Amid COVID-19, How Are Chatbots Solving IT Help Desk Challenges

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a serious wake up call for companies which put digital transformation and AI adoption in the back-burner. It made us all realize that adopting emerging digital and AI technologies is not so much an option but a necessity. 

One significant area where digital transformation has become critical is ITSM. In the past few weeks, we have seen IT help desks in several companies struggling to manage the sudden unprecedented surge in incidents, issues and requests. Some of our key observations include:

• Incidents are continuing to grow as a large number of employees are trying to access different types of applications simultaneously and remotely

• In order to maintain smooth operations, organizations are rushing to rollout critical business apps without proper testing. Once the issues are detected in the production environment, more incidents come up  

• Incidents and requests range from simple ones like setting up VPNs, authentication issues to complex ones like accelerating the deployment of new digital initiatives to ensure business continuity

• When troubleshooting end users’ issues with SaaS apps, it’s becoming difficult for service desks to determine whether the issue is related to the network connection, users’ equipment or the app itself

Ensuring that an IT helpdesk is running hassle free at all times has been an ongoing challenge for many enterprises even before this pandemic. Many of these organizations already face a shortage of help desk staff. And with the new unique challenges, the situation is becoming further overwhelming. Employees are being kept on hold for hours before their issue is resolved. Just imagine the loss of productivity.

How IT Helpdesk Chatbots Can Help?

A huge volume of requests are usually ‘basic’ or ‘simple’ questions that take a lot of time to answer. When most of your workforce is working remotely, the overhead on the helpdesk team to resolve such queries is huge.

One of the easiest ways to overcome these challenges is to deploy an IT Helpdesk Chatbot and enable self-service to employees.

A chatbot is not only a powerful solution to address repetitive and low-value requests but also super easy to deploy.

A chatbot will be available 24*7 on any device and can handle requests across the organization simultaneously. This will allow your IT staff to move away from a reactive environment where they are constantly putting out fires and focus on productive and proactive tasks.

Chatbots conduct multi-turn conversations (something most help desk requests involve) and guide users to resolve the issue through a series of steps.

In addition to solving simple requests and low-value tickets, chatbots are becoming increasingly intelligent to address several complex queries as well. The AI, NLP and ML integrated in a chatbot helps it learn from previous conversations, understand user intent better and deliver smarter responses.

When the chatbot can’t handle a particular query, it’ll handover the conversation to a human agent.

With low-code chatbot builder platforms like Microsoft Virtual Agents and BotCore, you can build and deploy a simple FAQ bot within hours and with limited resources! These chatbots also come with prebuilt connectors and easily integrate with your existing help desk platforms like ServiceNow, JIRA, Freshdesk etc.

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Benefits Of A IT helpdesk Bot

• Easy and quick rollout

• Seamless integration

• Super fast responses 

• Reduced cost per ticket and IT support costs

• Improved productivity of help desk agents

• Eliminate calls and emails: The bot acts as a single point of contact for help desk requests

• 24X7 availability in both mobile and desktop devices

• Real-time alerts

• Enterprise level security

• Employee self-service

Learn More: How AI Bots Can Revolutionize Enterprise Helpdesk? 

Key Capabilities To Look For In A IT helpdesk Bot

• Incident Management

• Incident notifications

• Incident creation

• Submit change requests

• New change request notifications

• Task notifications and notes

• Outage Management

• Sends outage alerts 

• Displays real time outages

• Sends outage reports

• Security Management

• Reset passwords for devices and network and generate tokens

• Disable, wipe or suspend device

• Real-Time Alerts

• Access request notifications

• Asset request notifications

• Outage alerts

• Authentication alerts

• Human Hand off 

The chatbot should be intelligent enough to recognize situations where it can’t help the user and should hand over the conversation to an agent. As soon as the bot learns that a human intervention is required, it should present users with an option to “chat with an agent”. Once the user clicks the option, an agent takes over the conversation.

Learn More: Chatbots Human Handoff 

Get Started With A IT Helpdesk Chatbot

We are forced into the largest work-from-home experiment and many employees have little to no experience in adopting the new environment. Right from setting up their home offices, VPNs, to adopting video conferencing and collaboration apps, employees are facing a myriad of challenges and flooding the helpdesk with repetitive requests. An ITSM chatbot streamlines the helpdesk workflow, enables self-service and acts as a level-1 support agent.

If you’d like to learn more about this topic, please feel free to get in touch with one of our AI and ITSM experts for a personalized consultation.