Within the first few months of 2020, the COVID-19 crisis has assumed pandemic proportions. Worse, it is a pandemic that shows no signs of tapering off anytime soon.
Amidst this crisis, organizational leaders and managers must accept that what we once considered ‘normal life’ or ‘normal business’ is now a thing of the past. Moreover, they need to be prepared to deal with the repercussions of this ‘new normal’ if they want to continue to keep their firms afloat and their people productive.
One such serious repercussion is being felt by the IT departments of organizations everywhere. To help manage the contagion and to ensure that they comply with national lockdown rules, organizations have adopted ‘remote work’ models and moved their employees from shared office spaces to their own homes.
This has increased the pressure on IT departments to make the transition as smooth as possible, both for employees and for the organization. This means ensuring that employees have remote access to all necessary applications, systems and devices, managing bandwidth demand spikes with minimal downtime, while also maintaining network (and organizational!) security at all times.
In many organizations, IT support teams are also tasked with the responsibility of training the workforce on new ways to access systems remotely so they can remain productive and efficient.
All these responsibilities are often overwhelming for IT staff, especially when other non-negotiable factors are added to the mix:
- The number of tickets cannot be reduced
- Compromising on SLAs is not an option
- Budget increases are impossible.
So what can be done to minimize the pain and maximize the results for IT?
The answer: AI-powered IT Process Automation.
There are multiple ways to harness the power of Artificial Intelligence to automate IT processes, particularly if they are rule-based, high-volume, repetitive, and require little to no human judgment or decision-making.
These include processes and requests like VPN access, password reset for business applications and IT systems, user provisioning and access control, and mobile device registration.
So instead of your L0/L1/L2 teams manually handling user-generated tickets for these processes, you can introduce automation into the system with a self-service web portal or with a ‘AI Chatbot’. The latter can ‘talk’ to users and provide relevant information like FAQs and knowledge-based articles.
Such ‘automated fulfilment’ can significantly reduce turnaround times and empower support staff to focus on more business-critical tasks.
[Also Read: 6 Ways To Successfully Manage Remote IT Team]
Deploying a Virtual Assistant with Chatbot and intelligent automation technology can help reduce the number and frequency of support-related phone calls, easing the burden on IT operations and also improving user experiences.
If users want to raise tickets via email, automation can allow that as well. With the help of Natural Language Processing, a type of AI technology, email ‘bots’ can recognize, interpret and understand user requests written in their natural language, and automatically create service desk tickets in the system. Other bots can automatically assign these tickets to the relevant agent or team of agents.
Intelligent IT operations with artificial intelligence offer a number of benefits that will endure long after the COVID-19 crisis is a thing of the past. Want to make it work for your organization?
To learn more, request a demo here!