Service Desk Automation - Your Go-To Guide

In today’s modern world, efficiency is everything. So if your organization is not already practicing IT helpdesk automation, it’s about time. Service desk automation and help desk automation are one and the same – these practices are all about helping incoming tickets get resolved faster so that your customers experience an elevated level of service.

In this article, we’ll cover everything you need to know about IT service desk automation so that you can reduce busy work, increase productivity, and check those tickets off the list!

What is service desk automation?

An automated helpdesk allows you to streamline and automate your ticketing. There are numerous helpdesk automation tools out there, but the most effective tools will allow you to scale and grow your IT department without getting caught up in busy work. You’ll be able to automate one of the most challenging parts of IT department management: incoming tickets.

Top 4 service desk automation effects

When you invest in IT service desk automation, you will see a multitude of benefits, including an increase in your team’s productivity, scalable IT support automation, a decline in support costs, and fewer human errors. You will be more efficient than ever before, and your day won’t be slowed down by endless busy work. To put it simply… What are you waiting for?

Increase of team productivity

With the right service desk automation tools, your team will see enhanced levels of productivity. After all, your IT department is chock full of talented individuals whose intelligence is best used on challenging tasks requiring critical thinking. Using your manpower on easy-to-fix tickets is certainly not the best use of your time.

So instead of spending all of your human resources on humdrum tasks like password resets, folder creation, or onboarding journeys, allocate your bright minds where they really account. Automate the repetitive IT tasks and make your whole department more efficient.

Scalable automation

With an automated help desk, you will be able to help your organization grow and scale without hitting any roadblocks. When promising new companies begin to expand quickly, it can be tough to scale your IT department accordingly. But helpdesk automation allows you to do just that, as you can automate repetitive tasks and ensure a high level of user service.

Reduction of support costs

Let’s be honest: Hiring more IT department technicians is pricey. And that price tag is especially hard to swallow when they’re going to be spending their hours on mundane tasks that a machine could easily take care of. Enter, service desk automation. You’ll be able to cut costs while providing even better service than before. It’s truly the best of both worlds.

Elimination of human errors

Humans are essential in any IT department, but with an automated service desk, you can reduce human errors in repetitive tasks. This will streamline your processes and get rid of pesky mistakes in places that can be easily automated. Let your technicians do the work that really counts instead of spending their time with small tasks that don’t need expert attention.

Service desk automation ideas

There are many different ways to practice IT support automation, but here are some of our favorite service desk automation ideas. At Atera, we harness the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to promote efficiency and high-quality endpoint user service as well as internal automation through our advanced helpdesk automation and ticketing system.

Atera’s AI-Powered IT

At Atera, we understand how IT departments work. For that reason, users notice a big difference in our AI helpdesk product: It’s truly tailored to the day-to-day needs of IT departments. Our AI service desk is intuitive and user-friendly, enabling you to manage your tickets like never before and communicate with end-users through a helpful live chat.

With the AI-powered IT of Atera, you will be able to streamline and automate your ticketing in just a few clicks. Our product comes with numerous benefits, including the ability to schedule tickets in advance, easily manage technician schedules, open tickets from both email and chat, and automate customer feedback surveys after tickets are resolved.

Our AI ticketing system has the most up-to-date capabilities so that you (and your end-users) receive maximum benefits. With AI ticket tagging, you can automate the categorization of incoming tickets by specific keywords and then route them to the IT professional who can provide the fastest, most expert support.

You don’t need to spend your time worrying about ticket dispatching anymore. Leave that to Atera’s AI ticketing system. With our automated reports and rich knowledge base as well as the always-expanding AI capabilities of Atera, your team will be more productive – and effective – than ever.

Reporting and analytics powered automations

Other helpful automations can come from a goal of getting more insight into your employee behavior and your customer experience. For example, you might want to learn how your customers feel about the service they have received. Why not automate a survey that gets sent after support interactions, and asks users whether they are satisfied with their experience?

New innovation is allowing this to go even further, as service desk employees can use this kind of automation to get instant feedback on how they’re doing. When augmented with tools that provide natural language processing or sentiment analysis, guidance can be provided in the moment to help users resolve friction or end a service call with a better outcome.

If you have the reporting infrastructure in place, you can correlate helpdesk surveys as your qualitative research with quantitative data on how long it took for an incident to be resolved or responded to, finding out the ideal amount of time to include in contracts and SLA moving forward, or improving staff training.

With a robust Helpdesk dashboard, you can also use automation to get more visibility and control into your user and employee behaviors. You can answer complex questions such as:

• Which users send the most ticket requests, and are they repeat challenges?
• Which employees resolve tickets fastest, and what is their associated satisfaction rate from the customers?
• What time of day, month or even year prompts the most ticket requests, and can we identify the cause?

Workflow automation

As well as customer requests, you can also manage your own internal systems using automation from your Helpdesk software. Think about automatically applying rules such as copying documentation to the right folders, notifying users of escalation or resolution, integration with your own Knowledge Base to send one-click responses, and even configuration and management of your devices.

This last one can include internal tasks like tracking inventory and automatically ordering replacements, or externally pushing software updates, and ensuring security patches are installed. Another great example is automatically assigning time in a technician’s calendar to deal with a service request, from an email request that is sent by a user. In that situation, without any action from the administrator, the customer request can be received, the work scheduled, the technician appointed, and the customer notified, all at any time of day or night and entirely hands-free.

Having a PSA that integrates with a robust Remote Monitoring and Maintenance solution really takes your business and your automation potential to the next level. Not only can you serve your own users in terms of ticketing and support, you also have the tools in place to fix problems and troubleshoot or uncover the root cause of issues, all from the same desk.

When you find a task that crosses over both sides of the business, you can automate a whole process or event, such as receiving a ticket about the need for a software download, and automatically sending a wizard process that can simply be accepted by the user in one click.

Ideas for ticket automation

• Password management: Allow users to request password changes, password resets or forgotten passwords.
• Folder creation: Automatically create a new folder with the right corporate settings and privacy according to predefined rules.
• Email to ticket: Open or escalate tickets automatically from an email, tagging the right admin or technician for attention.
• Skill or urgency routing: Assign a priority level to correspondence, or channel to the right member of staff based on sender or keyword.
• Process and project management: Repetitive tasks like onboarding journeys for new hires or install wizards for downloading software can all be automated to save you time.

Automated Helpdesk with Atera

In the IT service business, customers value efficiency and convenience – and that’s a fact. So when your schedule is getting clogged up with tasks that aren’t billable, it’s time to bring in IT support automation. With automated helpdesk services, like Atera’s PSA tool, you will be able to provide your customers and end-users with five-star service around the clock.

Plus, you will be able to help your organization scale and grow, taking on new customers and bringing in new employees with a smooth onboarding journey. When tickets come in, you’ll be able to streamline categorization and dispatching through our AI ticket tagging system, revolutionizing your productivity and putting your best resources where they really count.

IT helpdesk automation is an essential piece of bringing your department (and your organization) into the modern world. You’ll benefit from enhanced team productivity, scalable automation, reduced support costs, and fewer incidences of human error. But best of all, your day-to-day life will get so much easier.

Service desk automation benefits the IT department, the users, and the clients. In streamlining the workflows and ticketing of the IT department, it offers users and clients a quicker and more effective service experience. In terms of the bottom line, this can improve the productivity of your organization as a whole. If that’s not an argument for investing in AI-powered helpdesk technology, we don’t know what is!

When you’re ready to make the change, keep Atera in mind. Our AI capabilities are unmatched, and you’ll start enjoying the benefits right away.

In the IT service business, time is money! If your tasks aren’t billable, then it’s in your best interests to reduce or replace them with automation as much as you can. If they are billable, then the more you can hand over to an automation rule, the more you can scale up and take on new customers, users, or value-added tasks. Your customers are looking to you to do more with your time, and delight them with technology that can ensure you provide 5* service around the clock. Lucky for you, automation is the key to making that happen.

Automation rules and Automation profiles are a powerful part of using Atera’s all-in-one IT management software, and have been made even easier with the use of our Shared Script Library. This is a community-driven feature that allows you to benefit from the success and know-how of your fellow Aterans, so make sure not to miss it! In the meantime, if you want more information on automation and scripting – look no further!