The Ultimate Guide To Improve Service Desk Agent’S Productivity

With the world of technology evolving every day, the facet of development is advancing exponentially. In digitization, service desks are invaluable as they provide the employees with the first human touch or interaction in the time of need or inquiries. It is the platform or interface which provides the users with the ease of access to the services, knowledge inventories or ticketing systems to report various incidents or solve their queries. 

The service desks have evolved and changed completely from the traditional service desk structure before the revolution of technology. 

The traditional service desks had the sole purpose of delivering value to the employees by solving the various queries and tickets. Traditional service desks used manual systems for the working and the tickets or interactions were completely manual. 

With the manual ticketing systems or incidents management structures, the queries resolutions were delayed in delivering optimal employee experience and satisfaction as the solutions were not readily available. 

The system's manual working required a service desk agent to be fully dedicated to providing the solutions to the mundane and repetitive tasks such as resetting the passwords, software updates, or simple tasks such as following up on the previously filed tickets. 

The Traditional Desks Followed: 

Manual ticketing systems were tedious to file or even if the online portals were available for the filing process of the tickets; they were hard to follow and were time-consuming. 

Incident management systems took forever to solve, and the filing systems were not up-to-date 

Knowledge inventory was not regularly updated, which caused a void gap between the employees and the departments. Service requests were not easy to file and were not fulfilled by the organizations due to the long waiting queue 

Communication gap, since the online presence and the point of interaction were not up to the mark, the communication between various departments internally was difficult and not easily available. 

These institutional structures and systems caused communication gaps and late processing of the requests, which were not handled appropriately and most often returned with irrelevant and not relatable solutions. 

The technology gap and its inclusion in the systems and structural modeling of the organizations' working resulted in the various gaps that needed structural rebuilding and modeling. 

The Growing Need for Holistic Solution: 

The clunky software, disjointed processes and slow service delivery called for serious and immediate action plans. Service help desks is no longer a standalone entity. The system demands a clear and clean mesh with the production, change management, assets, delivery processes, and functions within the organizations' information systems. 

The modern service help desks are much more integrated between the platforms and services that aim to collaborate between various applications and user interfaces to provide the employee with seamless user experience and satisfaction. 

Elements in Modern Service Desk: 

Technology is the new and critical pivotal to driving growth in almost all areas of an organization; the modern service help desk leverages the power of artificial intelligence, advanced and powerful analytics and insights filtering the pool of data to provide meaningful and relevant results solutions resolutions. 

The gap between the new millennial workforce, who are tech-savvy, having brought up with the social media and the digital novices, who see IT as a way of getting by, is bridged by the understanding of the AI and automation, which helps in delivering the services and solutions which are relevant and reliable. 

The digital workplaces or websites, which are the key source of driving the most queries and tickets, comprises three technologies; functional interfaces, enterprise communication and service management. The research analytics, industry insights, artificial intelligence, and automation, assist help the departments deliver a clear and meaningful solution to the employees, which in turn improves the employee experience and work environment, making it a more employee-friendly and productive space. 

The Key Factors of the Modern Service Help Desks Include: 

Artificial Intelligence: The use of AI and its integration in the platforms have helped leverage the power of analytics and statistics. Artificial intelligence has enabled organizations to act proactively towards any barriers and solve the issues instantaneously. 

Chat-bots: the conversational interaction between the employees and the bot encourages the users to use self-help portals more often. Chatbots provide help and solutions right away without having a service desk agent to handle the inquiry. The chatbots provide the most accurate and relatable resolutions to the given query with natural language processors and up-to-date knowledge inventory. 

Multiple Integrations: Whether the employee is on a laptop or mobile, the AI's service is available and works seamlessly on any platform. The seamless integration does not require any software or drastic institutional changes. 

Incident management: The integration makes the reporting of the incidents seamless and makes the process of resolution transparent and accountable with the tracking feature. 

Automation: AI constantly understands the processes the frequent queries asked and then completely automates it. The intelligence also adjusts and learns the new changes and updates itself accordingly to provide the employees with reliable and relevant solutions tailored and personalized to their query. 

With 59% of service desk agents and organizations recognizing the use of automation as a top priority, it is no doubt that the service help desk plays a crucial role in the progression of the organization. 

By equipping the employees with the right and powerful tools, the organization can improve the employee experience, directly correlating with the higher average revenue growth, net profit margin, customer satisfaction and earnings per share. 

Moreover, 70% of business leaders agree that employee experience is critical to achieving their business goals. With this been said, how to improve the employee experience and productivity is the next big question. 

With the right tools such as automation and artificial intelligence and leveraging the power of analytics and industrial insights, one can drastically increase employee engagement and productive hours. 

Employee experience is defined as the holistic view of life at work, which requires constant feedback, necessary action and monitoring. It is a critical component of an organization as nearly 80% of executives rated employee experience as very important but only 22% reporting that their companies were excellent at building a differentiated employee experience. 

Hence, it is important to provide the employee with the necessary tools and platforms to provide an engaging and productive environment. 

What Does the Modern Service Desk Contribute? 

The modern service desk contributes to the proper and smooth functioning of the employee's experience in several key ways: 

• Connect employees to service desk resources: when the employees have access to the knowledge inventory with reliable and relevant content, it is easier to solve various problems. Giving the employees access to the self-service portals and making them easier to access and use, the employees can solve their issues.
  
  
• Chatbot inclusion: with the organization’s platforms integrated with the technology do chatbots that provide conversational assistance to the employees, the service help desk agents can focus on more complex and intricate issues that require creative thinking.
  
  
• Offer multiple integrations: with the technology working seamlessly with all the platforms and devices, the employees will work more efficiently and productively while the agents at the service desk can be free from performing the mundane and repetitive tasks again and again.
  
  
• Keep the employees informed: by the regular updates of the knowledge inventory, the employees can access reliable and up-to-date information, which helps in better assistance.
  
  
• Improve team communication: Mckinsey's study shows that improving team communication can increase productivity by up to 25%, which improves the communication between various departments and helps in transparent and accountable processing with easier tracking.
  
  

The employee experience is pivotal to the organization’s success through the years, and with the modern service desk tools, one can guarantee the organization’s progress. 

With artificial intelligence and modern tools of service desk, one can leverage the power of industry insights and analytics to free the service desk agents from the mundane and repetitive tasks, allowing them to concentrate on the complex issues at hand. 

Conclusion: 

These tools can help the organization work with transparency and accountability, making it easier to collaborate and making the communications seamless internally in the organization. This also helps track the requests with real-time updates and proactive notifications and enable the organization to solve the issues and automate the queries' processes before they become the hindrance noticeably in the organization's progress. 

Want to learn more about how you can take your service desk to the next level? Then hop onto this article.