For enterprises in any industry, leveraging the right technology is critical to meeting service expectations and maintaining a competitive edge. Enterprise leaders are well aware of this, ranking technology enablement for employees, employment of advanced analytics, and an improved experience as top priorities for 2024.
From leveraging advanced system management platforms, such as ServiceNow, to evaluating new contact center capabilities — organizations are eager to create strategic digital transformation plans to optimize their IT Help Desk, but they’re up against several challenges. These include high or increasing costs, handling spikes in call volumes, hiring enough agents, and agent turnover. To drive an efficient service center, enterprise leaders must quickly assess what applications and processes help drive increased ROI, agent productivity, and employee service satisfaction versus what will lead to more complicated processes, lower retention rates, and increased operational costs. In this article, we’ll focus on how you can leverage and enhance your existing ServiceNow ITSM workspace with AI and contact center capabilities to optimize the IT Help Desk experience. More specifically, we’ll cover how to:
Every application added to your technology stack creates another layer of cost and complexity. Oftentimes, this introduces competing capabilities where the same features are provided across different systems. In addition to paying the price for the same capability twice, disparate platforms increase the difficulty for agents to deliver satisfactory service. Research by Harvard Business Review confirms an agent can spend up to four hours a week simply switching between different applications. Siloed platforms result in agents wasting valuable time and energy searching cross-platform for information instead of helping the next caller. Simply put, when the IT Help Desk isn’t working, neither are your employees. Consequently, productivity levels and ROI potential are plummeting.
To efficiently streamline IT Help Desk processes, including tickets, contact records, and engagements, your technology stack needs to be right-sized. One way of doing this is to evaluate what contact center capabilities are enhancing your existing ServiceNow ITSM investment versus what’s competing with it. Many contact center vendors want you to leverage their platform for employee engagements (such as voice, chat, email, SMS, etc.), AI insights, and dashboards — but lack the necessary workflows to connect tickets with incoming calls through a unified agent workplace, perpetuating the age-old issue of agent “swivel chairing.” To avoid paying for duplicative features and eliminate multi-platform requirements, it’s crucial to find a solution that weaves front-office (contact center) engagements into the existing workflows and processes built with ServiceNow. A ServiceNow-native solution complements ServiceNow's existing data and digital channels (i.e., chat and email) with additional voice, SMS, and engagement insights. This unique approach empowers the IT Help Desk with a single source of truth for contact records and employee interaction insights. In the next section, we’ll dive further into how complementing existing ServiceNow capabilities — such as complementing ServiceNow’s AI with additional AI — helps enhance service productivity and delivery.
It's nothing new that AI is a hot topic. Artificial intelligence's potential impact on the service industry is impressive and is expected to only continue to increase in value in the future. Gartner predicts that 80% of customer service and support organizations will leverage Generative AI (GenAI) by 2025, replacing 20-30% of live agents. In a separate report, Gartner states that Conversational AI will lower agent labor costs by $80 billion by 2026. While ServiceNow’s ITSM platform already provides native AI capabilities, there’s a potential for organizations to further enhance the agent workspace with additional contact center-specific AI intelligence. As discussed in our previous section, it’s important to make sure you’re not introducing duplicative capabilities. AI for the IT Help Desk is no exception.
With contact center AI capabilities that natively complement what’s already available in ServiceNow — such as NowAssist, Agent Assist, etc. — the IT Help Desk is empowered with in-depth, automated insights. For example, Generative AI for auto-call summarization provides a call summary for each contact record in ServiceNow, which can also feed into ServiceNow’s already-existing GenAI feature for case summarizations, enhancing the information provided for each incident. Additional AI capabilities, such as real-time call transcriptions, sentiment analysis, and Conversational AI, help enhance the service experience from within the ServiceNow ITSM platform, avoiding the introduction of duplicative features or the requirement to toggle between multiple platforms. As mentioned by ServiceNow, AI can help boost agent productivity, reduce manual costs, and improve the speed of service. It provides your organization an opportunity to handle increased call volumes without adding extra IT agents to your team, leading to lower labor-related costs while increasing revenue.
A few years ago, an employee would simply walk over to their office’s IT Help Desk and ask for assistance. With 41% of full-time employees working fully remotely or hybrid — a number that’s expected to continue to grow — solely relying on in-person IT assistance is no longer effective. Remote employees need access to the same seamless IT assistance as office workers. Forrester reports “the office” isn’t a place anymore, instead: “It’s a network of locations, practices, and technologies that empowers employees to be successful and productive while honoring their individual needs at any given moment.” The IT Help Desk must provide accurate, fast, and personalized service to all employees. The question is, how do you ensure your IT team has the tools they need to efficiently support employees from anywhere?
One solution is to embrace a ServiceNow ITSM workspace with embedded voice and video interactions, co-browsing, and remote desktop takeover. These ServiceNow-integrated capabilities empower agents to walk employees through problems in real time, using the method of engagement most suited to troubleshoot and resolve an issue quickly. This not only drives IT Help Desk efficiency but also provides your employees with the speed of service required to quickly get back to work, meaning increased efficiency across your entire organization. Solving issues faster than ever while ensuring the employee feels comfortable and engaged throughout the process. In addition to increasing productivity levels, meaning more issues can be solved with less effort, these collaborative IT Help Desk tools also lead to more personalized service.
“Password reset requests are my favorite,” said no IT Help Desk agent ever. While assisting with even the most repetitive requests is important, these types of IT tickets take up valuable time for agents — meaning, you would need to recruit and employ more agents to solve all incoming calls in a timely manner. With high or increasing labor costs often being a core concern for enterprise organizations, hiring more agents to meet increasing call volumes isn’t a long-term, revenue-driving solution.
So, how do we optimize the IT Help Desk to improve issue resolution and agent productivity without increasing operational costs? One effective way to automate the service process is to create a solution intelligent enough to route incoming calls to self-service or live agents based on identified needs and historical contact data. With an IVR system built into the ServiceNow ITSM workspace, incoming callers are pre-verified and intelligently routed through voice self-service or to live agents based on real-time identified needs and historical ServiceNow-stored data. The solution leverages Conversational AI and machine learning (ML) to create a personalized and human-like experience for the caller — even if not connected to a live agent.
When inquiries, such as simple password resets, can be effortlessly routed through self-service, agents have time to focus on more important requests. This reduces your need to hire additional agents to meet spikes in call volumes. In other words, the dynamic IVR flow helps improve call deflection without any extra work — leading to higher ROI, effortlessly. McKinsey highlights the impact a well-established IVR can have on the service outcome: “The results can be spectacular. We have seen next-generation IVR systems deliver a fivefold improvement in customer satisfaction scores, accelerate issue resolution, and reduce the number of live-agent calls by more than 10 percent.” Additional research from the firm states how personalized experiences drive better productivity and higher service satisfaction scores, helping to generate 40% more revenue compared to those who don’t embrace it.
With assistance from ServiceNow-integrated AI capabilities, such as intelligent routing and automated post-call processes discussed in previous sections, your IT Help Desk agents will be able to focus their time and effort on handling only the most challenging IT requests. That said, with more complex issues at hand, your agents need to become more skilled and specialized in their work to sufficiently assist employees. The solution? Agent training opportunities.
As with everything, humans need proper training to ensure performance quality lives up to expectations. When agents are provided with the right guidance, you’ll automatically create a comfortable working environment, helping to boost performance, productivity, and efficiency across your organization. Because successful agents are more likely to stay with your organization, providing efficient agent coaching and education leads to lower turnover rates. This, in turn, results in organizational cost savings. Why? Because retaining your agents is less costly than recruiting and training new ones. Research shows that replacing an agent can cost between $10,000 - $15,000.
Effectively training your IT Help Desk agent and boosting performance doesn’t need to be difficult. Modern capabilities, such as AI-powered speech analytics and sentiment analysis, provide automated insights for 100% of engagements. Your organization can quickly analyze keyword usage, agent best practices adherence, emotional responses, and more to create a complete picture of performance. When complemented with AI Coaching, pre-completed evaluation forms and personalized training opportunities effortlessly become available to boost an IT representative's performance based on real-life examples.
From right-sizing your solution stack to leveraging AI for process automation, productivity, and insights, 3CLogic and ServiceNow provide a unified customer experience solution that helps optimize the IT Help Desk for any enterprise. The road to success doesn’t need to be complicated, and our ServiceNow-certified experts are readily available to assist you. We’ll help you design a personalized plan to transform your organization’s IT Help Desk experience.
