Experts predict artificial intelligence augmentation will create $2.9 trillion in business value globally in 2021.
One way artificial intelligence (AI) can create value for your business is via your employee support system. AI ticket deflection, which enables a virtual assistant bot to respond to frequent and repetitive requests, improves your employee experience and cuts costs.
Calculating Your Ticket Deflection Ratio
Does your help desk need support? Chances are, it could benefit from using AI ticket deflection as a first line of support, leaving human analysts to solve more complex problems. To understand the opportunity and demand for AI deflection, let’s look at a metric you want to track: ticket deflection ratio (or self-service score).
How to calculate ticket deflection ratio: the total number of users being supported divided by the total number of users who submit tickets. You’ll get a ratio like 5:1, which means that for every five employees who try to resolve their own issues using self-service, one submits a support request.
The higher the ratio, the higher number of people who found solutions through self-service.
Using AI for Ticket Deflection
Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning can help your business encourage self-support in several ways.
Identify Knowledge Gaps
If you want employees to use your self-service portal, you need to have a knowledge base that answers their questions accurately. Finding answers should only require minimal effort on employees’ part.
Your knowledge base should be:
- As comprehensive as possible
- Accurate with expert verification
- Up-to-date
- Use appropriate rich content, like rich-text, images, videos or audio
- Universally searchable
AI can help you identify knowledge gaps, so that you can improve the quality of your knowledge base. AI uses algorithms that can identify trends in employees’ searches. Natural language processing can find questions that appear frequently in search query data. By curating search data, you can see categories emerge, topic popularity and topics that aren’t covered in the knowledge base.
Recommend Relevant Content
AI can provide suggestions of relevant content based on an employee’s intent and context. If an employee starts a chat or creates a support ticket, AI is working in the background. The AI virtual assistant bot uses deep learning and natural language processing to scan the employee’s text. It replies to the employee with suggestions of help center articles that they can use to resolve the issue themselves, often surfacing useful content that the employee might not have seen yet.
Benefits of AI Ticket Deflection
Using AI to increase ticket deflection improves IT support and employee experience. It also lowers your support costs and gives you better support data.
Better IT and Employee Experience
Employees often prefer self-service support, because they can resolve problems faster. They don’t need to contact an agent and wait in the queue to get an answer to their question.
Operational Efficiency
AI and machine learning let you automate many high-frequency, low-touch interactions. Your support agents have more time to handle complicated issues.
Every support contact costs money and resources, whether to staff the phone line, assist over chat or reply to email. Ticket deflection means that you are reallocating resources to create greater efficiency in IT and speeding response times to employees.
Improved Data Collection Process
Getting accurate data on self-service support operations can be difficult. How do you count the tickets that didn’t happen? AI gives you one way to get concrete data.
When an employee starts a chat or sends an email requesting help, AI sends an automated response. The suggested resources should help the employee resolve the issue themselves.
If the employee successfully finds a solution, an agent doesn’t need to follow up. If the employee needs further assistance, a help desk analyst will contact them to resolve the issue and close the ticket. You can clearly see when an interaction with AI prevented the need for a ticket. This data can help you understand what information should be highlighted or more visible in the knowledge base.
Start Increasing Case Deflection With AI
Using AI can encourage self-service support and ticket deflection, which improves employees’ experience and speeds efficiency. Choosing the right self-service software helps you maximize the benefits you get from ticket deflection.
If your business uses Office 365, Tikit provides a great way to use AI deflection to delight IT analysts and employees. Tikit integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Teams, providing a native help desk experience in Teams. Schedule a demo today or sign up for a free trial. You’ll see the difference the right ticketing solution can make.
