The Ultimate Guide 2021- Benefits Of Automated Employee Help Desk

We tried to find out how employees feel about the traditional help desk service today. Many feel frustrated with the slow rate of response of their existing IT support system. They believe in the power of automation and want to see smart conversational AI technology taking customer support systems to new heights. 

Introduction: Evolving Era of Deep Automation & Microlearning

IT helpdesks have evolved a lot over the years. Thanks to the adoption of smart AI technology, what began as a traditional ticketing system to address employee concerns has now transformed into efficient platforms for automated employee experience. They come with quick responding and resolving features that enable companies to enhance the employee support system to a high degree. However, your organization's ability to exploit these modern helpdesk systems is highly dependent on the skill of implementing the automation technology and following the latest practices that are restructuring it. 

To help you all get optimal benefits, here is a quick compilation of help desk system facts and figures. It also covers all the flaws and trends you need to look out for, from what employees expect from organizations to the challenges of deploying automation in a help desk system. Hopefully, this Ebook will answer how you can automate and optimize your employee help desk solutions in 2021 and ahead of it. 

Employee Helpdesk - How Important?

Have any of you ever gone through this? Get greeted and have a quick prompt on your company website to continue with your query, which is nothing but automated employee support ensured to resolve the issue fast. Practically, businesses have started to invest significantly in supporting and engaging their employees the best. By exploiting AI-driven auto resolution features, they just want to support, retain employees, and better their experience in each phase of their journey. 

Of course, companies are now taking the initiative for an automated and interactive experience for employees at lightning speed with the implementation of the AIESM strategy. Are they assuring to instantly resolve the complex tasks and satisfy their employees the most? 

Do you think that companies are putting in enough effort to provide the employees with a highly automated and collaborative help desk system to keep them engaged at a personal level continuously? 

Every employee needs helpdesk support during her or his employment with a company. She or he gets assignments, resource allocations, training, contact requests, and much more to streamline the workflow within the company. Their helpdesk queries are likely to range from moderate and straightforward to complex ones. 

With employee experience now being redefined through an automated platform, companies find themselves in a better position to meet their employee expectations and demands. This Ebook focuses on the necessity, essential elements, and power of automation in building an employee-oriented helpdesk system with digital features for employee support at a personal level. It highlights many advanced options like multi-factor and multi-channel availability, integration with multiple systems for end-to-end automation, intelligent ticket routing, and ticketing analyzer to reiterate the need to deliver the most interactive employee experience. 

Handling employee needs is no longer conventional. It is a significant burden to be managed with strategic thinking and sophisticated solutions. This is why the global market share of help desk software has been growing radically since AI technology was used in the integration. Moreover, investment in employee support now leaves a better impact on the companies' operational expenses than before. 

Surprisingly, the following statistics offer insight into how vital a help desk is for the overall satisfaction of employees and their retention. 

1. The help desk software market size is estimated to be 1273.9 million USD by the year 2025. (MarketWatch, 2020)
   
   
2. Not being able to actively engage employees cost US employers something between $450 billion to $550 billion annually.
   
   
3. Unsatisfied employees need 15 more sick leaves every year than any average employee.
   
   
4. The satisfaction of Google employees grew by 37% after its employee support measures.
   
   
5. Companies with actively engaged employees earn 147% more per share than their peers.
   
   
6. In its report, Future Workplace and Beyond.com state that nearly 83% of HR managers mark Employee Experience as very important for their company's success.
   
   
7. According to HubSpot, 86 percent of service teams agree that a help desk system helps them boost their productivity.
   
   
8. HubSpot claims that 51 percent of high-growth service teams thrive on help desk systems.
   
   

Trends & Technology Reshaping Helpdesk Service

With the growing use of mobile devices, apps, multiple channels, social media platforms and modern technologies such as MLN, IoT, and more, solutions in the area of employee support are being reshaped to ensure automation and digitization. Helpdesk systems, while designed to support in-house staff, are soaked in these brilliant technologies. Additionally, expanding IT resources in every company is done away with traditional helpdesk solutions. 

Based on the challenges and emerging trends, employee helpdesk systems will go through considerable changes to include the following significant technical features: 

1. Consolidation of all helpdesk data, functionalities, and features into one platform to lower the operational expenses of managing helpdesk and enhance AI-powered decision making. 

2. Use intelligent automation to attend to repeated tasks, issues, requests, and cases to minimize manual administrative activities. 

3. Inclusion of chatbots and VAs to helpdesk systems to respond quickly to employee issues and suggest the best actions based on AI data analysis. 

4. The helpdesk system should be capable to integrate social media channels and allow analysis to guess the satisfaction of employees about the company's work atmosphere or policies. 

5. Mobile-enabled self-service portals in the helpdesk system can be very effective in providing a personalized employee experience while assisting in request deflection. 

6. Augmented or virtually reality-based self-training sessions should become part of the employee helpdesk system to avoid traditional class-room teachings. 

7. AI ticket analysis to keep track of ticket history; automatically find out key issues for facilitating machine learning-based recommendations and pace up new policy/product launch, etc. 

Employee Helpdesk Service - Present State & Rate

Traditional helpdesk systems were known as cost-effective, unstructured, and slow resolving solutions, not promptly responding to employee concerns. A thorough study of these employee support systems acknowledges a set of challenges throughout the journey of the employee: 

1. No multi-channel support
   
   
2. No comprehensive view of employee data
   
   
3. No facility for quickly tracking employee cases
   
   
4. No virtual or augmented interaction
   
   
5. No option for a self-service portal
   
   
6. Lack of access to common KM and FAQ
   
   
7. Unstructured support system
   
   
8. No automation of employee tasks
   
   
9. Inefficient ticket routing
   
   
10. Request recurs
    
    
11. Difficulty in tracking employee history
    
    

There are lots of statistics available on the rate of traditional helpdesks functioning that you may feel overwhelmed. Fortunately, some have been placed together to help you know how sluggish a manual helpdesk can be, what you can do to improvise it, and which modern technology you need to pick up for benchmarking purposes.

Explore what statistics have to say about a manually operating helpdesk system in your organization. 

1. The average time taken by a traditional helpdesk for resolving a ticket is: >48hrs (Whatfix)
   
   
2. What % of tickets are resolved in the first-time interaction? <60% (Whatfix)
   
   
3. What is the minimum number of interactions required to close an employee support ticket manually? 7 (Whatfix)
   
   
4. How many employee tickets does a conventional helpdesk leave re-opened? >3.1%(Endsight)
   
   
5. On calling a traditional help desk, the average time taken to connect with a live agent for employee support is: >2 minutes (Endsight)
   
   
6. The score of employee satisfaction for the support over a manual helpdesk is poor (<50%). Feedback was found to be mostly negative, indicating inefficient employee engagement through a conventionally managed helpdesk system.
   
   

To tackle growing employee issues, the help desk may be running with a single or two human operators in your organization at best. However, more than 90% of employee support your company needs can be managed with an automated help desk solution, adding to employee experience without fail. Moreover, you still have the scope to improve as much as you can. You can also measure how far you have come and what your present state and rate may look like in the future. 

Key Elements of Modern Helpdesk

To speed up processing the request of modern-day employees while having control over the operational expenses of running a helpdesk system, your company needs a far better solution than a traditional help desk. Let's have a quick look at the key factors involved in the designing and making of a fully effective helpdesk system. 

1. Complete view of employees across the organization to make a fast decision. 

2. Omni and multi-channel support request or case. 

3. Easy and instant access to the knowledge base of the company. 

4. Intelligent ticket allocation and resolution rules. 

5. Showing the data one is authorized to see within the helpdesk system. 

6. Record and analyze feedback for better helpdesk performance. 

7. Advanced options like social media and conversational chatbot integration. 

8. Ensuring AI-driven automation to serve employees properly and on time. 

9. Comprehensive help desk support across company functions. 

10. Pre-configured ticketing feature. 

11. Improved satisfaction and personalized experience for employees. 

12. Smooth integration with external solutions for data sharing and updates. 

13. MLN-based employee data analysis and prediction. 

14. Fully automated reactions, fault findings, and suggestions. 

15. A help desk system design approach based on the persona of the employee. 

16. Technical capability of the help desk to serve employee-specific requests. 

Role of Automation in Helpdesk System

To help your employees and get guided through self-resolving steps, automation is emerging as a core factor of the company help desk system. This has transformed the way employee engagement is done these days. It's a must-have feature for a help desk solution to bring on automated competence so that human agents are involved less in everyday communication and spend more time improving the employee experience, maintaining their satisfaction, retention and ensuring lasting value for the employee base. 

Since automation is everywhere in the service world, your company workflows should be designed to carry out an automated mode. The workflows that are the building blocks of your company, masked from the exterior world but make a big difference to how employees feel and perform. The solution to minimize the use of human agents for employee support and streamline workflow is by picking the most important processes (helpdesk) to automate. 

In the field of employee support, helpdesk automation frees human agents of recurring employee service requests, initiates intelligent ticketing & routing, runs SLA, automates analysis, follow-ups and simplifies the company workflow. 

1. Automated ticket routing to the right personnel.
   
   
2. Automatically merge employee tickets to save human agents from the extra effort in getting a comprehensive view of employee ticket details.
   
   
3. Facilitates pre-configured auto assignments, auto resolution, and auto-update of employee tickets.
   
   
4. Configure time-based events, criteria, conditions, and rules to auto-check tickets at fixed time intervals, saving time for real human agents.
   
   

What Benefits does an Automated Helpdesk Service Offer?

Automated helpdesk systems care to resolve your employee support problems uninterruptedly… correct? They happen to perform better than email/chat support, automating workflows and making your employees happier as well as more productive. In this Ebook, let's explore together the top benefits of having an automated helpdesk system in place. 

Plus Points for an Automated Helpdesk system

An automated ticketing system turns out to be an ideal replacement for email, chat, or phone support: 

• It keeps all your employee requests in one queue. You will find them all lined up in one place.
  
  
• It identifies and marks all significant requests so that you can easily prioritize them without wasting time.
  
  
• It is highly collaborative, includes knowledge management tools, and lowers the possibility of attending already resolved requests.
  
  
• It rules out manual efforts while preparing accurate reports on the number of employee requests your helpdesk is handing in a day, month, or year.
  
  
• It is simple and designed to automate everything in employee support services.
  
  
• It does not slow down even after serving hundreds of employee requests back-to-back.
  
  
• It can get personalized concerning your company rules, policies, etc.
  
  
• This does not cause any clash or confusion while sending automated notifications.
  
  
• It reacts automatically to every incoming employee request.
  
  
• It goes well with external systems.
  
  
• This leaves no space for a delay in support delivery.
  
  

Key Highlights 

• 30% less time to market
  
  
• 25% more employee satisfaction
  
  
• 27% less support expenses
  
  
• 20% more employee productivity
  
  
• 24% less calls for support
  
  
• IT teams can respond to an employee ticket in less than 24hrs
  
  
• L1 support expenses ($22) and L2 support expenses ($84) could be controlled as less people will be involved in the ticket resolution
  
  

Best Practices in the Industry

Irrespective of how many employee service requests you receive in a day, managing a well-automated help desk system is key to continue supporting your employees successfully. Exceptional ticket generating, routing, and the resolving system can lead to huge problem-solving power and building employee satisfaction. Here are the helpdesk industry's best practices you can embrace. With them, you can add to your employee support, productivity, and satisfaction level. 

1. Train human agents on automation technology properly
   
   
2. Choose how to prioritize employee tickets based on urgency
   
   
3. Make the most automation features built-in helpdesk system
   
   
4. Encourage your helpdesk team not to keep tickets in backlog
   
   
5. Go for clear, consistent, accurate, and well-planned ticket tagging
   
   
6. Track and update ticket status
   
   
7. Think of using canned replies and templates for standard queries
   
   
8. Put on use Service-level agreement
   
   
9. Tracking the history of employee tickets
   
   
10. Monitor and adjust helpdesk team performance
    
    
11. Allow self-service features to prevent crowding of the ticket queue
    
    
12. Make sure your employee support agents are empowered to make the right decision at the right time.
    
    

Conclusion 

The help desk solutions have now moved on from manual ticket handling activities. The growing competition to deliver employees automated support has met the employer's expectation to better their employee experience as well as productivity without much effort. 

Coming to the end of this Ebook, we would like you to give a thought to the concept of an automated helpdesk system; a smart solution built with the right blend of technology, features, employee behavior, and persona to meet both the structured and unstructured requests of employees in real-time. 

A Smart Option for Automated Help Desk System

Rezolve.ai offers a conversational AI-based help desk platform integrated within MS Teams. It lives up to the standard of automated employee support across multiple channels –Slack, MS Teams, etc. 

With Rezolve.ai, it is easy and fast to auto-resolve employee queries without creating a backlog. Employees can manage to have support within 5-10 seconds with a mere interaction on the Rezolve.ai app using MS Teams. 

The entire process of employee support through Rezolve.ai will be hassle-free as employees need not have to raise or route tickets. Be assured that all employee ticket data is visible in one window for ease of use. An employee-specific view will allow your company to track, analyze and modify KPIs for better performance of the help desk system from time to time. 

Additionally, Rezolve.ai acts as a replacement for the intranet when it comes to auto-resolving employee issues. To explore how an automated help desk system can benefit employee support in different ways, visit us here. Looking to invest in a very efficient MS Teams integrated AI-powered automated help desk solution, feel free to reach out to us.