An Ultimate Guide To Set Up Your Modern Employee Service Desk In 2023

Today, the corporate world is undergoing a "perfect storm for change" or, more precisely, "the need for change." As organizations continue to recover and grow post-pandemic, so much has happened to add pressure and provide opportunities to improve. The ongoing Great Resignation with a record of 4.5 million job quits in 2022 alone, employee attrition, rising recession, understaffing issues, the pressure to maintain SLAs and CSATs in this hybrid work culture - etc. are some of the severe issues most employee service desks face in this ever-evolving workplace. Despite this, companies are relying on older, more traditional service desks that provide fragmented and delayed support to the employees. One of the critical issues of a traditional service desk is that it is siloed, and services are more valuable to agents than to employees. The main drawback of a traditional service desk is that employees have to wait an exceptionally long period for their issues to be resolved. An organization's productivity is directly proportionate to the productivity of its workforce. This leads us to the conclusion that a traditional service desk slows down the overall business workflow and operations and hinders employee productivity and business ROI. All of these significant challenges can be overcome by implementing an 'automated employee service desk'.  

Needless to say, you will receive the required traction from your customers if you are able to modernize the support you provide to your workforce. The fundamental goal of using an employee service desk is to leverage technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and human support efficiently and effectively to meet employee requirements. Undoubtedly, the way the employee service desk is changing and catching up with the newest technological breakthroughs leads to a future filled with beneficial process automation and various other productive technologies. However, the notable reasons to use an AI-powered service desk for employee support include:  

• It is beneficial to the employees because an employee service desk solution helps employees to resolve their issues within 15 seconds without being frustrated or waiting hours.
• It's beneficial to the organizations since everyone is concentrated on completing tasks before the deadline which benefits both customers and the bottom line.
• It's also beneficial for support agents because, at a traditional service desk, agents are often swamped with several questions from diverse employees and unable to provide timely assistance. A modern employee service desk agent streamlines all mundane tasks and processes, allowing agents to focus on more critical issues.

But it can be tough to choose when and how to modernize your organization. Budgets are tight for many businesses, and "free" solutions just do not satisfy your expectations. You don't need anything fancy; instead, a simply functioning software solution that is up to date and satisfies your employees. So, how do you go about finding what you're searching for in terms of your employee service desk? Here's our complete guide to automating your employee service desk and getting to where you want to go. But before we begin, let’s look at the challenges faced by service desks today.  

Top Challenges Your Service Management Faces Everyday

Today, the need for IT service desk and HR helpdesk services grows faster than the capacity of staff, and budgets can keep up, resulting in many problems hindering the employee experience. Knowing the most prevalent difficulties can help organizations address them early on to function efficiently and maintain high levels of customer satisfaction (CSATs). Your service desk platform provides frontline help, which is essential for effectively empowering and managing your IT and HR employees. When it comes to excellence in employee productivity in your organization, it is both heart and head. Focusing on the difficulties that your service desk faces can help you save management costs while also providing an improved employee service experience. You may achieve everything from hiring top talents and onboarding them to satisfying and retaining them if you can overcome the next hurdles.

1. Getting rid of outdated technology
   The rapid advancement of technology makes it impossible to keep using old tools for a long time. Companies face significant difficulty due to existing tools' incapacity to adapt to evolving technologies. Furthermore, due to operational inefficiencies, aging technology may be more expensive to maintain than new ones. Because of the fast digitization, this necessitates ongoing investment and divestment.
2. Tons of service requests and interruptions
   Since employees' dislike a traditional ticketing system, they often prefer to make queries or requests via email or phone calls. Thus, it can be challenging for agents to respond to inquiries and duties cost-effectively without losing quality. This is because the more time the service desk spends answering the phone or sifting through requests submitted by email or in person, the less time they have to focus on resolving employee queries. Phone calls are particularly time demanding since they quickly fill queues and take a long time to handle. This is inconvenient not only for the IT service desk agent and HR helpdesk agents but also, for the employees who anticipate a quick resolution. They frequently have to wait in a long line before speaking with agents, producing dissatisfaction and rifts in the service experience.
3. Long ticket line and unresolved issues
   It is true that a service desk receives a large number of inquiries. It is inevitable that troubleshooting of employee issues will become more crucial as technology grows in importance within an organization. When the service desk receives too many requests to handle and lacks the essential communication channel, this can soon become an issue. On the other hand, the service desk misses out on the potential to acquire data that can assist in identifying typical issues. Employees who have to wait a long time to resolve their tickets start manually sorting these issues from their end. As a result, employee productivity will suffer.
4. Challenge in tracking employees’ history
   In most cases, employees encounter IT and HR-related issues frequently linked to the employee equipment or work policy documents or 'dress-code policy' etc. In order to resolve such cases, knowledge about these assets needs to be acquired. While this is time-consuming, it allows the support agents to understand how to handle individual difficulties. For example, the IT service desk can resolve issues with employees with the same assets instantly based on service histories without the need to repeat troubleshooting every time they encounter the same issue.
5. Repetitive problems
   The service desk can't quickly uncover systemic problems without adequate record-keeping and data analysis tools; instead, time and corporate resources are squandered investigating and fixing the same ones over and over. Suppose the service desk agents fail to collect meaningful data. In that case, it will be challenging to develop effective plans to solve these glitches and reduce the number of submitted tickets to address the source of common problems reported by the employees.
6. Wasting time on Tiresome and time-consuming processes
   As reported by Clockify, around 90% of corporate employees are often troubled with boring, routine tasks and processes that consume their time and energy. A report by McKinsey states that an employee has to spend around 1.8 hours of his/ her day to find relevant data to perform his/ her day-to-day work. This is almost 9 hours a week- which is a major productivity loss for the company. Typically, the employee service desk must deal with several frequently requested inquiries and difficulties on a daily basis. This means that a lot of time is lost in repeating the same processes. Password resets, trouble with VPN connectivity, configuring laptops or installing new software etc are the most common IT-related issues faced by employees. If end users are provided with the right information or have access to automated processes, they can resolve many service desk problems.  

Using Traditional Service Desk Won’t Cut It In This Modern World

“If we’re not solving the right problem, the project fails.” - Woody Williams

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Indeed, employee support and experience are the major areas that organizations should prioritize in this modern era of remote and hybrid work. So, this brings us to the million-dollar question – what must be done to offer outstanding employee support and service to win the trust of your employees? The best way to answer this question is to think about what is most important to your employees. Would you say it's timely support, a satisfactory personalized experience, or both? At Rezolve.ai, we believe it should be a combination of both on-time support and seamless employee experience. But if your organization still relies on the traditional service desk, it won't be possible to meet employees' requirements. Employee service desks have been utilized for many years to assist employees in an organization. Because traditional employee service desks are designed to track employee issues rather than resolve them. In most cases, traditional service desks entail an employee generating a ticket based on a problem they are experiencing and or approaching the dedicated service desk agent to get their questions or doubts answered. Undoubtedly, employees who work remotely or in the office may encounter various technical and non-technical challenges. Unfortunately, the traditional service desk is incapable of dealing with all of the issues highlighted by employees in a timely and effective manner. Most traditional service desks are designed on outdated architectures, and even with an archaic mindset, so they aren't focused on employees enough. Oftentimes, employees are forced to wait longer for the dedicated agent to answer, investigate, and resolve their complaints or questions. Eventually, this has an impact on the overall productivity of the department in question as well as the organization as a whole. Furthermore, the traditional employee service desk frequently confuses employees. Employees become confused about which option to choose and whom to approach due to the many platforms, multiple support agents, and multiple communication channels.  

Why Don't Employees Use Traditional Service Desks?

1. Lack of right information
   Whenever an employee has a query, he or she is supposed to look it up on the service portal. Most of the time, the employee would leave the portal for the following reasons:
   -Inadequate content: The content on the site will not address the employee's specific pain points.
   -Outdated information: Employee portals require regular content assessments and updates. Portals will no longer aid employees in finding solutions to their difficulties if this is not done.
2. Lack of timely support
   When employees come across a problem, they will be agitated and seek immediate support. Often, employees receive support vis microlearning content, chatbots or live agent chat. However, a traditional employee service desk will be unable to show data in the manner desired by employees in such instances.
3. Struggling to deal with multiple employee requests When multiple employees register requests on various issues, it will be difficult and time-consuming for support agents to respond to these requests and inquiries. This demonstrates that traditional service desks are unproductive and provide inconsistent support, which frequently confuses employees and causes them to lose interest in their work. This will have a detrimental impact on your company's productivity.
4. No scope for employee training
   Certainly, millennial employees are disinterested in traditional instructor-led training. Employees find it tedious and time-consuming. Moreover, because of the attention curve, they won't be able to remember various information in one stretch. That is why they choose the precise and targeted bite-sized learning strategy. This is something that traditional service desks lack.

These are the major disadvantages of the traditional service desk.

The Watermelon Effect!

“Taking care of your employees is extremely important and very, very visible.” - Larry Ellison

Even with the challenges posed by traditional service desks, the watermelon effect is another challenge affecting most service desks today. But, have you ever heard of the "watermelon effect" before? At least, not until recently. But it makes sense because the name must be taken literally. Being a round fruit and full of grains, watermelon is green on the outside but red on the inside. And this is what the watermelon effect looks like. Employees who don't have access to the necessary technology to streamline their work will be negatively impacted in their experience and engagement. However, in most organizations, employees are afraid to share their opinions. At the same time, management does not care to hear employees' opinions or feedback. And that’s exactly called the watermelon effect.  

In terms of SLA metrics and CSAT levels appear green as if everything seems to be excellent, even though it isn't. But most companies fail to fully capture whether their employees are happy with the internal services or do they have any suggestion? So, when you look a bit deeper, the reality will be red like a watermelon- your employees do not feel supported and have a negative experience. As a result, management-level decisions in an organization will be made without understanding their employees' real daily problems. This will eventually impact employee productivity and business profitability. A company encounters a watermelon effect on both HR and IT-related processes.  

For example: When an employee faces sexual harassment at his/her workplace in the form of unwelcome touch, suggestive jokes or comments, sexually explicit photographs etc that makes him/her offended or humiliated, but in most cases, the victims will be hesitant to open up or raise a complaint before the management. Working in such an environment will be hard for them, forcing them to leave their existing jobs and employers eventually. So, the watermelon effect is harmful for both Fortune companies as well as start-ups.  

Ultimately, what matters is the happiness of employees. Successful businesses are built on the backs of their employees. When employees are happy and satisfied, they will perform better at work. And happy employees always make happy customers. If your company wants to have happy employees, satisfied customers, or just provide exceptional services, you have to prevent the watermelon effect.  

How To Prevent These Workplace Challenges? Prioritize Employee Feedback

“We all need people who will give us feedback. That’s how we improve.” - Bill Gates  

Happy employees perform better than their counterparts who are unhappy. It's an obvious choice. Employees that are happy are more engaged and even contribute to a more pleasant workplace culture, which drives additional engagement. The major workplace changes will adversely affect employee experience and productivity and eventually impact on the organization’s overall ROI. As reported by IDC, almost 81% of corporate companies invest in their customer experiences, while around 70% do not measure or invest in the employee experience. This is a major ROI loss for organizations. Employee happiness leads to reduced turnover and improved job performance. Analyzing how satisfied your staff is with their jobs is the first step to getting more from them. But how do you discover dissatisfied employees and begin working to improve their levels of engagement?  

There are other approaches, but gathering employee feedback is arguably the most effective. Feedback assists you in determining how your staff feel and what influences their level of satisfaction. Simply put, employee satisfaction surveys are questions that provide information about how employees feel about their business and work environment. Employee satisfaction surveys are generally used to identify employee concerns so that management may address them and provide employees with optimal working circumstances to enhance productivity. But, in a traditional survey, employees are not able to seek assistance or clarify questions. There is no simple way to personalize questions based on role or geography. As a result, organizations won't get an accurate picture of the employee experience and engagement if they use a traditional approach. To avoid this, organizations must invest in a well-designed automated employee engagement feedback system which will allow managers to obtain a sense of overall morale in the organization and identify any persistent concerns to make adjustments to keep employees pleased.  

The most admirable aspect of the modern employee satisfaction survey is that they can be completed without taking away your consumers' attention. Employee surveys may help any company identify and solve problems, as well as take effective action. Employees require a polite and appreciative work environment as well as the opportunity to advance their careers. Employee surveys, which use employee input and employee experience indicators, provide a tool to manage employee experience and engagement better.  

Is Modern Employee Service Desk- The Need OF The Hour?

“Modern Problems Require Modern Solutions” - Dave Chappelle  

Looking at all of the limitations of the traditional service desk and the negatives of the watermelon effect, a modern alternative was developed to modernize and streamline employee support and experience ie, an automated employee service desk. A modern employee service desk is powered by advanced technologies like conversational AI and machine learning (ML) and provides employees with a unified platform to seek seamless support. With a modern employee service desk, employees will find it a lot easier and more effective to ask questions, raise issues, and receive personalized solutions with the updated and modern service desk. Conversational AI technology enables the platform to have human-like analytical abilities, allowing it to understand the issue being expressed properly. As reported by Market Research Future, during the forecast period of 2017-2023, helpdesk automation is anticipated to hit USD 11 billion at a CAGR of 33 %. The development of the AI-powered employee service desk was a gradual process. A traditional service desk cannot handle the queries or tickets raised by the employees. As a result, hiring an agent with expert knowledge of every department became challenging for the organization.  

The ability to interact and collaborate between employees is another benefit of platforms such as SharePoint, which facilitates employee discussion and resolution. Yet, it did not allow for two-way communication between employees and the company. An AI-powered service desk was ultimately the best solution. This modern platform allows employees to engage in two-way communication across the organization through conversational intelligent chatbots within a unified `suitable for all departments.  

Business Benefits Of Implementing A Modern Employee Service Desk

• Quick Resolution To Employees’ Issues
  Needless to say, employees require immediate resolution of issues, such as a system failure right before an important presentation, defects discovered in software prior to a critical conference, and so on. A company cannot afford to keep its employees waiting until their case is routed to an agent for resolution. With an AI-powered employee service desk, employees will get quick, personalized, and robust support whenever they encounter technical or non-technical issues. They can use the software solution to communicate with conversational chatbots and seek guidance from expert agents without spending time. Employees who receive instant assistance can save time and concentrate totally on their high-value tasks. This will improve the quality of their work.
• Automates Routine Tasks, Processes And Workflows A modern employee helpdesk helps companies to automate time-consuming and tedious tasks and processes. With an automated service desk, it is possible to program your system to commence and halt activities such as password resets, software installation, and laptop configuration, without the need for human agent’s intervention. A modern helpdesk can also automate crucial HR procedures such as recruitment, employee onboarding/offboarding, new hire training etc.
• A Minimal Scope Of Error
  When you use the traditional and manual method to deliver employee support, no matter how talented your team is, there will always be room for human mistakes. When you use an AI-powered employee service desk to automate support practices, you can improve the accuracy of work and the assistance provided to your team.
• Cost-effective And Reduce Low-value Tasks
  An automated employee service desk can help you modernize communications. A modern service desk leverages conversational AI technology to automate most of the redundant and time-consuming processes, saving valuable time. When an employee service desk does most of the routine tasks, it frees up the service desk agent's workload and allows them to focus more on critical tasks that need personalized attention.
• Instant Access To Information
  A solid knowledge management system is essential to a modernized service desk solution. With an effective knowledge management platform, users may find all of the information they require in a single, centralized location. This will assist them in resolving their concerns and getting answers to their questions.
• Save Money And Time
  Traditional service desks cost organizations a lot of money, from extra support agents and trainers to allocating personnel to perform repetitive tasks. A modern service desk doesn't require additional agents or employees, because it has a virtual assistant or chatbot.
• Maintaining Best Practices When you automate your employee service desk's operations, you can ensure that only the most acceptable practices are used to give holistic assistance to your employees.  

How Does An AI-Powered Employee Service Desk Work?

“Advanced technology changes the way we work and the skills we need, but it also boosts productivity and creates new jobs” - Alain Dehaze  

An AI-powered employee service desk makes use of conversational AI and process automation to provide seamless support. Here, conversational virtual assistants (VAs) or chatbots take the spotlight by guiding your employees at every step, from highlighting a problem to receiving a tailor-made response. A modernized service desk saves your employees valuable time and effort in handling the most simple and complex issues. An organization's overall productivity can be boosted by implementing a unified platform.  

Nowadays, the corporate world widely uses these platforms across a variety of industries, including some of the biggest names in online collaboration. Collaborative platforms like Microsoft Teams or Slack can be utilized as an AI enterprise service desk with service desk providers like Rezolve.ai that deliver users simple, rapid, and efficient help. The conversational AI capabilities and invisible ticketing system of a modern service desk ensure that your employees' issues are fixed in a matter of minutes (or even seconds) without waiting for a service desk agent to respond. The implementation of virtual assistants differentiates modern help desks from their traditional counterparts. These automated intelligent chatbots interact with the user directly and handle their problems from start to finish. The following are the critical steps in the functioning of a robust employee service desk:  

• Step 1: Using a Virtual Assistant (VA) for First-Level Support (L1)
  A distressed employee seeking the right kind of support is the beginning of the process. When you deploy a modern employee service desk with a collaborative platform in your organization, any employee who requires assistance may log onto the connected platform and ask their question directly to the intelligent bot. This is the standard front-end level one support (L1) delivered to all employees in your company. Depending on the topic and queries raised, the conversational virtual assistant (VA) will provide relevant responses by searching for a robust knowledge base. While all employees will receive L1 support, the approach to each question will be unique. Because of the power of AI and NLP technology, the virtual assistant will understand the question asked by each employee, gather context by reviewing previous encounters with the concerned employee, and provide answers that are tailored to the subject and employees. This entire procedure only takes 10-15 seconds. In most circumstances, the problem is auto-resolved at the first level, and your employee may resume his or her work.
• Step 2: Approaching Expert Agents for Second and Third Level Support (L2 and L3)
  In case your employee is dissatisfied with the first-level of support (L1) offered by the chatbot, he can choose to interact with a dedicated service desk agent in real-time and create a ticket for himself. The modern employee service desk enables them to do so with the press of a button (without requiring the employee to do anything) and route the case to the most appropriate expert. A dedicated service desk agent comes in to provide L2/L3 help to your employee and conduct an in-depth analysis of the matter.
• Step 3: Using A Conversational Chatbot To Communicate With Employees
  The conversational AI-powered chatbot that handles first-level support (L1) acts as a point of contact between your service desk expert and the employee. After determining the solution, the service desk agent delivers it to your employee via the virtual assistant. The chatbot will automatically close the ticket once the problem is resolved successfully and record the conversation with the employees in the database for future reference. As a result of the invisible ticketing feature of the modern service desk, the employee doesn't have to take any action in order to close a ticket.

This is how automation, combined with the effectiveness of artificial intelligence, may assist you in resolving all concerns encountered by your team and attending to them until they are satisfied with the solutions.  

How Does An AI Service Desk Boost Your ROI?

“Happy employees lead to happy customers, which leads to more profits”, - Vaughn Aust

Handling your finances is a critical component of owning a company. Companies build all of their operations in such a way that they may reduce costs while increasing ROI. Today, most businesses have realized that they must make the right investments to create profits and taste success. Similarly, in order to provide excellent customer service, you must invest in cutting-edge technologies such as AI-powered service desks. As a part of their cost-cutting measures, many companies have adopted automated service desk platforms and allocated resources. But, do you know how service desk software can be used to improve ROI? While service desk tools are very inexpensive, they may consume a substantial percentage of your money, particularly if you have a large crew. It is even more critical to ensure that your investment does not go to waste and that your clients have access to excellent 24-hour assistance.  

When it comes to providing comprehensive assistance to your team, investing in a modern service desk is the best way to save money.  

Two basic ways an organization can save money are:  

• Increase ROI
• Decrease the existing expenditure

A modern service desk satisfies both needs, allowing you to save enough money for your firm. It is because an AI-enabled service desk platform comes with various advanced features that can support your company in reducing expenses, increasing productivity, and boosting return on investment (ROI). Let’s look at the ways a modern employee service desk can enhance ROI.  

1. The Cost Savings of Having Multiple Service Desks
   Traditional service desks lack an integrated approach to delivering help to all employees of a company. It necessitated the establishment of dedicated service desks and support platforms for various employees working in various departments. This naturally raised the overall budget for providing employee support. Furthermore, having many helpdesks creates extra complexity and confusion when it comes to receiving efficient support. An AI-driven service desk, on the other hand, allows you to save money by delivering an integrated approach to staff support. The "single window" method allows employees from many departments to get help via a centralized platform. Moreover, an automated service desk can serve as an IT service desk, an HR helpdesk, a marketing helpdesk, a finance helpdesk, and even a project management tool. As a result, a one-time investment in a single unified platform yields increased returns and value for your money.
2. Reduce Cost with An Advanced Ticketing System
   The self-service ticketing system was likely the most prevalent issue addressed by employees at traditional service desks. This ticketing system needed them to support and track rickets on a different platform. While this was not a massive issue for the IT staff, other employees frequently found the platform challenging to utilize due to a lack of technical understanding and elegance. A traditional ticketing system frequently resulted in confused and helpless employees resolving their difficulties through alternative means (making calls and sending emails). If you take this method, your investment in the service desk will most likely be in vain. If you invest in the right employee service desk, you may equip your team with a modern ticketing system it allows your employees to auto-resolve issues without manually creating tickets. An AI-powered service desk handles all of the processes associated with establishing, tracking, and closing tickets, freeing your employees from raising their eyebrows in order to resolve their concerns. When you adopt a modern service desk, you will not need to invest in a ticketing system or ensure that your employees can effectively auto-resolve their concerns.
3. Bringing Down The Costs of Support By Hiring Limited Agents
   In a traditional service desk, organizations must spend lots of money recruiting several dedicated service desk agents to handle a flood of requests and problems employees face. As a result, the agents were deployed immediately from the first level of support. It was common for employees to direct every issue they encountered to support agents, regardless of urgency or complexity, overloading them with inquiries. Agents were now focused on resolving all of the cases instead of providing personalized service. As a result, companies spent money recruiting more support agents without adding any significant value to the help they gave to their employees. By utilizing intelligent chatbots, an AI-powered service desk reduces the necessity for support agents at the first level. To provide personalized help to your employees, these chatbots perform the roles of support agents. A modern service desk's use of conversational AI allows your employees to interact with conversational chatbots and handle issues independently. The chatbots help them log into the support desk and navigate the site successfully until their difficulties are handled. With the help of these bots, employees can obtain information, express concerns, and receive precise directions. When a question is asked, the chatbot utilizes the knowledge base and provides the best answer in seconds. Most employee cases are resolved at this point without the intervention of support agents. If your employees are dissatisfied with the AI chatbot solutions, they can have their cases sent to a support person for further assistance. The chatbots will now generate a ticket and route the relevant case to an appropriate agent, along with the context needed to deliver a customized solution. The chatbot acts as a link between your employees and the service desk agents when they are participating in the chatbot's conversation. All these features are available with a modern service desk at no additional cost. It enables you to give simplified and tailored support to your employees while using a minimum number of support experts.
4. Getting the Most of Your Knowledge
   If used properly, your business knowledge base can be a rich mine of context-based information essential for comprehensive employee assistance. Traditional service desks rarely optimized the knowledge base for better staff support and delivered generic replies to queries, requests, and solutions using a "one size fits all" approach. This did not justify the expenditure on typical service desks. An automated service desk solves these disadvantages through streamlined and robust knowledge management. Investing in AI-driven service desks provides you with various capabilities that ensure your knowledge base is leveraged to provide personalized solutions based on your staff's demands and preferences. An automated employee service desk records all contacts with your team and takes note of their preferences and primary areas of concern. By using conversational AI interfaces, these service desks can analyze the behaviour of your employees, and their needs and provide customized solutions. Also, robust knowledge management enables you to help your employees engage in content formats. The modern service desk allows you to be more creative by providing interactive content formats to your staff, such as films, animations, infographics, and so on.
5. Reduced Training Costs
   Learning is a never-ending endeavor in the age of digitization when technical improvements are regular. Organizations frequently invest significant funds in training their personnel in specialized skills that increase productivity. By allowing your employees to teach themselves, you may save the expense of employing trainers and organizing training sessions with a modern service desk. These service desks include a microlearning function that allows you to teach your personnel specific micro-skills. All you have to do is populate your knowledge base with relevant training resources and allow your employees to access them whenever possible. In this way, your staff can master specific skills independently without seeking assistance from anyone, empowering them to become self-sufficient. Being self-reliant, particularly for new employees, enhances engagement and productivity since they are genuinely motivated by the task they accomplish. Furthermore, improved knowledge management enables you to make learning more exciting and interactive. You can include videos, links to articles, and milestones for your staff to meet as they are trained to learn new skills. Using such interactive information improves your employees' retention rates, allowing them to be trained faster and better.
6. Service Desk Perform Repetitive Tasks
   When performing repetitive IT activities like password resets and changes, companies often hire staff committed to these tasks. The AI-powered service desk can help you save money by reducing hiring costs and saving time by automating repetitive work. It enables employees to set and modify their passwords by connecting to the back-end system and verifying their identities.
7. Enhance Employee Engagement
   When employee complaints can be resolved automatically, they are more motivated to work for your company. This, in turn, boosts employee engagement. Process automation enables your employees to get quick results without knocking on several doors or seeking assistance from multiple sources.
8. Elevate Employee Productivity
   Employees who are more engaged at work tend to perform better and do their best. This boosts your organization's overall revenue and motivates your team to use their expertise.
9. Enhance Service Desk Agents' Productivity A modern employee service desk solution can make your agent's life and work easier. Unsurprisingly, they'll be able to perform better, satisfy consumers, and be their most joyful selves. Researchers say that happy employees are more productive. Research conducted by the University of Warwick found that workplace happiness makes employees 12% more productive than their competitors.
   Here are some tips for looking after your service desk agents:
   -Promote a flexible work culture
   The work-life balance of agents is critical to their job satisfaction. You must provide more flexibility for your employees to prevent burnout and reduce stress at work.
   -Recognize your top talents
   Managers may keep a close eye on individual performance using modern employee service desk's reports and analytics. You may identify your top performers and give them rewards.
   -Conduct regular internal surveys
   Are your agents happy with their jobs? How frequently do they experience tension or stress at work? Employee surveys can provide answers to these questions. Furthermore, soliciting regular input gives agents the impression that your company values their overall happiness and well-being.  

The Must-Have Features For An Automated Employee Service Desk  

If you are planning to invest in a modern employee service desk for your organization, you must ensure that you set up a solution that meets all needs of your employees and provides them with the right support. Although there is no common checklist of elements that an employee service desk must have, the following are the most significant features to look for in an automated service desk solution.

1. Conversational AI-powered Chatbot or Virtual Assistants For First-Level Support
   AI-powered conversational employee service desks are the future. In a modern service desk, chatbots fill the role of support agents in traditional service desks. Your employees can immediately speak to a smart chatbot or virtual assistant after logging on to this modern service desk instead of waiting for a service desk representative to respond. Conversational AI incorporates a machine's seamless efficiency and accuracy with human behavior. This adds convenience to the support process because your employees will feel as if they are interacting with a human agent. Furthermore, conversational AI ensures that your staff receives personalized responses to their questions. Unlike traditional service desks, which provide long and text-heavy materials, virtual assistants can evaluate the perspective of the conversation and provide appropriate responses.
2. Seamless Support Within Collaborative Platforms
   Integrating your employee service desk with collaboration platforms like MS Teams, Zoom or Slack will help centralize employee support. The smart chatbot will assist your employees from the minute they log into the platform until their issue is fixed. This enables all your employees to receive consistent support on the same platform they use for work. When they are in need, they must open a tab in their separate accounts and file an issue. This prohibits your team from switching to a diverse platform to gain tailor-made support.
3. Twitter-Age Knowledge Base
   It is possible that employees could experience issues opening a document while working, requiring an immediate solution to get information about the issue. According to an Economic Times report, employees spend approximately 25% of their time looking for helpful information. This can be avoided when you automate your knowledge management system. An automated knowledge base is a flexible way for businesses to utilize information. It enables employees to get the proper help and get the right answers to their questions quickly. In Gartner's research for 2022, the best method for increasing employee productivity and stability is to implement an automated knowledge base. Whenever your employee encounters difficulties finding data, they just need to type their issue with the chatbot. All relevant data will appear in multi-media formats like video, infographics, images, texts or audio, etc, within 10-15 seconds.
4. Invisible Ticketing System
   One of the most significant benefits of having a modern employee service desk is that it eliminates the need for a manual ticketing system. Here, a smart chatbot will handle the entire process of establishing, managing, and closing support and request tickets, relieving your employees' burden. The invisible ticketing feature of a modern service desk also allows employees to understand their tickets' status through collaborative platforms. The virtual assistant will close the tickets and send notifications once the issue is resolved.
5. Interaction With Live Agents
   When one of your employees raises an issue that the virtual assistant cannot resolve at the first level of support (L1), the chatbot will instantly open a ticket on their behalf and route the case to a dedicated live agent for second and third-level support (L2 and L3). The expert will use his experience to resolve the problem and deliver the best feasible solution as soon as possible.
6. Robust Employee Training via Microlearning
   If your company wants its employees to learn specific skills to execute their jobs, investing in an employee service desk with a microlearning feature would be quite beneficial. Through the microlearning system, you can add relevant training content and resources to the system to teach the required skills to your staff. The AI-powered service desk platform will ensure that your staff understands the skills taught and can train themselves independently. When you deploy a modern service desk, you will save your company significant money by eliminating the need for specialized trainers and programs. You must provide effective training tools to your staff and let them master the skills independently.
7. Automation of Mundane Tasks
   Most employees are saddled with time-consuming manual tasks like "monitoring the VPN status," "resetting a password," "collecting reports and insights," "installing software”, and so on. As a result, they are feeble and unproductive. According to Simply Flows, employees spend up to 40% of their time completing them. A modern service desk allows companies to automate different IT and HR-related multi-step manual processes within collaborative platforms like MS Teams and Slack.
8. Desktop Automation
   When employees encounter problems with their OneDrive while at work, they instantly create a ticket; however, it takes nearly one hour for a human agent to handle the issue via remote access. Employees frequently feel disconnected from the organization due to this delayed and fragmented assistance. Investing in an AI-driven service desk with a desktop automation feature will provide an end-to-end solution that employs PowerShell scripts to automate complicated tasks. It also enables dedicated virtual assistants (VAs) to conduct functions like installing new software, clearing cache, provisioning printers, troubleshooting OneDrive, and so on.
9. Automation Of Employee Onboarding And Offboarding Process
   When a new employee joins your company, your IT and HR department are responsible for ensuring that they have the necessary IT equipment, software, and access to perform their day-to-day tasks. When employees leave, IT must limit their access and determine which assets they are utilizing and where they are currently. When you automate employee onboarding and offboarding, you can easily simplify these tasks. In this manner, new hires get immediate access to all necessary systems, allowing them to begin working rather than waiting on their first day. When employees leave, an automated offboarding procedure will quickly and easily end accounts and access.
10. Automated Employee Engagement Surveys
    Every organization needs to get regular feedback from their employees about their support and experience working at the organization over a set period. A modern employee service desk enables team managers to conduct tailored employee surveys via collaborative channels like Microsoft Teams or Slack. The managers can customize the frequency with which their employees respond (weekly/monthly/quarterly/annually) and personalize the questions based on the employee, location, and department. This assists management in streamlining the process of collecting employee input and analyzing it to make critical decisions by understanding the collective pulse of the workforce in your firm.  

Conclusion

Needless to say, the corporate world has already begun transitioning to the modern employee service desk. Due to the exponential growth of online collaboration platforms and virtual workplaces since 2020, technologies such as process automation and conversational AI are likely to remain relevant for a long time. You may always take the first step into the realm of fully automated employee support with an AI-enabled employee service desk! An automated employee service desk helps businesses and their employees by lowering "enterprise friction" and ensuring seamless HR and IT support within 10 seconds.  

Rezolve.ai is the industry's leading AI-powered employee service desk that enables next-generation employee experiences and engagement via Microsoft Teams and Slack. Rezolve.ai uses advanced conversational AI technology, a cutting-edge automation engine, an invisible ticketing system, and a "Twitter-Age" knowledge management system to automatically address many common employee issues in seconds. Rezolve.ai can also involve dedicated human agents in issue resolutions and interact with other enterprise systems/tools to complete tasks and complex processes such as user provisioning. Employees can use Rezolve.ai to use that time to accomplish their duties rather than being annoyed by a back-and-forth with the service desk. Being a modern service desk, rezolve.ai helps in achieving low incident response times, exceptional auto resolution rates and higher CSATs using out-of-the-box automation skills.

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