No organization is immune to internal hiccups.
Equipment will eventually break; apps will inevitably need fixing; items will no doubt get lost.
You can address these issues and many more successfully by adopting an incident management process that can prioritize issues, provide transparency, and enable your team to resolve any issue quickly.
To accomplish this at scale, you’ll need to use an automated incident management system. We’ll break down what that can look like and why it’s so critical, but let’s align on what the IT automation term means first.
What is Automated Incident Management?
It’s the use of automation and AI to streamline an incident management process end-to-end. This requires the use of a business event (e.g. a ticket getting created) that sets off real-time outcomes (e.g. a ticket getting assigned to an agent).
Examples of Automated Incident Management
With this definition in mind, here are 2 automated incident management examples that range in importance and in how they’re handled:
1. A product bug that impacts the customer experience
When a technical issue prevents your application from performing optimally, you’ll want to address it as soon as possible.
Here’s how automated incident management lets you do just that:
1. Once an employee becomes aware of the product bug, they trigger the workflow by filing a ticket in a chat tool like Slack. This involves providing info around the issue’s importance, a description that allows colleagues to better understand it, and the customer it’s impacting (if it only applies to a certain customer).
2. A platform bot that can interact between the chat tool and the rest of your systems automatically creates the ticket in Zendesk.
Once created, the bot asks if you’d like to escalate it to engineering—and since the issue is critical, you click “Yes.” This triggers a ticket in Jira to populate, which is the platform your engineers use to manage their work.
3. The bot posts the ticket to the #escalatedtickets channel. From there, the appropriate stakeholders can find the ticket and create a separate channel exclusively for handling the product bug issue.
4. Anyone who’s working on the issue can leave comments in the ticket and change its status via chat.
Once the issue gets resolved, the agents can close it, archive the channel, and the employee who made the request instantly gets notified.
Popular Zendesk integrations
2. A printer connectivity issue
Unlike the previous incident, straightforward and less business-critical ones, like a printer connectivity issue, can probably be handled without human involvement.
To resolve this type of issue, you can use a chatbot that effectively functions as an IT Help Desk. Here’s how this can work:
1. An employee has trouble printing their document in the office printer.
2. They ask the chatbot within a platform like Slack about the issue.
3. Using AI, the bot provides a relevant response (which it pulls from your knowledge base). For example, this can be general tips around troubleshooting your printer connection.
4. If the bot still can’t help the employee, a ticket gets filed (which then follows the process outlined in the previous example).
Related: 3 IT apps that can help your employees monitor app performance and manage incidents
Why is an Automated Incident Management Process Important?
Now that you know how automated incident management can work, you probably have a handle on the value it delivers to your users, agents, and to your organization more broadly. In case any slip your mind, here’s a look at a few of its key benefits:
1. It lets agents focus more on resolving incidents.
The process of managing incidents manually leads agents to perform double data entry and it leaves them vulnerable in making mistakes (e.g. forgetting to update an issue’s status in a system).
By using an automated incident management system, your agents can avoid app-hopping and performing manual tasks. They can, instead, reallocate that time towards resolving more tickets quickly—which should significantly improve employee and customer satisfaction.
2. It provides employees with an easy way to track their tickets’ progress.
Your employees are likely eager to stay in the loop for any issue they submit.
You can provide them with the transparency they’re looking for by using automated incident management. How? Once an employee submits a ticket, they can get notified via chat at every stage of the ticket’s lifecycle—from when it’s assigned to an agent to when it’s resolved. That way, the employee is kept informed without needing to visit a specific application, and they don’t have to ask agents for a status update.
3. It gives your organization a competitive advantage.
Organizations by and large aren’t doing enough when it comes to incident management. Research by IBM made this abundantly clear: 77% of organizations don’t have a consistent cybersecurity incident response plan across different departments.
If your organization not only rolls out incident management processes for issues like cybersecurity, but also automates them, you’ll gain a significant competitive edge in delivering for customers and employees.
Ready to Implement an Automated Incident Management System?
You can use Workbot®, Workato’s enterprise platform bot, to automate your incident management system end-to-end. To learn more, you can speak with one of our automation experts!
