How Is Artificial Intelligence Improving Itsm And Esm?

ITSM has been helping organizations deal with the issues faced by their employees for decades. The IT service management principles allow your organization to attend to the IT-specific needs of your employees, helping them go about their work seamlessly.  

However, the application and principles of traditional ITSM are limited to looking efficient on paper. The older and more traditional ITSM has not been proven effective for the employees. One of the biggest problems faced by the dedicated IT help desks is the fact that the help desks are rarely well-versed with the organization as a whole.  

This restricts the scope of ITSM when it comes to employee support. Owing to the times that we live in, limiting your employee support to ITSM will never work. The scope of employee support is much bigger as employees across the board are often in need of efficient support.

What Additional Support Do Employees Need?

Here are some of the key areas of support that your employees need apart from the traditional ITSM support:

Dedicated Service Desks  

There are several departments in an organization, and each of these departments needs a service desk that helps the employees get their issues resolved. Generalizing employee issues and helping all of them out in the name of ITSM no longer works.  

Service desks in the field of HR, finance, project management, facilities, DevOps, and other specific business units are important to ensure that holistic support is provided to all your employees.

Knowledge Management For Answering Questions  

There is much more to employee support other than helping your employees out of complicated IT-related fixes. Your employees may face an array of issues frequently and may have questions about specific aspects of their jobs. The traditional ITSM has no provisions for getting these quick questions answered immediately.  

Your employees need efficient knowledge management where all their questions (no matter how trivial they are) are answered out of your enterprise knowledge base. These questions may address issues relating to business policies, procedures, business flow, process knowledge, process automation, workflow management, application knowledge, and many more.  

Answering Process-related Questions  

Your employees are likely to have questions relating to the process they undertake, either on a daily basis or in special cases.  

There may be times when they look for brief guidance on carrying out a specific process that has been hindering their job. Such processes may be as basic as re-issuing a check or more complicated processes that include programming and web development.  

Performing Simple Repetitive Tasks  

Owing to an increase in process automation and the volume of work done, your employees may need some help in performing simple repetitive tasks. Whether it is viewing reports, sending emails, or making calculations, performing the same task repeatedly will reduce the pace of the task, which can easily shoot up via process automation.  

Answering Policy Questions  

Employees often get confused and lost in figuring out whom to contact when it comes to answering policy-related questions. They need a service desk that easily and quickly answers these questions without them having to use multiple communication channels for getting a simple answer.  

Learning New Skills  

Employee support is not limited to answering the questions asked and resolving the issues raised by your employees. It also involves teaching them new and relevant skills that help them increase their productivity.  

Today, employees need a platform that helps them learn a variety of important skills by themselves, making them increasingly self-reliant in doing their jobs.  

Enterprise Service Management (ESM) – An Evolved ITSM

The shortcomings of ITSM have given rise to enterprise service management (ESM). As the name suggests, ESM involves providing support to employees belonging to all the departments within an organization instead of limiting the support to the IT department.  

The basic principles of ITSM and ESM are more or less the same. When you take the ITSM principles and use them for providing seamless employee support across the organization, you end up implementing ESM.  

Enterprise Service Management is the most relevant and effective alternative ITSM. Here, although IT service management will be at the heart of the platform, it also caters to the needs of the employees working in various other departments. This will ensure the holistic development of your organization.  

The Need For Automating ITSM And ESM

According to a report by McKinsey, employees spend 1.8 hours every day and 9.3 hours every week on average to search and gather information for obtaining the right support.  

Although having a service desk for all your employees is a big step towards improved employee support, it does not really make the job of your employees easier. They will still have to raise tickets and approach the agents every time they encounter the smallest problem.  

The solution to this problem comes in the form of an automated employee service desk. These service desks relieve your employees from putting in more time and effort than required for getting their issues resolved.  

When you automate your ITSM and ESM, the use of artificial intelligence helps you take the efficiency of employee support a notch higher. The technology gives your service desk human-like analytical skills, allowing the platform to make sense of your database and enterprise knowledge according to the specific support required by your employees.  

Process automation and artificial intelligence allow your employees to obtain immediate solutions to their problems without having to create tickets and wait for them to be addressed by the agents.  

Many prominent organizations and online collaborative platforms have been automating their employee support by using AI service desks. Microsoft Teams makes use of Rezolve.ai, an AI-driven employee service desk that helps the users in getting their issues resolved by interacting with a chatbot.  

From automating specific processes and getting basic questions answered to providing a micro-learning system for teaching specific skills to the employees, Rezolve.ai makes sure that an organization is able to streamline its employee support in the best way possible.  

The Working Of AI-driven ITSM And ESM

When you automate ITSM and ESM using artificial intelligence, the service desk makes use of conversational AI to provide quick and efficient support to your employees.  

Conversational AI allows your employees to interact with smart virtual assistants instead of reaching out to dedicated agents. The full functionality of such platforms depends on these AI chatbots.  

Whenever an employee needs help, they can log into the service desk and type in the issue they are facing. They will be immediately greeted by a virtual assistant who would guide them every step of the way. This is the common front-end support (L1) provided to all the employees of your organization.  

At this stage, the virtual assistant will scan your enterprise knowledge base and provide the most suitable answer to the question asked. This should not take more than a few seconds. In most cases, the issue is resolved here, and the employees continue their work without any further hindrance.  

However, if the virtual assistant is not able to provide a satisfactory answer to your employee’s problem, it would automatically create a ticket (without your employee’s knowledge) and take the case to an expert for a better approach.  

The expert looks into the matter and provides the best possible solution to your employee through the virtual assistant. The use of AI helps you eliminate the need for your employee to connect with dedicated experts directly.  

If your employee is still not satisfied with the solution provided by the expert, the serviced desk will allow them to create a ticket manually and have a live interaction with the experts.  

This way, automating your ITSM and ESM service desk using artificial intelligence puts a virtual assistant at your employees’ disposal who would guide them until their issues are resolved, and they are satisfied with the support provided.  

The Impact Of Artificial Intelligence On ITSM And ESM

AI has completely changed the way ITSM and ESM provide employee support within your organization. It not only helps you overcome the drawbacks of the traditional service desk but also increases the speed and efficiency with which your employees obtain organizational support.  

Here are some of the major ways in which AI has impacted ITSM and ESM:  

An Integrated Service Desk  

The use of AI allows you to set up a service desk that is not specific to one or two departments. You can provide common L1 support to employees working in all the departments, irrespective of the issues they are facing and the complexities of the same.  

This solves the inherent issue of employees getting confused as to whom to approach for finding the right answers. A single platform acts as a solution to all their problems.  

Seamless Knowledge Management  

Earlier, the luxury of knowledge management was provided to the agents and not the employees. The advent of AI in the realm of employee support has turned the tables, allowing your employees to obtain answers straight out of your enterprise knowledge base.  

According to the question asked by an employee, an AI service desk will immediately go to the vast knowledge base and come up with precisely the solution to the problem. This increases the personalized approach of solving employee issues and providing unique answers to their questions.  

Cutting Down Training Costs  

AI employee service desks like Rezolve.ai help your employees learn specific skills through the feature of microlearning. If your employees need to learn new and relevant skills to improve their work, the AI-driven platform helps them in getting trained all by themselves.  

All they need to do is access relevant training resources out of the knowledge base and follow the guide to learn the concerned skill(s) effectively. This helps you save the cost of hiring a trainer every time you need to teach specific skills to your employees. Once you have added relevant materials to your knowledge base, the AI service desk will take care of the rest.  

Context-based Solutions  

AI-based ITSM and ESM platforms will not provide generic resources in response to the questions asked by your employees. They will provide solutions that are in sync with the specific question asked by the specific employee.  

When employees interact with a virtual assistant, the virtual assistant understands the context of the question asked and provides an answer accordingly. The service desk will keep track of all the interactions taking place between your employees and the AI chatbots and store important details within a centralized database.  

Maintaining such a database allows the virtual assistant to be already aware of the problems an employee has faced in the past when logging into the platform.  

Improved Workflow Engine  

Apart from providing solutions to the issues faced by your employees, the use of AI in an employee service desk provides you with an automated workflow engine to keep track of the different workflows carried out within an organization.  

Your employees can use the platform for automating the processes they perform and manage them to achieve the desired results. While ITSM helps your IT employees to manage their processes well, the workflow engine in ESM allows all employees across the board to streamline an array of activities.  

Making Employees Self-reliant  

When you allow your employees to train themselves via the AI service desk, they get increasingly independent in their respective jobs. Also, self-learned skills always prove to be stronger and more sustainable as opposed to the skills learned in a workshop/physical training session.  

When your employees are self-reliant, they can focus more on their work, improve their existing skills, and increase their productivity over time.  

The Final Word  

In 2021, the importance of artificial intelligence is only going to increase with time. From carrying out the simplest processes to resolving the most complicated matters, employees will prefer seamless automation over the traditional approach.  

It is, therefore, advisable to stay in sync with the technological advancements by implementing ITSM/ESM platforms driven by artificial intelligence. It will not only help your employees work better but also leverage the overall functionality of your organization.