We naturally talk a lot about efficiency that technology affords us, but the IT service desk might better serve end users—and support employee experience—by prioritizing productivity. Because as it turns out, the most significant driver of employee experience is the ability for employees to make headway each day in work they value.
Understanding what employees find meaningful about roles and responsibilities is a task for managers, but from an IT perspective there is certainly opportunity to minimize or prevent workday disruption due to technical issues. It’s an obvious way to support employee productivity.
Do Employees Even Like Self-Service?
Efficiency can be in the eye of the beholder. Take the concept of self-service: giving employees the ability to research and attempt to resolve common tech issues would make life easier for service desk analysts. Analysts receive a lot of repetitive requests, so it makes sense to propose a process that creates efficiency somewhere in the ticketing process.
But is this a good solution for employees? Just because you build it doesn’t mean employees will embrace it. If it’s not intuitive, easy-to-use or convenient, chances are it just won’t be used to its full potential. And that certainly doesn’t do the support desk or end users any favors.
But here’s a thought: instead of putting the onus on employees to search and problem-solve, why not use artificial intelligence to do the proactive work? This way, when employees ask for help, AI-powered virtual agents can:
- Assess the request
- Create a ticket if the request is unable to be deflected
- If the ticket can be deflected, the virtual agent identifies relevant knowledge base instructions or articles to resolve the issue and serves them to the end user
- If the problem isn’t resolved, the support analyst can step in and resolve the issue
This process creates less work for employees, allows them to get served answers or proactively route their issue to the appropriate group or subject matter expert. Either way, all the employee needs to do is submit a request. The rest of the process is set in motion with AI.
What Channels do Employees Prefer to Use?
Speaking of convenience, why not let employees submit requests in channels they already use in daily work? Many companies use Microsoft Teams for communication and collaboration—especially given hybrid work schedules. Chatting in Teams is probably as intuitive by now as email. Why not give employees (and analysts for that matter) the ability to submit requests and carry out further communication from Teams chats and email?
It would be more efficient than trying to encourage adoption of another tool and another process. And wouldn’t this actually support productivity for employees and analysts?
What Data Can You Collect to Support Employee Productivity?
It’s hard to make informed decisions without data. Luckily, the service desk is in a pretty good position to produce insights. You just need data points to help you collect relevant information. Here are a few basic questions to ask the service desk team and employees:
- What are your most common end user requests?
- What issues do employees think prevent them from being productive?
- Employees’ responses can be revealing. You may think that a laptop or software startup delay is an issue, but end users might not see it that way. The time it takes to boot up might give them a minute to catch up with a co-worker, clear their minds or grab a cup of coffee.
But there is likely more that you want to know. That’s where having an appropriate number of data points and the ability to customize is extremely helpful. Ticket types is one such feature that can help you distinguish between an incident, request or change, but you also have the ability to give ticket categories unique names and meaning. This kind of categorization flexibility will help you provide meaningful insights.
Setting up a mechanism for consistent feedback, analysis process and continuous refinement gives you an ongoing ability to qualify and quantify productivity improvements. We’d love to hear about your results.
Tikit contains the above-mentioned functionality and more! Check out a demo of Tikit to see how it works. Or better yet, explore Tikit in a free 14-day fully-functional trial with no credit card needed. Also, IT admin and analyst feedback plays a major role in Tikit’s feature development. Let us know what functionality you’d like to see and track Tikit’s development in our Roadmap site.
