10 ways an AI helpdesk can boost your IT efficiency

What are the two top reasons that companies invest in IT helpdesk software? 

• To improve productivity
• Competitive pressure

That’s according to a report by Gartner. 

There are more reasons to believe that productivity is a first concern for business professionals, and that AI provides a solution. In a Zoom workplace survey of over 11,000 people, 74% of leaders and 46% of employees said that using AI tools “saves one hour or more… a day.”

What could your IT team achieve if they could tap into the efficiency of an AI IT helpdesk?

AI helpdesk benefits and how it helps some companies speed response time by 99%

According to the State of Service Report by Salesforce, 88% of customers say that “good customer service” makes them more likely to return. 

At the same time, over 70% of service professionals say that customers are more rushed to get good service.

For IT helpdesks, the challenge is connecting the gap: providing great service to customers and users, quickly and efficiently. At Atera, we leverage AI to do just that and the proof is in the numbers.

After transitioning to an AI helpdesk solution, our clients have been able to solve 10X as many tickets, speed up their response time by 99%, and solve 95% of tickets faster. And that leads to increased satisfaction among customers or users.

Let’s break down the 10 ways that an AI helpdesk makes it all possible.

1. Streamline and automate workflows

When workflows are manual, and each IT technician deals with every issue separately, sometimes customers are served well and sometimes they are not. While your team members likely have good intentions, they do not have access to helpdesk data and IT automations that can speed things up. They are also juggling too many tickets at once.

Instead, an AI helpdesk enables you to define workflows that act automatically when a specific alert or issue comes up. These workflows can be customized precisely for the needs and structure of your IT ecosystem and users. Tweak the automated workflows over time as you gather feedback from both technicians and customers so the AI helpdesk serves you even better.

2. Automate mundane tasks

An AI IT helpdesk takes rote tasks off the hands of IT staff, so they can focus on more important activities, such as innovating new tools and solving complex IT challenges. For example, password resets and patch updates can be automated with AI-driven workflows that predict and handle these ongoing tasks with minimal input from your team.

3. Provide a comprehensive overview of customer history

An IT helpdesk software provides immediate access to the customer’s history, including previous tickets, recurring issues, and details of issue resolutions. An AI helpdesk solution goes beyond these data points to provide automated insights and suggestions about how to improve service delivery. This builds customer trust and satisfaction, which is critical for business performance.

4. Conduct sentiment analysis

Behind every IT device is a human being. An AI helpdesk platform uses natural language processing (NLP) to analyze customer sentiment and understand its root causes. It can also suggest how to handle the ticket in a way that provides a positive emotional experience for the customer.

5. Filter and prioritize customer requests automatically

An AI-powered service desk prevents unnecessary escalation — technical, emotional, and financial — by automatically prioritizing the most urgent tickets.

Examples of urgent or high-priority cases include:

• Repeat issues
• Essential workers or senior management (ie. the company’s attorney)
• Technical issues that have the largest negative impact on the customer or business continuity

In addition, a solid AI helpdesk can assign tickets to IT team members based on their expertise, giving the best chance for efficient resolution.

6. Identify trends in customer feedback 

AI helpdesks help identify and predict trends in IT issues among your customer base, which supports smarter ongoing operations. For example, an AI helpdesk can show you:

• Which hours or days require extra team availability
• What usually escalates technical issues or customer frustration
• And which bottlenecks keep popping up for technicians trying to work efficiently

Importantly, when your AI helpdesk identifies trends, it also picks up on anomalies.

7. Get anomaly detection alerts

An AI helpdesk software that knows your baseline can detect anomalies and send immediate alerts, so you can quickly discover and rectify the issues. Examples of anomalies include:

• Irregularities in network traffic
• Security threats and vulnerabilities 
• Deviations in hardware performance
• Failed backups
• Unexpected downtime
• Performance issues in applications

8. Reduce response and resolution times

With smart workflows, automation of mundane tasks, instant alerts of anomalies, and insights and predictions about customer experience, an AI helpdesk is working 24/7 to reduce your response and resolution times.

That said, time isn’t the only thing your AI helpdesk is saving you.

9. Minimize IT costs of manual labor

According to a survey by Digital Enterprise Journal, “68% of IT teams’ time is spent on tasks that do not contribute to key business outcomes.”

An AI helpdesk reduces the burden of labor-intensive tasks, so IT teams can spend resources doing work that bots can’t do. For example, providing faster, more empathetic service, and supporting strategic, revenue driving ITOps activities. All of this contributes to cost savings, freeing up IT budgets for activities that are focused on driving the business forward.

10.Gain an advantage with industry trends

An AI-powered service desk helps you stay aligned with industry trends and expectations, giving you a competitive edge. With AI helpdesks, you can:

• Embrace automation: The IT helpdesk AI automation can help you automate call and ticket routing, prioritize tasks, and build workflows for mundane tasks, among others.
• Use chatbots: Instead of having your trained IT team handle simple, repetitive requests, your AI helpdesk platform can do it for you via chatbots. For tasks that require human intervention, the chatbot can automatically redirect the ticket to an IT agent.
• Run predictive analytics: AI helpdesks can analyze vast amounts of data to identify patterns and anomalies that would be invisible to the human eye. It enables your team to predict, prevent, and resolve IT issues before they occur or escalate. This leads to reduced downtime, optimized resource allocation, and improved system performance.
• Enhance cybersecurity: An AI helpdesk can automate security audits, patch management, vulnerability assessments, and incident response. This makes it easier for IT teams to prevent cyber threats from being realized.

Best practices for implementing an AI helpdesk software

Now that you understand the benefits of an AI IT helpdesk, it’s time to discuss how to make it work for you.

Take full advantage of your AI helpdesk solution with these best practices:

Define needs and goals, and scale gradually

When you first begin with AI-powered helpdesk software, focus on your most pressing IT helpdesk AI needs. Make a game plan for implementation. The more you progress, the more features you can leverage in your AI helpdesk. 

Get your team used to this new process, show business results, expand your budget — then scale.

Build automation flows for rote tasks

This step is a crucial part of leveraging AI in your helpdesk solution, and it provides a quick win to demonstrate the value of your AI helpdesk to internal stakeholders. You’ll quickly see more tickets solved in less time, which will boost confidence among your IT team and customers. Then, you can start focusing on more complex implementations of AI in your helpdesk workflows to get even more from your platform.

Incorporate AI into existing systems and processes

This might mean connecting your AI helpdesk to databases or leveraging APIs. Make sure you define clear goals to support you — start with the most impactful integrations, and add more as you go.

Include human oversight

An AI-powered service desk can do plenty on its own, but not without human oversight. Add regular QA assessments to your workflows, so that any errors in your AI IT helpdesk are immediately spotted and corrected.

CoPilot will take your AI helpdesk to efficient, profitable heights

In our mission to deliver 10X efficiency for IT teams, we help you go from ‘reactive’ to ‘proactive’, fusing Atera’s IT management platform and OpenAI to create CoPilot, Atera’s AI helpdesk solution.

With Atera CoPilot, your IT team can leverage AI to:

• Drive quick responses with summarized tickets, data-based troubleshooting recommendations, and automatic responses embedded with your chosen tone of voice.
• Help customers self-serve with automatically generated knowledge base articles.
• Deliver efficient resolutions by creating precise terminal commands and context-specific scripts within seconds.

Looking for an AI IT helpdesk that works for you?

Start your free Atera trial today.