Frank Smit, Chief Innovation Officer at our partner OBI4wan, explains what chatbots are and where you should (and shouldn’t) be using them.

‘I forgot my password’.

How often does your service desk receive this call? Wouldn’t it be easier if you could automate this type of simple request, so that your service desk employees could focus on more interesting tasks?

Good news. Chatbots can make life easier for service agents. How? Chatbots capture requests automatically. Here’s how it works: a customer asks a question. Then, the chatbot analyzes the text and interprets its meaning. Based on that interpretation, the chatbot knows how to respond to the customer.

This is what the service desk of the future will look like. Having a database with all your FAQs is essential for this process to work.

Which service desk tasks can you assign chatbots to perform?

Chatbots can intercept requests. But not all of them. So, how do you determine which processes should be automated? Below is an overview of the types of queries received by a typical service desk and whether they’d be suitable for a chatbot.

1. Simple, recurring requests

Password resets are a prime example. Employees are constantly forgetting their passwords. This is something that you can’t prevent. But for the service desk employee who’s having to reset the umpteenth password, this is pretty tedious work. And for the organization, staffing a service desk for this type of request is a waste of money.

Chatbots are the perfect solution: they understand the query and know what to do to ensure that the customer receives a new password. The customer is happy that they’ve been helped quickly and your employees are able to focus on more rewarding work. It’s a win-win situation.

2. Gathering feedback

As a service desk manager, you want to know what customers think of your services. This isn’t directly helpful for customers, but is highly beneficial for your service desk. For example, you can ask customers how easy it was for them to source the information that was relevant to their request. This is an ideal job for a chatbot. The chatbot collects qualitative feedback while the service agent talks to the customer. This provides your service desk with valuable input to keep improving your services.

3. Processes that are too complex for the customer

Some processes are too complex for the customer to handle alone, resulting in multiple calls to the service desk. This was a situation that service desk employees experienced at the Education & Student Affairs department of Erasmus University. International students needed to input 20 variables to determine their tuition fees for the coming year. This was confusing for the students and the service desk were struggling to process the resulting requests.

How did OBI4wan resolve this? They created a chatbot which would engage in conversation with the students to determine their particular circumstances and then respond to their tuition fee requests accordingly. This saved international students a great deal of time and unnecessary stress, while taking pressure off the service desk.

4. All other queries

Other kinds of requests are generally more complex and are therefore unsuitable for outsourcing to chatbots. It’s best to assign these more challenging requests to your service desk employees. And, in some situations, customers prefer to call and speak to a real person, such as when phoning an insurance company to report a car accident. In this scenario, the customer is looking for empathy and reassurance. This is when a human touch is needed.

Start by deciding which queries require the human touch and which can be automated.

What are the benefits of chatbots?

Once you get started with chatbots, the first benefit will become clear from the word go. Start by deciding which queries require the human touch and which can be automated. You’ll immediately start processing requests more efficiently. And, once the more straightforward queries have been automated, your service desk staff will have more time for more challenging work, resulting in happier employees.

Looking for more ways to improve employee experience? Say goodbye to service desk stress.

And the customer? They’re guaranteed a friendly response 24/7, even if they’ve forgotten their password for the umpteenth time. And if the chatbot is unable to resolve their request? Then a service desk employee can intercept it right away, so the customer still gets helped quickly.

Want to learn more about ITSM automation?

Discover new ways to save time and money, while improving your customer experience. Learn more about ITSM automation.

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Is AI on the verge of taking over? Are people truly becoming redundant? And what does this mean for IT departments? Let’s find out.

What is artificial intelligence?

To start, let’s look at what we mean when we talk about AI. Gartner defines artificial intelligence as “applying advanced analysis and logic-based techniques, including machine learning (ML), to interpret events, support and automate decisions and to take actions.”

AI is used for a myriad of things: self-driving cars, face and speech recognition, e-payment, smart home devices, Google Maps, and so much more – probably without you even realizing it.

Businesses also heavily rely on AI. Machine learning (a subset of AI) is used for customer analytics and customer relationship management, for example, to better understand and serve customers.

Artificial intelligence in IT (service desks)

In IT, AI is employed for many different purposes, one of them being security. IT departments use machine learning to detect anomalies and identify suspicious activities that indicate threats. By analyzing data and using logic to identify any similarities to known malicious code, AI can detect new and emerging cyberattacks much faster than humans.

AI is also used in chatbots. These understand what customers are asking and provide the answer to these questions using natural language processing to simulate a chat. Thanks to chatbots, customers can still get the answers to their questions, even outside the IT department’s office hours.

The digital workforce goes one step further than chatbots: it’s a category of software robots that support and augment the work humans do. Digital workers are different from chatbots in that they can complete a task from beginning to end, whereas chatbots are only able to perform single tasks.

Artificial intelligence needs human ingenuity to work.

Are machines taking over?

But how mature is AI really? Mature enough to take over anytime soon?

In 2020, the World Economic Forum predicted that automation would displace 85 million jobs globally in the next five years. According to their report, roles in areas such as data entry, accounting and administrative support are decreasing in demand as automation and digitization in the workplace increases.

News like this is bound to create anxiety. Yes, AI is growing fast – but fast enough to have completely disrupted the workforce by 2025? We don’t think so.

First of all, it’s going to take years and years for AI and robots to catch up enough in both capabilities and numbers to make people truly redundant. Right now, ChatGPT might be smart enough to answer even complex queries, but experts say it still lacks the ability to think critically or make nuanced, ethical decisions, like a human being. It can also occasionally give answers which sound plausible but are just factually incorrect, simply because its knowledge base only contains information up to 2021.

What does AI mean for IT departments?

Instead of employing AI to replace humans, IT departments should be using AI to complement IT professionals and their work.

AI is foolproof, fast, consistent, and efficient. So, play to these strengths. Use AI to reduce manual actions, increase data insights, or facilitate challenging tasks. This gives IT professionals more time and energy to focus on customer experience or solving complex incidents – tasks that require a human touch.

Curious about the state of the IT service desk of the future and what role AI will play in it? We’ve made some predictions.

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By leveraging AI, service desk employees can spend their time doing what they do best: using their expertise to resolve complex calls. Discover 3 ways in which AI can make your service desk more effective.

How can AI help automating service management?

With AI, tools can gain insight into the underlying problem of each incoming incident and service request.

Do your service desk employees strive to do their utmost, but occasionally things don’t work out as expected? Such as an incorrect incident registration or prioritization? Artificial Intelligence (AI) is here to help. Modernize your service desk by using AI, and your employees will make fewer mistakes and have more time for customers.

1. Faster incident and service request registration

Incident and service request registration is all in a day’s work for the service desk. Service desk employees don’t only register the incident or request; they also capture lots of other data including the category and priority. Correctly assessing this information can prove difficult, error-prone and time-consuming. Your service desk employees would certainly thank you if you could relieve them of this administrative burden by making customers more self-sufficient. Still, consistent registration and categorization are an essential part of your services:

• Correctly registered incidents are easier to assign to colleagues with the right skill set.
• Registering the right information means you can determine the right priorities.
• Service desk managers can run reports on service status.

So, how can AI make life easier for your service desk employees? AI simplifies the registration process. It can be used to identify the properties of incidents and service requests within a specific category for example. AI provides service desk employees with a category suggestion for each new incident and service request. It makes these suggestions based on information contained in the knowledge base.

AI similarly provides service desk employees with suggestions for other fields in the incident and service request forms, making them easier to complete.

What’s the benefit of AI assistance? Service desk employees make fewer mistakes and have more time to focus on their customers. And, as new employees need no longer commit incident and service request categories to memory, they can get up to speed far more quickly.

Is incident and service request registration set to become a thing of the past?

AI makes incident and service request registration much easier for service desk employees. The question is whether registration remains necessary at all. If you regard registration as a means of routing for example, then you can achieve the same results using AI, without the intermediate step of registration.

AI can be used to recognize which incidents and service requests are similar, and which service desk colleagues can resolve them based on information available in the knowledge base. Time will tell whether this development will ultimately make registration completely redundant.

2. Accurate incident prioritization

How does your service desk prioritize incidents and requests? There’s a good chance it’s based on categories, a predefined priority matrix, and SLAs. While these are currently the most useful tools for serving customers effectively, the practice is much more nuanced. And AI will actively assist with this type of work in the future.

Prioritization made easy

With AI, tools can gain insight into the underlying problem of each incoming incident and service request. This helps to improve priority assessment:

• AI recognizes which incidents and service requests have proved problematic in the past (e.g. because they were bounced from one service desk colleague to another, or because they exceeded their resolution time for example). This alerts service agents, allowing them to give this type of incident or request additional attention.
• AI recognizes emotions. If typically easy-going customers suddenly appear stressed, or become increasingly irritated upon each communication about the same incident or request, then AI will prompt the service desk employee to contact them to request additional information or manage their expectations.

Imagine an office projector is broken and the normal resolution time is 2 days. The customer, however, is due to conduct a presentation for a major client and requires the projector within a few hours. AI can understand the context and urgency of the incident, and will indicate that it must be assigned the highest priority.

Ultimately, AI will be capable of harnessing numerous factors, such as text comprehension and past experience, to assist in assessing customer satisfaction upon incident or service request resolution.

3. Simplify task assignment using AI

For service desk managers, service desk employees who take the initiative to optimally organize their workload are worth their weight in gold. When that occasionally proves a challenge, AI is there to help.

AI assesses how long a specific incident or request will take to resolve based on previous incidents and requests. It can then assign tasks based on your service agents’ schedules. If one of your service desk employees suddenly finds themselves with an extra hour to spare, then AI will resolve this by suggesting a one-hour task.

Make your service desk future-proof

Do you want to learn more about working smarter and faster at your service desk? Our best practice service management (BPSM) e-book is a great place to start. We’ll take you through a step-by-step guide on how to simplify your work process using BPSM.

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Wouldn’t it be great if your customers could answer their own questions? If they were no longer dependent on service desk opening times and capacity, and could solve their own problems at a time of their choosing? 

3 ways in which an AI-powered service desk can help make your customers more self-sufficient.

Shift Left and service management

Shift Left doesn’t only enhance customer experience; it also benefits the service desk by actively reducing the number of calls and eliminating repetitive tasks. This leaves more time for more challenging problem-solving. The end result? Happier service desk employees and happier customers: a win-win situation.

Making Shift Left a success isn’t easy. But thankfully help is at hand. You can improve your Shift Left operation demonstrably using Artificial Intelligence. Below are 3 ways in which AI can help your service desk customers become even more self-sufficient.

1. AI helps customers find information more easily

A key component of Shift Left is Knowledge Centered Support: service desk employees create knowledge items and customers subsequently retrieve the information that they need from the knowledge base. Well, at least that’s the theory. In practice, the service desk often makes information available, yet the customer is unable to find it. Either because the customer doesn’t know exactly what information they’re looking for, or because they’re not using the same search term as the IT specialist who has written the knowledge item.

Thanks to the Natural Language Processing and Understanding (NLPU) component of Artificial Intelligence, computers are able to understand human language. They can discern the topic and context of a text. For the service desk, this means that the computer has improved understanding of two things: the customer’s enquiry, and the knowledge item subject matter. The benefit? AI enables the machine to make a much better match between the customer’s request and the machine-generated solution, even if the customer’s request is unclear. AI also recognizes and reports which questions cannot yet be answered with the help of a knowledge item. That way you know what information you need to add.

If your company is multilingual then it’s essential that knowledge items are available in multiple languages. Unfortunately, most service desks don’t have a dedicated translator to hand. Artificial Intelligence provides a solution: NLPU can translate knowledge items automatically, ensuring that new information is instantly available to customers everywhere.

2. Chatbots and virtual assistants provide 24/7 service with a smile

Increasingly, a customer’s first contact with the service desk is not with a person, but a chatbot. Chatbots are constantly available. Even in the middle of the night and at weekends. And chatbots don’t mind answering the same questions over and over again. This directly benefits your customers and your service desk employees.

Chatbots help customers find the information they’re looking for through conversation. For people, this is a far more natural way of retrieving information than a search query. The customer starts off with a general question, instead of immediately specifying the right keywords. The chatbot determines precisely what the customer enquiry concerns by asking additional questions. This conversation prevents customers from becoming frustrated during the search process.

If the chatbot can’t find the right information, it can independently create an incident. This reduces the workload for both customers and service desk employees.
Some chatbots can even solve problems autonomously, by resetting passwords for instance. This ‘chatbot plus’ is a virtual assistant that’s available 24/7 to relieve busy service desk employees of small, simple, repetitive tasks.

3. Machine Learning proactively predicts customer requests

In some cases, Machine Learning (another AI component) completely eliminates the need for customers to search for information. How does this work? ML enables you to predict why customers will visit your portal. Amongst other things, it makes this prediction based on their job role, department and location, and the activity of other portal users.

By virtue of this predictive technology, the portal is able to proactively present the information that customers are likely searching for. Such as a knowledge item or new computer request form. This is comparable to the way in which Netflix provides suggestions for series that you are currently unaware of, but will probably enjoy.

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AI in Service Management: hype or game changer?

Artificial Intelligence is a broad concept. What you’d describe as AI some 20 years ago – think of IBM’s chess computer Deep Blue – has now become standard technology. When people talk about AI nowadays, they often mean Machine Learning.

With Machine Learning, a computer uses examples to learn how to complete a task. So the hype is really about Machine Learning, a technology with huge potential. But how will this impact our everyday lives? And how will Machine Learning change our work in service management? What will the service desk of the future look like? We’re starting to get a better idea.

Research by Gartner also shows that Machine Learning is at the peak of its hype cycle. Expectations are high; in some cases people think that the entire service desk will be replaced by intelligent chatbots within a couple of years. We’re slowly realizing that a lot of these expectations won’t be met for now. I predict that the high expectations of Machine Learning will normalize in the coming years, and it will become more clear what the practical uses are of this technology.

Which Machine Learning application for service management do expect for the coming years?

Machine Learning is good at recognizing trends and changes in these trends. For service management, this means that Machine Learning quickly recognizes when an above average number of calls are logged, or lots of calls within one category, and you can act upon this. Just imagine that you suddenly notice several calls being logged for the same problem. For instance: a specific cloud service is no longer available.

Machine Learning will recognize this and send a signal to a specialized agent, who can react to this. In a more advanced setting, Machine Learning can create a major call to which other calls are linked, and which informs all agents about the call’s progress.

Machine Learning is not only able to spot urgent disruptions, but also long-term problems. Problem management is currently very labor-intensive, because you have to plough through long lists with calls. Machine Learning can help you recognize patterns in all your calls. This makes discovering structural problems a lot easier.

Machine Learning can also help you find solutions for incoming calls. At first this will only be used by service desk staff. For instance, when they receive a new call, they are shown similar, completed calls that includes details the agent can use to provide a solution. Later, Machine Learning might be used to answer the question automatically – or even prevent calls if you provide the customer will a solution while they’re typing.

Common misconceptions about Machine Learning versus service management

The biggest misconception is that chatbots and virtual assistants will make service desk employees redundant within the next couple of years. This won’t happen for at least 5 years.

Why not? Because the technology isn’t sophisticated enough. There are many technical possibilities – just look at the impressive Machine Learning experiments at Google and Microsoft. But the majority of chatbots for company applications are quite expensive, and don’t always work well. Asking a chatbot a question doesn’t have any added value compared to a typing a search query in Google.

Additionally, Machine Learning will mainly help to answer straightforward questions more quickly. But there are a lot of calls that are more complex, which will need to be solved by people.

In fact, because Machine Learning helps solve the easiest questions, there’s more time to solve the more complex calls. And it’s those calls that are currently left too long.

Once Machine Learning becomes better at finding the right information, service desk employees will have both hands free to focus on customer experience. How do you deal with a frustrated customer? What’s the right tone you should use? What can you offer them to exceed their expectations? This requires you to act empathetically. And I can’t see Machine Learning doing that any time soon.

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