Employees want a seamless experience at work. There’s less and less patience for slow systems and bureaucratic delays. For IT leaders, this new expectation for an improved employee experience presents a new challenge. Traditionally, corporate systems prized control and scale over ease. If you want to be seen as a leader aligned with the business, you’ll need to evolve your practices.
The New IT Service Challenge: Deliver 24/7 Support to Employees
Once your company expands its workforce beyond a few time zones, IT support quickly becomes difficult. You’ll start to receive complaints that users in Europe are delayed in getting their work done because the help desk in the United States isn’t open yet. Simply telling these users to wait half the day or longer is no longer a viable option. Given that reality, what are the options?
Expanding your IT headcount is one option. You could create a night shift or local IT departments to support users around the globe. In some cases, this might be a good move. For example, if your company has highly complex internally developed technology to support, then local support may be worth the expense. For most companies, this approach doesn’t make sense.
If doubling the size of the IT team isn’t feasible, what can you do instead? You can look at new technologies to provide support to employees. We recommend two options in particular.
Two New Ways to Develop IT Support Around the Clock Without Hiring More Staff
Use the following two applications to save time and provide better support to your employees.
1. Self-serve IT Security Applications
What’s the most common employee request when calling the IT help desk? In our experience, it’s password requests. Instead of compelling employees to wait for the help desk to open, there’s a better way. Use Password Management to provide self-serve password resets to employees. You’re surely concerned with password policy enforcement and records, and Password Management is built with those concerns in mind. It automatically logs all password resets. Even better, all password requests are automatically checked against your internal password policy. Saving time on password requests will go a long way toward improving the employee experience.
2. AI Chat Bots
AI is no longer limited to making recommendations on Amazon and Netflix. It’s now ready to make your IT security work easier. Imagine being able to start a chat session with a bot that can process your requests in plain English. Do you need access to a new system? Just type out a few words in chat. Do you need to terminate an inactive account for an employee who left the organization? You can do that in just a few minutes of chat.
AI chatbots can’t handle all IT security tasks; however, they can handle most routine tasks. Instead of asking your staff to respond to the same tickets repeatedly, your chatbot will take care of those tasks. As a result, you can focus staff time on more complex tasks such as designing employee password training.
How to Get Internal Support for AI
While AI and machine learning tools are becoming more common, you might face some internal resistance to using them. Consider some tips for addressing those concerns.
R&D/Expertise Concerns
A few years ago, AI projects required a small army of programmers and experts. Only companies with the deepest pockets, such as Microsoft and IBM, could afford to explore that technology. That’s all changed today. You can buy “off the shelf” AI tools, configure them quickly, and get started soon.
Management Oversight
When you say AI to many people, movies such as “Terminator 2” and “The Matrix” come to mind. In reality, today’s AI simply isn’t capable of such a rampage. To address AI anxiety, explain how you plan to exercise oversight over the AI service. After all, managers monitor their employees for performance and quality, so why not monitor AI as well.
Difficult Learning Curve
What does using AI mean for your end users? They might be worried that they’ll have to learn to speak and act like a computer. Modern AI chatbots are designed to process language as you write it. That means you don’t need to learn any special jargon. Simply type out your requests in simple English and the chatbot will act on those requests.
Keep coming back to the Avatier blog to find out more about our new AI product launching later this year.
