Reimagining the IT Help Desk Experience for ‘Silent Patients’ with AI
Workplaces can benefit from AI when employees struggling with technology issues are reluctant to seek help. With its rise, AI has established itself as a transformative trend. AI can improve productivity and efficiency while protecting against operational downtime and can proactively identify and resolve IT issues, benefiting employees who may not seek help and improving their overall experience.
These “silent sufferers” may experience outages and connectivity issues but be reluctant to ask for support. Instead, they may try to fix the problems themselves, which can lead to further complications, either immediately or later, especially if they make the original problem worse. Worse yet, they may continue to ignore the problems altogether. When that happens, the problems they tolerated—most of which could have been solved by IT—will undoubtedly result in these silent sufferers being much less productive and unhappy at work.
So how can IT support these silent victims? First, they need to understand why these end users remain silent. Often, silent victims don’t report an issue to IT because they don’t want to further impact productivity while IT fixes the problem or go through the 20 questions IT asks when they don’t have visibility into the problem. Others may have bad intentions, such as not wanting to cause a stir or draw attention, or they think they can fix the issues themselves. Whatever their reasons, their silence can cost companies a lot of time and resources.
From a technology perspective, IT departments need to collect data to identify who these employees are and what issues they are facing. Armed with this information, IT teams can gain a complete view of their IT estate and then apply AI to drive efficiencies.
Advances in AI are indeed changing the way employees interact with the IT help desk. AI technology can improve support for silent victims, IT staff, and the organization as a whole in three ways.
VP Solutions Engineering at Lakeside Software.
Proactive and predictive problem identification and resolution
A common frustration in IT is not knowing what impact any changes might have. AI can process large data sets to identify correlations and predict potential conflicts, preventing many digital disruptions that cost time and money. This capability empowers IT teams to address issues proactively.
For example, an organization I work with received two tickets about a slow network. While the IT team began working on these two tickets as isolated issues, AI analyzed the entire IT estate to identify similar issues. AI was able to give engineers a broader view of the scope of the impact, revealing that 800 users were experiencing the same issue but had not reported it to IT. The team used AI to be proactive instead of waiting for employees who may or may not have called the service desk about the issue. AI-driven technology can identify these unreported issues, ensuring a timely resolution that can be rolled out to all impacted users.
Think of AI as a tool that quickly flags anomalies in a technical environment. An AI-powered anomaly detection platform continuously scans systems and compares current and historical data to provide unprecedented visibility. This proactive approach helps prevent less critical issues that affect silent victims and large-scale problems that might otherwise escalate into late-night calls to the CIO.
When larger issues arise, like an IT outage, many organizations fall back on a reactive approach: wait for an outage, set up a war room, and work late into the night, often with a lot of finger-pointing at the network team, the app team, the desktop team, the security team, and so on. To prevent this, organizations need to proactively collect critical data ahead of time. Instead, by using AI and ML (machine learning) trained on this IT data, companies can quickly identify and prevent issues, ensuring business continuity.
Empowering all employees, especially the silent victims, with automated self-service
Silent victims often prefer to solve problems themselves, and with the generational shift in the workplace, this trend is likely to continue. Tech-native generations have grown up solving their own problems on their own devices, and they want to do the same on their work devices. While changing this mindset can be challenging, you can provide them with automated, tech-driven solutions. For example, AI-driven tools can combine real-time device insights with automation, allowing users to resolve recurring issues without having to reach the help desk. For example, one multinational bank automated a resolution for a frequently requested recovery key, reducing service desk calls by an estimated 800 per month.
The rise of “self-healing” IT tools means that problems can be addressed proactively. Automated testing tools identify and prevent challenges that arise from constantly changing user interfaces, web applications, and other popular platforms and systems. When a problem is detected and the correct solution is already known, it can be implemented immediately instead of waiting for users to report it.
This automated resolution approach is ideal for silent sufferers who would rather avoid IT interactions altogether, as the self-healing tool can resolve issues autonomously without manual intervention. Well-scripted IT solutions can also scale quickly, providing employees with immediate assistance, which in turn only helps to lighten the load on already overstretched IT teams.
Bridging knowledge gaps
Employees, especially silent victims, often spend time searching for IT solutions. They search online, browse the intranet, or ask colleagues if they can find an answer faster than calling the help desk. But they all waste valuable work time to avoid the help desk and skip the wait for IT support. An AI-powered help desk can drastically reduce this wait time by providing immediate answers to questions from IT agents. With high-quality data, AI can significantly expand the IT support knowledge base, making it accessible to a wider audience.
Improving IT support across the organization
By using AI to transform the IT help desk experience, self-service support can be automated, delivering better answers faster and preventing issues from happening. And that’s something everyone can appreciate. By using AI in help desk management, businesses can streamline operations and improve agent productivity. This frees up the IT team to focus on delivering high-quality support where human expertise is needed and hand off less complex issues to AI when they’re not.
Instead of an IT help desk that may not be equally effective for all employees, silent victims can become happier and more engaged employees by implementing a smart AI solution that works in tandem with the IT team.
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