Smart Service Desk - How it Delivers
According to a recent research by IDC, technology spending by non-IT business units will reach USD 609 billion this year as new influencers of IT emerge across the enterprise. The trend is expected to grow exponentially, and by 2020, non-IT business units’ (LOBs - Line of Businesses) tech spend will become nearly equal to the IT organizations spend. In an environment like this, technology needs to evolve with a customer and have a business-centric front office view. To enable this, traditional IT must transform to digital IT operations. CIOs and business leaders have an opportunity to collaborate and start discussing strategies beyond IT, and should synergize building newer digital businesses and operational models.
To fuel the growing technology needs of LOBs, organizations must create support offerings to meet the strategic and operational needs of both IT and non-IT business units. The expectations of non-IT business users are diverse, and they prefer experience over cost. They are used to expecting the same personalized, proactive and even pre-emptive services, tools, and technologies in their offices.
Per a Gartner research, by 2018, the main mode of team collaboration and communication - 50% - will be based on mobile apps.
Organizations need in-depth analysis of people and social behavior to design and provide better work practices. Considering this, running support operations becomes a lot more business-critical as it involves a lot of planning, investments in technology, strategies and their execution to improve the overall productivity and efficiency of an organization. This will bring a lot of changes to the workplace too.
To deal with the varied set of expectation from multiple business units, organizations need to adopt to “Business Service Desk” solutions that will accelerate IT operations, business process management, promote context driven support, and act as the face of enablement to other Business Units. This will help organizations move towards a more industrialized and predictive environment, apart from helping to identify new ways to enhance customer experience.
Intelligence Baked into Business Service Desks
Service desks in this age of millennials are continuously revamping their strategies to be able to respond better to the expectations of business units, end-user requirements, cloud-enabled infrastructure, and other initiatives such as Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), Corporate-Owned Personally Enabled (COPE), and Choose Your Own Device (CYOD).
Business Service Desks serve as the best means of remediation across the endpoint environment, for example, end-point security, end-point devices (printers, access points) and end-user devices (mobile, laptops and computers) and help BUs while streamlining their business processes. Business Service Desks tightly integrate work flows between IT and non-IT requirements and offers automated queuing, predictive intelligence, routing and channel allocation, a 360-degree view of customer interactions and business insights. The platform and device support solutions offer consistent and timely incident resolution, and the business service desk acts like a single point of contact (SPOC) for all IT and business needs from a single console providing a unified view.
Furthermore, with the ongoing trend of digital workplace and digital marketplace, service desks are required to instantly support users at every stage of their operations.
Let’s take a quick look at how these digital technologies can be used to reimagine Service Desk operations.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Using AI in service desks helps organizations analyze huge volumes of data that is collected from consumption patterns, end-user devices, and systems. This analysis helps organizations predict and take corrective measures against failures, which improves support quality. Implementing AI practices leads to the optimum use of machine and human intelligence, that brings about better business agility, end-user experience, and operational excellence.
With billions of connected devices requiring technical support, organizations will need to tackle them in the smartest way possible. One of the possible ways is to adopt shift-left and identify processes that receive the maximum support calls, and then try to deflect and automate these tasks to the maximum level possible. This will not only help reduce support volumes, but also the costs involved, improve time-to-market, predictability and ability to react faster to changing business trends. This will also free up the support team who can focus on other tasks that influence strategy and innovation.
Advanced Analytics
Advanced analytics in a service desk environment help correlate data in real-time, understand the criticality of the requests, and identify relationships between processes. This results in an improvement in setting the correct priorities of the tickets raised, in the productivity of the team, and operational efficiency and significant cost savings. Implemented along with Machine Learning (ML), advanced analytics can unravel emerging issues, underlying contexts, patterns, and trends that will make service desk operations even more intuitive.
VAs offer personalized and context-driven support for resolving end-user issues using AI, NLP, and Deep Learning techniques such as user interactions. The VAs respond to queries in real time by accessing their knowledgebase online and by integrating with enterprise systems.
Service Desk engineers are usually found to be entering repetitive data into the system. Omni-channel support helps provide collaboration by means of channels like blogs, KBs, social media, and wikis. These channels provide engineers in-depth visibility into the customer issues, including transaction history and latest communication.
Conclusion
Traditional service desk models today will not suffice to keep up with the rapid disruptions in the digital world. IT teams need to adapt and adopt technologies such as advanced analytics, AI, ML, and NLP that will help improve the overall productivity of enterprises.
CSS Corps’ IT Service Desk
CSS Corps’ Business Service Desk provides unparalleled remediation across various business units specific to processes, IT support for the endpoint environment – the end-user devices, end-point devices, and end-point security.
Business Service Desk is driven by data and offers automated queuing, routing and channel allocation, and predictive intelligence. Apart from providing a 360-degree view of customer interactions and business insights, our solution offers 24×7 multi-lingual, device-and-platform-agnostic services that serve as a SPOC for all your business process and IT service needs, from a single console providing unified view.
