The continual advances in AI and in machine learning (ML) offer ample opportunities for improving the experiences of your customers and employees.
One area that exemplifies this are service desk chatbots.
Using this type of chatbot, your employees and customers can get their questions answered quickly, resolve their issues easily, and, as a result, improve their relationships with your organization steadily.
To help you get the most out of your service desk chatbot, we’ll break down what it is, some of its applications, and the top benefits you can expect from using it.
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What is an IT Service Desk Chatbot?
An IT service desk chatbot is a type of chatbot that can communicate between your employees via an internal communications platform, like Slack, and the rest of your applications. This allows employees to get their questions answered, create cases/tickets, and more without leaving the internal communications platform.
To effectively understand, interpret, and respond to user inquiries, service desk chatbots use natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) algorithms. The NLP algorithm does this by processing human language contextually, determining the user intent, and extracting relevant information to generate responses. This makes conversations feel more natural and conversational.
Depending on the platform, purpose of the chatbot, and industry, the entire conversation might not be fully powered by machine learning algorithms. In this instance, the chatbot might be required to direct end users to a live agent to take over and handle the issue.
Related: What the future of IT automation looks like
Service desk chatbot use cases
To bring our definition to life, let’s walk through a few use cases.
Create tickets and manage them through completion
The process of creating tickets, editing them, and closing any can be manually intensive, as each of these activities involve logging into a ticket management system like Zendesk.
This, in and of itself, may not seem like a problem, but as the number of tickets you create and manage grows, the process of managing each can quickly become overwhelming.
An IT helpdesk chatbot can help you build a scalable process for creating and addressing tickets across your organization. For example, say an employee wants to request equipment for their home office.
The chatbot can get information from the user, create the request as a ticket and route the tickets to the sales team. This automated process will minimize manual effort from the process.
Here’s how they can do so using an IT chatbot.
As you can tell, the chatbot makes the process quick and easy for both the requester and the approver.
Related: How automation can transform your service desk (with 3 examples)
Directly address any questions and issues
Your employees likely share a variety of questions, such as how many days they get off for a certain holiday.
To help your employees find the answers to commonly asked questions, your service desk chatbot can serve up existing content from your internal knowledge base (e.g. Guru) that directly addresses them. Here’s how this can work:
Related: Examples of HR chatbots
Multilingual support
Your business is global; thus, you will probably get requests or enquiries in other languages. To effectively cater to your user’s needs, your service desk chatbot should be able to understand and attend to requests regardless of their language.
A study actually showed that 62% of users are more likely to put up with product or service issues if they can speak to support in their native language. This addition also improves user experience.
Engaging individuals with proactive messaging
Your service chatbot doesn’t always have to wait for the user to interact with it before taking action. You can use it for so much more. For starters, using your first-party intent data, you can send tailored, personalized messages and recommend activities while users are on your site. This helps you take a proactive approach to addressing any potential issue.
You can also program your bot to proactively send reminders, follow-ups, and updates about tasks that have been left incomplete or abandoned processes. This can help re-engage users when they are active again and encourage them to complete the task or process. Thus, increasing engagement helps with retention and drives conversions.
Benefits of a service desk chatbot
Now that you know how an IT service desk chatbot can work, you likely have a solid grasp of its many benefits. In case you miss any, here are the top ones:
- It allows employees to focus on more business-critical and complex work. With manual work largely out of the way, employees who manage customer or employee issues can dedicate more time to troubleshooting critical problems that can’t be resolved with an article. According to AI chatbots statistics for 2024, AI chatbots have reduce the workload of answering messages by half.
- It improves the employee experience. Nobody wants to hop between apps to perform their day-to-day work or to find answers. If they can do both in a single platform and allocate more time to thoughtful and strategic tasks instead, they’re more likely to enjoy their job. For example, a survey by Servisbot shows that 92% of HR departments uses chatbots to access information.
- It enhances the customer experience. Assuming your employees become happier, they’ll be more likely to take actions that delight customers (based on research by the Harvard Business Review).
- It is available 24/7, so any employee, regardless of their time zone, can access and use your service desk chatbot. According to a survey by Outgrow, 64% of users think 24/7 availability is one of the best features of chatbots.
Related: The top benefits from automating your helpdesk
How service desk chatbots work
Various technologies can be used to build an IT service chatbot. One approach is to build the chatbot’s framework in a language like Python or Ruby. NLP and ML will also be implemented to process and/or route inquiries effectively. Additionally, with AI becoming increasingly sophisticated, you can give your chatbot AI capabilities. The bot can then be customized to match your brand’s identity.
Another method is low-code/no-code, which involves creating a bot using resources like Dialogflow or Microsoft Virtual Agents. However, regardless of the strategy you choose, you can link your bot to knowledge bases. This knowledge base can be used to access relevant information through ticketing systems, CRMs, service desk software, and/or ticketing systems. Using an analytics dashboard, you may measure critical KPIs like your Net promoter score (NPS) or the average turnaround time. This will help you gain insights to improve further and enhance the functionality.
Use Workbot as your service desk chatbot
Workbot®, an enterprise chatbot, offers all of the capabilities and benefits outlined in this page. Plus, you can use it in several internal communications platforms, whether it’s Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Facebook Workplace—which all but ensures that it can work at your organization.
