3 Steps To Maximize ITSM Efficiency Through AI And Reduce IT Support Costs

AI powered Cognitive Workforce holds great potential for ITSM Automation. Virtual IT assistants leveraging Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) to assist IT users and service agents by automating tasks for them. NLP will make it easier for people to search content needed to resolve issues faster, thereby increasing productivity. Deep Learning will extract certain types of knowledge and pattern recognition based on observations.
It’s clear that IT service management (ITSM) will only become more automated as we continue our journey into the future. Continue to read how Techforce.ai is not only helping Enterprise IT teams to meet increasing user expectations and demand providing instant resolution to service-related issues but also reducing human errors and unplanned outages leading to increased efficiency and service quality.
1. Virtual IT Assistants (Chatbots) powered by Natural Language Processing
In a report titled Predicts 2017: Artificial Intelligence, Gartner claims that “Chatbots driven by artificial intelligence (AI) will play important roles in interactions with consumers, within the enterprise, and in business-to-business situations.”
· Powered by AI, these Virtual IT assistants can classify and differentiate between a request and an issue, understanding the context from the conversation and accordingly raise a ticket in the corresponding category in the IT Service Management solution while also keeping the user updated on the status of tickets, from initiation to resolution.
· While deploying this cognitive workforce, it is imperative to bring these interactions to your employees and service agents right where they work and engage across your enterprise communication channels be it Skype for Business, Workplace by Facebook, etc. empowering them to use functionality immediately without much training, via their preferred device.
· For better collaboration at the organization level and supporting the agile working practices of modern business, the ITSM solution should incorporate social principles. For example, the ability to bring a subject matter expert into a conversation by simply mentioning them in a post.
2. Deploy Cognitive Workforce to Create Intelligent Automated Help Desk
While the traditional approach to ITSM involved requests and issues entered into the system by a service agent or an end user, deploying cognitive workforce to integrate your ITSM solutions with other systems on the network will allow the system to detect and automatically open a request or incident without any human intervention.
· For example, if a user requests to download a software, you can add steps to automate not only the request workflow routing, approvals, and communication stages, but also the fulfillment stages thereby creating a zero-touch fulfillment for certain requests that improves the experience for all stakeholders involved.
· Integrating your ITSM solution with another solution that provides IT Operations Analytics would enable your ITSM to be notified of potential network issues. For instance if the monitoring software detects low disk space on a specific server, a ticket can be logged in the ITSM platform which then assesses the ticket and categorizes it accordingly. Workflow automation can be then triggered automatically to delete temp or large files on the server that may no longer be needed. Post successful operation, the tool automatically updates the ticket and marks it as resolved.
· According to a research by Gartner, 20–50% of a service desk’s call volume is just password reset. Another research by PricewaterhouseCoopers and Meta Group, help desk tickets for password resets cost on average $60.93 per users annually, not just this but 45% of total help desk tickets usually are for password resets. These numbers are staggering since any organization with 5,000–10,000 FTE’s stands to save approximately between $300,000 — $600,000 annually by implementing automation just for Password Reset.
The above scenarios represent only a few of the myriad of tasks, workflows and processes that can be fully automated in the scope of ITSM automation.
3. Leverage Enterprise Knowledge by applying Deep Learning
ITSM solutions powered with AI will be able to solve problems/recommend solutions based on infinite amount of data both structured & unstructured like system logs, emails, chats, etc and they will document these findings in knowledge databases that will also be used to support both end-users and service agents.
Integrating your ITSM with other systems installed on the network will provide the ability to observe much larger patterns across the IT environment making it more efficient to detect, record and potentially correct issues even before business is aware thereby minimizing reactive fire-fighting.
For example, your network monitoring system detects an increased amount of browser crashes occurring on the end-user devices throughout the day, your ITSM solution can treat this as a potential problem and proactively investigate the issue by verifying the logs from other systems to find any patterns that might explain the anomaly. Based on patterns and deep learning algorithms, solution will be able to learn as it updates its knowledge database, ultimately improving how it reacts to any issue. In other words, AI will be equipped to remember past experiences so that it can learn from them.
As we move further into the future, the ITSM solution will be able to automatically correct the issues by working with the other IT solutions it integrates with on the network. No human intervention will be required.
Summary
Perhaps the most important takeaway here is that AI driven ITSM automation strategy not only helps save the enterprises a significant amount of money in terms of operating costs, but at the same time frees up service desk agents to take care of more critical tasks and projects, involving complex human intelligence.
With a solution like this, the business will come to see the IT team as not just a supporting function but a trusted advisor on getting the best results from technology. In seeing the functionality and benefits of ITSM automation, the question then becomes not if an organization should adopt this technology, but how soon can they do so.
To learn more about how we are powering Enterprises with Cognitive Workforce and driving process efficiency and cost optimization, visit us at www.techforce.ai or write to us directly at getneo@techforce.ai

