been a great deal written about how Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, and chatbots are impacting desk management today, but less about the future impact. A look ahead at the advantages in the future include:
Maximizing existing people resources – The technology will predict future workloads and patterns, leading to improved resource planning.
Predicting Future Needs/Trends – Identifying and quantifying the demand for new/existing help desk services, or the future levels that will be required.
Improved Effectiveness of Search – learning from previous searches and resulting interactions will lead to more accurate search results and the pro-active delivery of self-service solutions.
Proactively Improve Services – As products, services and target audiences change, predictive analytics will identify future high-impact issues.
Identifying and Addressing New Opportunities to Improve – As stated earlier, AI is learning from each encounter and will no doubt, uncover future opportunities that have yet to be identified and defined.
AI Conclusion
AI enables you to streamline support with automated resolutions for an exceptional service experience. Push a new level of automation, speed, and availability with an all-encompassing bot. The process revolutionizes information retrieval with relevant ranking, intent, and query understanding in natural language. The advantages of integrating AI into your delivery of help desk interactions can be summarized as:
Reduces human error - it can significantly reduce errors and increase accuracy and precision. Errors are not only costly but can be damaging to your brand, especially in a B2B interaction.
Digital Assistance eliminates/prioritizes personnel - Many websites utilize digital assistants to deliver user-requested content and some chatbots are built in a way that makes it difficult to recognize whether you are communicating with a chatbot or a human. AI will eliminate help desk personnel and/or prioritize requests and matches inquiries to agent skills and experience.
Cost Savings - With AI-powered Chatbots saving money is a given., You can save up to 60% of your help desk costs. AI chatbots do not require workstations, licensing, or training. They can automate workflows, deal with more customers and end users in less time, and free up staff.
More accurate decision-making - Artificial Intelligence does not have any biased views, which ensures more accurate and more timely decision-making.
Reduce repetitive tasks - Artificial Intelligence will efficiently automate menial activities and even eliminate boring, repetitive tasks for people, allowing them to concentrate on being more creative.
24X7 availability - There are numerous studies that reveal humans are productive for only about 3 to 4 hours in a day. Humans also require breaks and time off to balance their work life and personal life. But AI can work non-stop without breaks so it is always available.
This is a critical benefit as more customers and end users encounter issues outside of prime business hours.
Now that you know how AI works and the benefits to your help-desk management process, it is time to get started. You can begin by testing a few, or all the tactics we have detailed above to upgrade your help desk by integrating AI to create a better support experience for your customers.
