Today, we’re going to dive into one of the simplest ways to start automating your services in TOPdesk – with Action Sequences.

What is an Action Sequence?

Within TOPdesk, you can define multiple steps, which follow up on one another, forming an automated process. This is called an Action Sequence. Action Sequences are typically used for processing responses, updating information in TOPdesk, and communicating with third-party suppliers. They can be used to set up API-based integrations with other applications, as well as perform Actions within TOPdesk itself.

What are the benefits of using Action Sequences?

Automating (parts of) your workflow doesn’t just improve efficiency and accuracy— it also frees up valuable time for more complex, challenging work.

With Action Sequences removing mundane tasks from their to-do lists, your service team will be able to focus on bringing real value to your organization, instead of wasting time performing manual actions such as closing Incidents or typing out generic replies to customers.

How do I set up an Action Sequence?

Let’s say you want to automatically close Incidents so that Operators don’t need to do any manual work once an Incident has been solved. In this case, you use the Action Sequence ‘Set status and/or close Incident’.

For this Action Sequence, you’d need to execute 2 steps.

1. Retrieve a list of all statuses used in Incident Management.
2. Assign the correct status to the Incident.

To trigger this Action Sequence automatically, you’d need to link it to a relevant Event. For instance, after 7 days have passed since the completion date.

Simple as that! And to make things even simpler? We’ve got plenty of resources to help you get started with Action Sequences, right away.

In the TOPdesk Action Sequence Library, you can find a list of template Action Sequences, that are free to use, so there’s no need to start from scratch. Have a quick browse and see which tedious tasks you can eliminate from your daily work with automation.

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We spoke with Yoline Neegers, part of the Service Desk team at Ferranti, who uses service automation to reduce repetitive tasks, save time, and make work less stressful. 

Why Ferranti decided to automate their services

With over 54 customers in more than 18 countries, Ferranti’s service desk deals with a wide variety of requests every day. Before deploying service automation, Yoline’s team often dealt with repetitive tasks, which were time-consuming and prone to errors. To make her team’s life easier, Yoline started exploring ways to automate tasks within TOPdesk. 

How Ferranti uses Action Sequences to automate their services

Yoline and her team decided to use Action Sequences – TOPdesk’s most flexible feature for automating multiple steps in a process – to get rid of repetitive manual tasks. But what exactly did they automate and how? Here are a few examples that Yoline shared with us:

Generating documents automatically

“Whenever we hand out new hardware, the recipient has to sign a document which we used to create ourselves, adding the name of the recipient as well. But sometimes we forgot to do so and ended up with the wrong information. That’s why we automated this process using Asset Management’s actions. Now, we no longer have to manually set up documents, so we can spend our time on more pressing tasks. It also reduces the stress at work because you know that you can just automatically generate the document and it’ll be ready instantly instead of having to create it last minute.”

Learn how to set up this action sequence in knowledge item KI 11163.

Closing calls automatically

“When a call has been open for a long time without a response from the caller, the call now closes automatically. We use the same action sequence when we resolve a call. Having this setup helps us keep an overview of our open calls so the team workload is more clear.”

Learn how to set up this action sequence in knowledge item KI 11138.

Assigning operators automatically

“We also use an action sequence to automatically assign operators because we have rather large teams. To do this, we use the contact field in the operator groups. The action sequence checks who the contact of that operator group is and assigns it to that specific call. This helps us make sure that a call always gets assigned to someone, resulting in lower response times.”

Updating brief descriptions

Automating the brief descriptions in calls made Yoline’s team more efficient: “When a new employee started, the brief description would just say ‘new user’. But that didn’t give us enough information, so I automated it to include the name of the employee, their start date, and their function. On and offboarding someone has become much simpler which means we make less mistakes.” 

Learn how to set up this action sequence in knowledge item KI 13930.

How can other organizations get started with Action Sequences?

“My first tip is to check my.topdesk.com because there are a lot of great examples there.”

“My first tip is to check my.topdesk.com because there are a lot of great examples there”, Yoline shares. “For our action sequence on brief descriptions, I went into my.topdesk.com and found a knowledge item, downloaded the JSON file, and imported it into our environment. All I had to do was change some field names, after which I tested it in our test environment, and it worked! So, my advice would be to check the knowledge base because it’s a very good starting point.”

And testing is key with automation. “Use your TOPdesk test environment so you can play around and experiment with your action sequences. This way, you can test whether you have connected the right event to your sequence”, Yoline shares.

Ready to start with service automation?

Do you want to test your knowledge on Service Automation? Take the Service Automation Quick Scan to find out how much you already know about automating your services in TOPdesk.

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But what is service automation? And how can your team make the most of it? Here’s everything you need to know about service automation.

What is service automation?

Let’s start by getting our terms straight. ITSM (IT Service Management) is the set of systems and processes organizations use to improve the way IT services are delivered to end-users.

Service automation means automating some of these processes to improve efficiency and reduce manual tasks for service desk employees, freeing up time for the work that requires a human touch. Simple as that.

Some examples of processes that can be easily automated are creating and tracking incidents and providing automated answers to simple requests via a self-service portal.

By automating easy tasks like password resets, you enable IT professionals to focus on higher level issues and more demanding requests. This can decrease service desk calls by more than 40% and reduce end-user downtime.

What are the benefits of service automation?

As well as making life easier for service desk employees, service automation also has several benefits for your organization, including:

Fewer repetitive tasks

Service automation also means you can reduce the number of simple, repetitive tasks that your service desk employees have to perform on a daily basis. By automating easy tasks like password resets, you enable IT professionals to focus on higher level issues and more demanding requests that require a human touch. This can decrease service desk calls by more than 40% and reduce end-user downtime.

Are password resets draining your IT department? Learn how to save time and money by automating these processes.

Smoother incident management

When a customer logs a request, it’s important that it gets to the person with the right skillset to help the customer solve their problem. makes the process of assigning incidents to the correct person easier by identifying the properties of incidents and service requests within a specific category.

It can also provide service desk employees with suggestions for other fields in the incident and service request forms, making them easier to complete.

Discover the benefits of service desk automation.

Improved customer experience as a result of automation

Your customers expect a seamless, personalized experience with your services. But they also expect it to reflect the positive experiences they have with B2C technology in their daily lives. Chatbots and conversational AI with Natural Language Processing (NLP) can answer customers’ straightforward questions by analyzing their written texts and interpreting their meaning.

This means customers don’t have to spend time searching for an answer or waiting for a response from IT. And the conversations between your customer and the chatbot can already provide a lot of helpful insights for IT, so you can get straight to work on the incident.

Find out what chatbots can do for your service desk.

How to get started with service automation?

All of this sounds good, but where should you begin when it comes to automating your service management processes? And which tasks should be prioritized? Here are a few tips:

Look at the kinds of requests your service desk gets most frequently, day-to-day. Go down the list and, for each item, ask: Do we always perform the same steps to complete this process? Can we determine rules for performing these steps? And, finally, does resolving this request add value for the organization? If so, then this task is a prime candidate for automation.

Take our service automation Quick Scan

Are you a service automation beginner, pro, or wizard? Our Quick Scan assesses your service automation maturity and gives you insights into how to future-proof your service desk with automation.

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Sounds great. But what does automation look like in practice? Here are 5 IT tasks you should be automating. 

1. Incident registration

Correctly registering, categorizing, prioritizing, and assigning incidents is crucial for every IT department. But it does take up a lot of time.

Luckily, AI can help. Learning from the knowledge in your IT department’s database, AI simplifies the registration process, making suggestions for appropriate categorization or applicable SLAs.

With AI as their sidekick, IT professionals make fewer mistakes and have more time for customers. And, as new IT employees no longer have to memorize incident categories, they can get up to speed far more quickly.

Take your first step towards faster incident registration with TOPdesk’s autocomplete feature. Just start typing and let TOPdesk fill in the rest.

2. Assigning tasks

Next to speeding up incident registration, AI makes assigning tasks a piece of cake.

Based on previous incidents and requests, AI assesses how long a specific incident or request will take to resolve. It can then assign tasks based on the level of expertise of an IT professional and their availability.

If an IT professional suddenly finds themselves with an extra hour to spare, for example, AI will resolve this by suggesting a one-hour task.

Automating recurring tasks can decrease service desk calls by more than 40% and reduce end-user down-time.

3. Answering customer questions

“How do I log onto the company WiFi?” “How do I add a shared mailbox?” “How do I connect my laptop to a printer?”

Your IT department is no stranger to questions like these. But wouldn’t it be great if customers could find the answer to these questions themselves?

With a little help from a chatbot, they can. Using AI’s capability to understand language and the knowledge of your IT department, a chatbot can understand the customer’s question and provide them with the answer.

The best thing? Chatbots aren’t limited to office hours – a lifesaver with customer expectations on the rise.

4. Recurring tasks

Recurring tasks are the bane of every IT professional’s existence. They take up a lot of time and effort, which could be spent on other things. And they’re costly too. Take password resets, for example: Forrester estimates that the average cost of a single password reset is $70.

The answer to the headache of recurring tasks such as password resets is automation. Automating recurring tasks can decrease service desk calls by more than 40% and reduce end-user down-time – which quickly adds up to significant cost savings.

5. Employee onboarding (and offboarding)

When a new employee joins the organization, your IT department is tasked with making sure they have the IT hardware, software, and privileges they need to do their job.

And, when employees leave, IT needs to restrict their access and figure out which assets they were using and where they are now.

You can easily simplify these processes with a bit of automation. This way, new hires get instant access to all required systems, which means they can actually start working instead of having to wait around on their first day.

Likewise, an automated offboarding process will quickly and easily terminate accounts and access when employees leave.

Of course, employee onboarding and offboarding aren’t just tasks for IT. HR, Facilities, and other service departments are also involved. With Workflows in TOPdesk, you can set up an automated chain of events for onboarding and offboarding so all departments will know what to do and when.

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The High Cost of Password Resets: Impact on IT Service Desk Efficiency and Budget

According to Gartner, between 30% and 50% of all IT service desk calls are for password resets. Depending on the size of your organization and the number of end-users, this can take tens of hours per week. In some cases, this means IT service desk employees spend almost 40% of their workday handling password resets.

But handling password resets isn’t only extremely time-consuming: it doesn’t come cheap either. The Burton Group estimates that password management can cost up to $250 per user, per year. For a mid-sized organization of 500 end-users, that boils down to $125,000 per year.

Impact on the organization

Password resets being extremely costly is not all there is to it. With IT departments spending most of their time on password resets and other recurring tasks, they don’t have any time to invest in high-value strategic projects such as modernization or problem management.

But it’s not just IT that suffers from password resets. As end-users wait for their password to be reset, their work is put on hold – negatively impacting not only their productivity and the organization as a whole, but the organization’s customers, too.

Automating password resets can decrease service desk calls by more than 40% and reduce end-user down-time.

Automation is the way to go

The answer to the headache of password resets is automation. Whether it is done with a chatbot or via an automated workflow within a self-service portal, automating password resets can decrease service desk calls by more than 40% and reduce end-user down-time – which quickly adds up to significant cost savings.

Automation also allows IT service desk employees to handle more complex calls and invest in larger improvements, ultimately improving job satisfaction, efficiency, and productivity. This, in turn, leads to happier end-users. A win-win!

But don’t take our word for it. A Forrester research states that employees who work with automation have experienced a 69% improvement in their job satisfaction, while 78% of business leaders confirm that automating tasks in the organization increases productivity for everyone involved.

And our customer, the District School Board of Niagara, found automation helped them save valuable time and money. As did the University of Ottawa: Since implementing its ITSM software solution, uOttawa has been able to clear more than 45,000 (and counting) service desk tickets without the need for help desk intervention or triage service requests.

Embrace service desk automation today

Ready to automate those pesky password resets away? Read up on the what, why and how of service desk automation.

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Nowadays, we’re bombarded even more with AI-related topics. One of those topics is the digital workforce. A threat  or a blessing for the service desk?

What is a digital workforce?

A digital workforce is a collection of “software robots” that support and augment the work humans do. The work done by the robots basically replaces the humans’ effort.

The number of mistakes, however, is much lower. Plus, robots can be faster and more efficient. They don’t get sick or go on holidays. And scaling up or down is more easily done, without personal emotions coming into play.

Another advantage of working with robots lies in their consistency. Many organizations are always looking to structure their processes. The goal of working with processes is to guarantee a consistent quality of services, no matter the supplier.

However, humans can be less motivated on certain days, which may lead to a decline in the quality of the services your organization offers. Despite processes being followed. You don’t have this problem with robots. Consistency is their key.

We shouldn’t consider robots as a replacement for human beings, but see them as an augmentation for service desk employees.

Digital workforce: the end of a human service desk?

So, are robots a big enough reason to cut your service desk department in half? Do they enable you to achieve the same outcome and level of quality with half of your workforce? Some companies are actually considering this path, or even pursuing it.

As a service desk employee, these are scary developments. But is a digital workforce really the way to go in the long run?

Personally, I believe you should aim for service excellence. And, in my opinion, a human being is the only one who can provide that. It’s true that the quality of the service provided can vary per person. However, I think services can only exceed expectations by using the advantages of human interaction. One thing a robot can’t have is actual empathy. Humans are still the only ones that can adjust their service delivery to fit the emotional needs of the customer.

When you know that a customer has had a rough day, you can deliver your service with some extra care, for instance. Therefore, human beings are still vital for delivering an excellent service experience.

The future of hiring service desk employees may be a bit different, however. When interviewing new candidates you should probably focus more on their empathy level. Can they understand the situations of customers well enough to adjust the delivery of the service to their individual needs?

Frank Smit, Chief Innovation Officer at our partner OBI4wan, explains what chatbots are and which processes you can (and cannot) utilize them for.

One plus one is three

The digital workforce at the service desk won’t replace service desk staff any time soon. We shouldn’t consider robots as a replacement for human beings, but consider them as an augmentation for service desk employees. The digital workforce should take over boring and recurring tasks, freeing up time for the humans to focus on the individual needs of the customer.

To summarize, robots can efficiently identify solutions for a customer’s problem. So that service desk employees are helped in their attempt to help the customer. It’s all about connecting the digital workforce and the service desk, ensuring service desk employees can make the difference in service delivery. By implementing an AI solution in this way, you’ll get a step closer to service excellence.

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