As organizations continue their digital transformation journey and adopt new technologies, IT Service Management has become an indispensable part of every organization. IT service desks need to undergo massive transformation to be more efficient, productive and offer better service delivery experiences.
The IT service desk manages incidents and employee requests like setting up a new laptop, providing access to applications, creating passwords, and fixing hardware. Furthermore, the IT service desk must also address cybersecurity concerns and communicate with employees about maintenance outages and so on. IT service desk processes are manual and repetitive, and can be automated by implementing Robotic Process Automation (RPA).
Typically, IT service desks are overwhelmed with requests and questions that require quick responses, which is not always possible for human agents working on other projects. Furthermore, an IT support professional with a heavy workload is also prone to errors. This not only affects productivity but also negatively impacts user experience. RPA can handle many service requests simultaneously. You just need to programming the RPA bots to follow a set of rules and execute specific tasks. RPA bots can process requests quickly without error.
During the HR onboarding process, the IT service desk is responsible for creating new accounts, setting up a new email account, and other service requests. RPA bots can be programmed to extract information from email exchanges and ITSM tools, structure the information according to an HR template. The bot can then create an account, provide default credentials, notify HR, and close the case.
While some incidents require human intervention, the majority do not, and can be resolved with rule-based actions performed by RPA bots. Using NLP capabilities, bots can identify service request categories based on the user conversation, raise incident, route the incident based on a predefined priority scale with to the appropriate authority or self-help knowledge base article. The bots then update the user until the incident is resolved. This process reduces issue resolution time and improves user experience. If required, the RPA bot can forward issues to human experts especially if any intricate decision-making is involved.
RPA bots can save 120 hours of time or manpower every month.
-Based on research from UiPath
The cost per ticket resolution is determined by the time and resources allotted to completing the ticket. The cost of issue resolution increases with request complexity. RPA consumes far less time and resources to fulfil the same amount of requests. Unlike human IT professional, RPA bots don't get tired or take breaks. A single bot can handle any number of user requests, is available 24/7, and shortens resolution time, ultimately reducing cost.
Users are increasingly preferring to solve their problems on their own instead of relying on and waiting for their IT department. Automating basic service offerings to let users file tickets and track the status on their own improves user experience.
RPA offers a tremendous advantage to the IT service desk and augments IT workers by taking over tedious and repetitive tasks while allowing those professionals to focus on more value-based tasks.