AI-Enhanced Solutions: Taking Your Service Desk Operations to the Next Level
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Your service desk plays a crucial role within your enterprise, serving as the key point of communication between the organization and its employees or users. It facilitates the resolution of technical issues, manages incidents and ensures minimal disruption to business processes. By providing efficient troubleshooting and maintaining clear communication channels, the service desk contributes significantly to the organization's ability to deliver on customer satisfaction and loyalty commitments.
The service desk is responsible for handling a variety of requests, including technical support, software and hardware installation, password resets, and network connectivity issues. It acts as the first line of defense for any technical problems faced by customers or employees, resolving them in a timely and efficient manner.
One of the key benefits of a service desk is its ability to centralize communication channels. This allows for a more streamlined and organized approach to addressing customer or employee concerns. Instead of contacting multiple departments for different issues, users can simply reach out to the service desk and have their problems resolved promptly.
To efficiently handle their capabilities, the service desk will utilize a service management application to effectively manage all the diverse work activities. This application helps in tracking issues, automating workflows, managing knowledge bases, and providing real-time data and analytics for continuous improvement.
Leading service desk organizations are leveraging Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions to enhance their service management application and support their service desk employees. This strategic approach allows them to effectively supplement their existing systems and streamline operations. With the help of AI, service desk staff can quickly identify and resolve issues, automate repetitive tasks, and provide more personalized support to their users. As organizations are looking to improve their service desk operations, they should be considering how utilization of these tools can provide direct support and enhance their operations.
WWT specializes in providing contact center solutions for service desk operations. We have been at the forefront of implementing cutting-edge AI and NLU solutions in this domain. With our refined implementation methodology and strong business analysis capabilities, we ensure that all components of your solution are meticulously planned and orchestrated to meet the unique needs of your users.
Over the years, we have identified the critical capabilities of service desks that can benefit the most from the integration of NLU and AI technologies.
The future of user authentication
The ability of a service desk organization to accurately identify the user or caller is fundamental to providing efficient and personalized support. By recognizing the individual, the service desk can swiftly access historical data, including past incidents, preferences, and specific support agreements, leading to tailored service and faster resolution. Accurate identification is a crucial security measure, ensuring that sensitive information and support services are only provided to authorized individuals, thereby safeguarding against potential data breaches and unauthorized access.
Leveraging advanced machine learning techniques, AI has the capability to identify and authenticate users, irrespective of an organization's user authentication protocols. Simple authentication, such as validating demographic information, presents a straightforward use case for your AI engine to effortlessly handle. As authentication processes grow in complexity, techniques like multi-factor authentication or utilizing authentication codes sent via text messages come into play.
The usage of AI and NLU opens up possibilities for integrating sophisticated authentication features such as voice biometrics. By harnessing these techniques, organizations can streamline the authentication process and effectively meet their security requirements.
Harnessing AI for smarter service management
The service desk is the first point of contact when problems arise. They are responsible for logging, categorizing, prioritizing, and assigning incidents to the appropriate team. If deemed necessary, the incident management process may result in a 'problem' being identified where the root cause needs to be captured.
The deployment of AI and NLU technologies such as Google's Contact Center Artificial Intelligence (CCAI) augments the capacities of the service desk in incident and problem management, regardless of the media channel. AI algorithms can automate the initial interactions, identifying the nature of the issue based on utterances and the caller's intents and categorizing it accordingly. This not only quickens the process but also reduces the scope for human error.
The use of NLU technologies enables the service desk to understand and process user queries phrased in everyday language, making the service more accessible and user-friendly. This combination of AI and NLU allows for more efficient distribution of incidents and helps ensure that each case reaches the right team in a timely manner, subsequently improving the overall resolution time.
By leveraging the suite of AI and NLU products, your enterprise can unlock valuable insights and achieve new efficiencies. These tools enable you to identify incident trends in real time, empowering you to proactively respond and reduce the number of incident tickets. Furthermore, these cutting-edge technologies facilitate seamless communication with callers, ensuring that high-cost resources are utilized only when necessary.
If the incident still reaches the agent's desktop, they will understand the user's issue and expectations. Simultaneously, a ticket will already be initiated, expediting the process of capturing caller information and incident description. This streamlined approach leads to faster and more effective resolutions.
With the deployment of AI and NLU, one of the most revolutionary tools available today is the ability to assist agents in direct customer interactions. These tools enable AI and NLU to stay engaged during conversations, providing automated context-specific assistance to guide agents through the interaction. This means that as the conversation with the customer progresses, the AI engine can continuously analyze and understand the context and suggest the next best action. This level of support not only helps agents resolve issues faster but also ensures consistency and accuracy in customer interactions. As these technologies become more sophisticated, they can even learn from past interactions and anticipate potential issues or provide personalized recommendations to the agent.
The AI engine also assists agents by providing a summary at the end of each interaction. The summary provided can then be edited by the agent before the data is saved in your service management application. This empowers agents to complete the necessary wrap-up activities consistently, efficiently and accurately in a timely manner.
Organizations are constantly looking for new ways to improve their customer service and satisfaction levels. Real-time sentiment analysis has gained popularity in recent years. This tool is capable of gauging a customer's mood based on their speech or chat input and providing feedback to the agent while the interaction is in progress. Empowering support teams to enhance customer satisfaction and achieve quicker resolution by crafting empathetic and efficient responses tailored to individual needs.
AI tools can aid service desk analysts in identifying patterns and trends in incident reports, empowering them to proactively address potential recurring issues. This type of analysis will help to speed the identification of the root cause and ultimately drive to a resolved issue. This enables service desk managers to make data-driven decisions to optimize the overall performance of the service desk.
Unlocking support potential with AI
Service requests from users, including software installations, password resets, and hardware procurement can be time-consuming activities for your service desk organization. For the consumers of your services, these processes can seem to take longer than expected.
From the perspective of your users, these processes might seem to take longer than expected. This is due to the fact that they may not be aware of the complexities involved in fulfilling their requests.
The use of NLU and AI can drive improved performance in the fulfillment of these requests. Natural language will allow for the interpretation of complex speech grammar and is able to understand the caller's need and ultimately fulfill their request. It is common for an NLU and AI-driven process to be used to allow individuals to reset passwords or unlock user's accounts. These technologies can facilitate intricate interactions that may necessitate multi-factor authentication or even utilize biometric speech recognition to authenticate users.
Natural language technologies are effective in helping service desk users with common questions and repetitive tasks. For example, if a customer wants to know the status of a ticket, they can use a virtual assistant powered by natural language understanding to get an instant answer, no waiting for a live agent. Virtual agents in voice and chat environments can understand diverse user requests and provide personalized suggestions to help callers resolve their issues. A typical scenario in the service desk involves users needing guidance on setting up multi-factor authentication on their mobile devices. Once the intent is identified, virtual agents step in and offer to send an email or text document with the necessary steps.
The power of intent-based routing
Service desk organizations typically adopt a multi-tiered approach to handle user issues and allocate resources. Tier 1 or Level 1 support serves as the initial point of contact for users facing problems. The objective of this team is to troubleshoot and resolve issues during the first interaction. To streamline the process, many service desk organizations leverage existing technology by prompting callers to select the reason for their call. We are all familiar with these menus: "Press 1 if you need to reset your password, press 2 if you are experiencing email application problems, and remain on the line for all other inquiries." These caller selection techniques aim to gather additional information about the purpose of the user's call. If the self-selection process is effective, the interaction is then directed to a Level 1 specialist, for example, someone who can reset a password, or answer questions about your email application.
The next support tier serves as an escalation level, aimed at addressing more complex issues that Level 1 technicians couldn't resolve. Technicians operating at this level don't typically handle new inbound interactions directly. Instead, interactions are redirected to this tier using various indirect methods. One commonly used approach involves transferring the interaction directly from a tier 1 representative. Another method gaining popularity is notifying tier 2 agents of new requests through a ticket completed by a tier 1 agent or even through a self-service portal where users can create incidents and requests.
The implementation of an intent-based routing approach will change the way you route calls to your pool of service desk agents. By utilizing intent-based routing, you can more precisely identify the purpose of each call, empowering you to make informed decisions on call routing. This not only enhances accuracy but also enables you to optimize the entire process.
Now that we have implemented intent-based routing, let's explore our understanding of this interaction. We can identify the customer either by the phone number they dialed from or by capturing this information at the beginning of the incoming call. Moreover, we now have insights into the purpose of the call. It is no longer sufficient to simply direct the call to a group of generalists.
To ensure the best experience for callers, it is important to select the most appropriate agent for each interaction. This can be achieved through advanced skills-based routing, a valuable yet often overlooked feature. By categorizing agents based on their ability to handle specific types of interactions and their effectiveness in responding to particular requests, we can deliver interactions to the most skilled agents. This approach emphasizes the knowledge and capabilities of agents rather than the duration of their waiting time for the next interaction.
With this approach, we can transform your organization from a collection of generalists into smaller teams of specialized experts. This enables agents to dedicate more attention to a narrower range of complex issues. Just imagine the impact this will have on your ability to train and manage your agents, ultimately leading to an improved experience for your callers.
It might be too early to advocate for the elimination of generalists. It is clear that the expertise and skills possessed by this group of individuals will continue to be crucial. By implementing intent-based routing and advanced agent selection, your services can undergo a transformative change in how they are delivered to your callers. These innovative approaches will revolutionize how your teams are organized and managed and best of all will deliver a better experience for your customers.
Tailoring AI solutions for your service desk
Implementing your AI and NLU solution for your service desk need not be a complex undertaking. In our experience, if your organization can follow a defined methodology, you and your users can start to reap the benefits of these new innovations.
To begin, it is crucial to connect with WWT and initiate an analysis of your existing and future service desk processes. This vital undertaking will equip our implementation team with an essential understanding of your users and their pivotal journeys. This is a critical step in the process and one that should not be overlooked.
Once we have a comprehensive understanding of your current processes, we can proceed with designing and developing an AI and NLU solution that seamlessly integrates into your service desk environment. This entails identifying the key pain points for both users and service desk agents, which will be combined with existing data on common trends and performance levels. By incorporating these findings into our analysis, we can create a roadmap that outlines all the necessary AI and NLU features and their respective implementation timelines.
Our implementation team is fully equipped to deploy these capabilities within your organization, backed by comprehensive analysis and well-documented use cases. If you are ready to move your service desk organization to a new level of advanced capabilities, WWT is ready and poised to assist. Reach out to your WWT account manager and schedule a workshop where we can start to outline your unique AI and NLU roadmap. By leveraging our expertise, you can streamline your service desk processes, enhance user experiences and drive significant cost savings for your organization.