Within a company, the IT team plays a crucial role in helping people carry out their work and achieve their objectives within an organization. Through IT Service Management, IT teams can further refine how they design, deliver, manage, and improve the IT services they provide to their end users. One of the areas IT teams have to consider is what tools they need to keep up with the quickly changing digital landscape. Here are some of the tools your IT organization should have to keep up with modern IT service management.
Automation
One of the key tools that an IT organization should have access to is automation. IT service management consists of many structured processes and best practices that help improve and deliver IT services within an organization. Things like password resets, status updates, approvals, and outbound notifications are all extremely important tasks, but are also very repetitive and tedious for IT organizations.
Automation is the key to reducing redundant activities and streamlining both the analyst and user experience. Automating basic work can reduce the volume of tasks that IT organizations need to handle, which frees up personnel to focus on more strategic initiatives. Automation tools are a natural fit for many different tasks and business processes across IT service management. One example is automated password resets. Although password resets are relatively simple requests for the help desk, they are one of the most common, making password resets very redundant and time-consuming to manage. By automating password reset, call volumes can be reduced by 20-30% and end users can be assured they are able to reset passwords 24/7, 365 days a year.
Today’s automation tools can also be powered by advanced AI, making automation safe and accurate.
Artificial Intelligence
Aside from automation, practical artificial intelligence is a key tool that IT organizations need to boost efficiency and keep up with the evolving digital landscape.
AI is perfectly suited for integration with many ITSM processes, especially incident management, service catalog, and change management. Some implementations of AI that can enhance the ITSM process include voice recognition and biometric ID recognition for user identification and authentication, AI-driven analytics through Natural Language Processing for better solution delivery, self-service for access to knowledge bases and service catalogs, and analyst assistance during interactions with clients through suggested responses and sentiment analysis.
AI has been shown to have a dramatic impact on ITSM operations. AI-powered technologies have reduced the total time required to create a service request by 80% and can reduce the number of calls by 20-30%
Artificial intelligence is a key tool that every ITSM organization should have as part of their service management tools.
Quality Assurance
Quality assurance assures that clients and employees are 100% satisfied with the IT services that your IT department provides. This means successfully resolving issues and great analyst performance within your IT teams. Monitoring interactions with effective quality assurance tools is a great way to ensure high levels of satisfaction with your IT services.
Any quality assurance, however, needs to have the right tools to ensure a comprehensive and great quality assurance system. With the right technology and proper implementation, comprehensive quality management on all digital channels is possible, allowing you to monitor 100% of all interactions on any channel. Through a combination of AI and analytics, any quality assurance program can reach 100% of all interactions on all channels.
One tool that can help boost quality assurance is sentiment and text analysis. Sentiment and text analysis can be utilized to gauge and analyze an end user’s mood during an interaction. Other information about the interaction, like call recordings and interaction transcripts, are collected and stored as well. Data collected through sentiment and text analysis can then be compiled into an easy-to-use format based on highlighted metrics and KPIs. Other information, including interaction details and recordings, can be used for retraining and quality assurance purposes.
Quality assurance is crucial to ensure high quality interactions and high levels of service within your organization.
Quick Self-Service
When end users are looking for answers to their issues, they will often attempt to find the answer themselves before asking others. As discussed in our ITSM ebook, “How to Turbocharge Your IT Service Management”, Microsoft stated in their “Global State of Multichannel Customer Service” report that “more than 90% of customers expect brands or organizations to have an online customer self-service offering, and 60% percent say they have a more favorable view of a brand if that self-service offering is mobile responsive.”
Quick self-service is a crucial tool for end users, giving them a quick solution to their issues while empowering them by giving them the ability to find answers to their inquiries and promote a culture of knowledge sharing and collaboration.
In order to make self-service as effortless and seamless as possible, there are many innovative technologies ITSM organizations can implement. One technology is AI for self-service. Through Natural Language Processing and speech analysis, AI can assist users with the right resources quickly and accurately. ITSM organizations should also frequently update end users on status updates, new information, and knowledge base refreshes. These frequent user updates are critical for an accurate and flawless user experience.
Through self-service, we’ve seen massive improvements in customer satisfaction and reduced call volumes. With effective ITSM self-service channels, customer satisfaction can be improved by up to 10% and call volumes can be reduced by up to 30% — these are very exciting and attainable numbers. Conversational IVRs with Natural Language Processing and speech analysis can reduce wait times in your ITSM organization to nearly zero and allow customers to log incidents, receive updates and, in some cases, resolve issues themselves 24/7
Bright Pattern’s Solution
Bright Pattern’s cloud-based contact center solution provides the tools your IT organization needs for automation, artificial intelligence, quality assurance, and self-service. With features like best-of-breed AI, Omni QM, and voice biometrics, Bright Pattern’s solution can help turbocharge your IT service management.
For the full guide to turbocharging your IT service management, check out our ebook “How to Turbocharge Your IT Service Management”.
