Chatbots aren’t just for answering basic customer enquiries anymore, they’re now changing organizational structures and actually have the ability to act as first-line support.

On the IT service desk, where ticket numbers might be high and staff resources might be low, this is certainly appealing. However, the question is: Does your IT help desk really needs a chatbot, and how to integrate IT help desk chatbot?

Why IT Help desk really needs a chatbot?
#1: IT help desk Chatbot Work Quickly
Chatbots, and other bots, have the ability to do whatever they’re programmed to do. This could include providing links to knowledge base articles or categorizing and triaging a ticket based on information the user provides.

Chatbots do this in much the same way as your human IT help desk team would, only they have the ability to recall information far faster than any human being. For every hesitation your agents make while trying to remember the answer to a question, the chatbot has already recalled this, provided the answer, and moved on to the next issue or even the next customer. The advantage here is that your chatbot will get through a much larger workload than any of your team members can and even has the ability to work faster than a small team combined.

Chatbots can thus be great for removing the basic first-line responsibilities away from your human agents, clearing them to work on more complex tasks.

#2: Chatbot Reduce Human Errors
Chatbots remove the risk of human error by always following what they’re programmed to do (albeit potentially learning “better ways” along the way). And because you program your chatbot to do what you want say, for example, triaging a ticket to a certain resolver team based on its categorization – the chatbot knows where to send the ticket when your IT help desk service team might not.

If you have a lot of different categories and many resolving teams it can be easy for agents to forget which team handles which ticket type and it’s therefore difficult to triage some tickets correctly. You can therefore use a chatbot to reduce your bounce-back rate and improve your triage service level agreement (SLA) performance.

#3: Chatbot Work Around the Clock
Chatbots never need to take time out. There’s no need for breaks, no vacations, no sick days they simply work all day, every day. If you don’t run a 24/7 IT help desk, then your chatbots are still available to provide assistance when your IT help desk agents have all gone home.

Thus, if any of your customer feedback has pointed out that the existing level of IT support availability isn’t sufficient, then a chatbot could certainly help you out.

#4: IT help desk Chatbot Save Money
Because chatbots don’t take time off, don’t ask for sick pay, or don’t go on holiday, and because they work quickly and consistently, they have the ability to save your organization money.

When you start looking at numbers such as your agents’ hourly rate and the output, they can provide versus the output of your chatbot, you’re likely to find significant savings stacking up in the long-run.

Support people are definitely still required but chatbots can be employed, with the right balance, to provide a better quality of service while potentially saving money.

IT organizations can prepare for a successful help desk chatbot or virtual agent deployment by building out their knowledge base and service catalog resources, establishing a strong self-service culture within their customer base and offering diverse avenues for incident and request reporting, especially live chat. Rattle Tech offers IT organizations the features and flexibility to build and customize IT processes that function with help desk automation chatbot services.