EFFECTIVE SERVICE AUTOMATION HELPS YOUR TEAM KEEP UP.
Customers expect faster and more individualized attention than ever, leaving teams struggling to keep pace with an ever-increasing influx of customer requests.
No longer can spreadsheets or other manual processes handle the constant inflow of requests. Service teams can look to one solution: automation. Let’s take a close look at five ways to use service automation to transform your service desk operations.
1. WORKFLOW MANAGEMENT
Automation in workflow management plays an important role in dealing with requests consistently and effectively. By assigning tasks to the right people at the right time, you can remove bottlenecks and inefficiencies in your standard processes.
There are a number of ways to improve on an organizations’ workflow processes through automation:
- Intelligent technician assignments
- SLA driven escalations
- Conditional actions based on customer selections
If you operate with a large service team, intelligent routing can assign issues to the most knowledgeable technicians automatically, reducing the burden on your first line teams. By orienting your escalations around your SLAs, you can ensure that the right people are involved with each issue. By offering more conditional choices for customer input, your agents can get the information they need to resolve the issue more quickly.
2. TICKET PRIORITIZATION
SLAs are created to define service expectations between a service provider and end-users. To improve customer satisfaction, SLA response and resolution times are often set based on ticket priority, allowing your technicians to accurately identify how much time is available to respond to incoming requests. However, it’s important to recognize not all tickets are created equal. For example, a small issue might become a big problem if it’s for a VIP user. Automatic ticket prioritization helps remove uncertainty about what to work on and when by using a rules-based approach to setting the importance of work.
3. SERVICE NOTIFICATIONS
Making sure the right people are notified about issues at the right time and through the right channel is essential for smooth operations management. If someone logs a ticket about a service not working, then the service owner should be notified immediately–not after someone in the call center has spent a couple of hours finding out who owns the service, and how to get hold of them.
Automatic notifications get the right information, to the right person, at the right time. Set conditions around technician communications for specific issue types and priorities. Automating these communications throughout the service process saves considerable staff time, provides transparent communication and helps to provide updates constantly.
4. SERVICE REPORTING
Automated business intelligence tools can help you put service metrics front and center. Regardless if you utilize them, it’s important you get regular access to deep insights into your service desk performance, including:
- Ticket generation by customer type and specific customer
- Close rates by employee and close time averages
- Tickets per employee by shift, day, month or other date range
- Ticket categorization and issue frequency
Scheduling reports around these metrics can automatically inform managers about performance data so that they have oversight over their whole team. These templated reports can send on a periodic basis so that no manual work is required to keep important individuals in the loop.
5. KNOWLEDGE BASE
The knowledge base is a powerful addition to many service desks because it gives users the power to solve issues themselves. Why wait for a technician to get back to you to reset a password when you can do it online? Or maybe that printer ink arrived, but you don’t know how to open the printer. Do you want to wait two days for Ian to visit on site? Or watch a two minute video, do it yourself and get that report on your CEO’s desk today?
Companies can give their end-users access to frequently asked questions via company branded portals, with intelligent tools that allow them to solve issues without input from your team – leaving your technicians to focus on the things that you’re paying them to do.
The knowledge base isn’t just for your end users, though. Maybe you don’t want your users trying to replace laser toner themselves – after all, it could be dangerous! But your technicians can’t be expected to remember the specifics of how to get under the hood of that one printer you purchased in the ’80s from someone who went out of business in the ’90s. Automatic article suggestion based on keywords or categories is just as useful to get that out-of-print user guide in front of your technicians as it is to get those password reset instructions in front of your end-users.
Vivantio is a leader in service desk automation and ITSM software. With Vivantio, companies can manage incoming email, track messaging histories, route tickets to the right teams or employees, escalate critical issues, conform with scheduling, prioritize tickets and integrate with other service tools – all powerful, automated actions designed to increase efficiency across companies’ service teams.
CONCLUSION
These areas are only a few that can be improved with effective service automation. Make sure you fully understand all of the benefits your team can get from automation by reviewing your processes and identifying what areas can be streamlined and improved.
