ITSM: When artificial intelligence beats real intelligence
Bright people wanted for service desks
There are more people out there wanting more IT help desk support than ever before.
HDI, the association for technical support professionals, reckons that more than two-thirds of IT support teams are seeing increases in ticket volumes year on year, while the same report claims that 27 percent of organizations are creating and filling new help desk positions.
Clearly there’s a demand for switched-on individuals to work in IT service management (ITSM). And once you’ve got them, a healthy compensation package, great culture and interesting, varied work are the things that keep them there.
But if you’re lucky enough to have great support staff, isn’t it a bit dispiriting for them when the work they’re being asked to do isn’t so challenging? I was discussing this with a help desk manager at a property company recently. Every morning several hundred remote employees try to log in to the main system, which can’t respond fast enough. It triggers a flurry of help desk tickets, all asking similar questions about access.
The obvious solution is to fix the underlying problem, but the organization struggles to get people to work on the project because they’re too busy fielding questions about keeping the lights on. Users get frustrated with IT, those bright, intelligent help desk staff get frustrated at doing the same thing day after day, and the business continues to lose productivity.
Why ‘regular’ ITSM software doesn’t cut it
Of course, service desk and help desk staff don’t just deal with break/fix. There are plenty of routine tasks, such as enabling access to email, printers and shared drives. You can have a really sophisticated piece of software tracking your tickets, operating through a self-service portal, and the result is still frustration among users.
Typically each user request gets signed off by a line-of-business manager, then approved by IT, then actioned. Eventually the user is notified that access is set up. (If the user is a bit slow at grasping things he’ll be straight onto the helpdesk again for more assistance). It can feel like a convoluted process, compounded by the fact that people don’t like self-service portals. They like to deal with individuals.
Again, you face the double whammy of unhappy users and unhappy help desk staff who are going through largely repetitive tasks at a very low level.
Of course, you can automate some policies and aspects of ticket handling, but what happens when a ticket is just a little bit out of the ordinary? When you need manual intervention, who is going to decide what to do? What is the escalation and resolution path? How does everyone know what’s actually going on?
AI that never sleeps
It seems that artificial intelligence is making an appearance everywhere now. Take the ‘self-driving’ cars that keep hitting the headlines. The idea is that the car responds in real time to road and traffic conditions, obstructions and so on, but that the driver takes charge of anything trickier. The car learns what to do, and gradually driver intervention is reduced.
Machine learning of this sort has been around for a good many years, but having been reinvented as AI it’s now finding new applications.
You can immediately see the similarities between the self-driving car example and what it would mean to have a self-driving service desk. The car remains alert and ready to respond at a moment’s notice, and advises the best course of action when something out of the ordinary happens.
An AI service desk is always on, ready to respond to users 24x7, without feeling tired or frustrated. Acting just like a person, it communicates with everyone using appropriate language, prioritizes what needs to be done (so that nothing gets overlooked), and learns enough to be able to resolve issues itself or to advise its supervisor what might need to be done.
The AI service desk in action
nudgeIT’s vision is to reduce the management overhead involved in running help desks, and to make them friendlier for users. Instead of using a portal, users log tickets however they need to — even from mobile devices — and feel like they’re being dealt with sympathetically and efficiently just as a great help desk person should respond.
With the right policies, approvals can be streamlined. If the line-of-business manager has signed off on the user’s request, the IT department can just execute the request. If the request is really routine, maybe a technician isn’t needed at all. If it is out of the ordinary, everyone’s kept informed, and the system learns what to do in similar situations in future.
Best of all, those bright, eager, knowledgeable IT staff are freed from the most mundane and routine tasks and can start to add value to your business.
The nudgeIT solution has been developed by a bunch of developers steeped in service management lore. They know that a friendly, responsive and successful help desk is essential to helping business run smoothly.
You can try it now, free of charge. Sign up on www.nudgeit.ch
