What if your IT service desk could automate everyday tasks within seconds, reduce the increasing number of tickets, and assist employees daily, while the rest of the work of your IT department will be concentrated on more complicated cases that require human assistance?
The increased number of tickets, repetitive questions, and manual processes make life harder for IT departments.
But with the help of service desk automation, companies can automate routine support while letting employees concentrate on difficult tasks that cannot be automated by machines.
This guide aims to define service desk automation, define priorities for automation, explain the ways to implement the service desk automation process successfully, and state the reasons why you should do so.
What Is Service Desk Automation?
Service desk automation uses workflows, artificial intelligence, and integration to automate IT support tasks with minimal human intervention.
Improves speed of request handling and the consistency of the support process for IT teams.
The most common service desk automation scenarios are:
- Knowledge Base Self-Service: Assists users in finding solutions for their IT problems without creating a ticket.
- Automated Ticket Management: Creation, classification, prioritization, and proper routing of tickets to respective teams.
- AI-powered Chatbots & Voice Agents: Understanding the requirements of users, answering the queries of users, and ticket creation for human intervention.
- Proactive Problem Management: Identification of possible IT problems before users face them with an alarm or an automated solution.
- Identity & Access Management: Automation of account creation, access request, password reset, and removal of access of employees.
McKinsey found that 25% to 35% of incident tickets at one company were requests for password resets or access, making these strong candidates for automation.
How Does Service Desk Automation Work?
Service desk automation integrates user requests, artificial intelligence, workflow, knowledge base, and IT infrastructure in order to solve common support problems with minimal human involvement.
The common workflow begins with receiving a request, detecting the problem, performing the relevant task, and escalating complicated cases to a human agent.
Service Desk Automation Use Cases
Service desk automation helps IT teams handle repetitive support tasks faster while reducing manual workload. The most common use cases include:
- Auto Ticketing & Ticket Routing: Tickets are created from emails, chats, forms, or voice, and then tickets are automatically assigned to respective departments on the basis of issue types and priorities.
- Password Resets & Unlocking of Accounts: Employees handle the most common IT help desk tickets all alone.
- Access Management: Access requests, approval, and provisioning are automatically performed according to the user's role, department, and employment status.
- Onboarding and Offboarding of Employees: Automatic account creation and application access are done for newly hired people, while automatic revocation of access takes place when an employee leaves the company.
- Self-Service Knowledge Base: Users are instantly provided with answers to frequently asked questions without having to raise a ticket.
- AI Chatbots and Voice Support: Conversational systems address routine queries round the clock, use the knowledge base to resolve commonly occurring problems, and only raise a ticket when the assistance of a human agent is absolutely required.
- SLA Monitoring and Escalation: Automatic monitoring detects tickets nearing SLA violation and escalates them proactively, instead of human agents recognizing the violation after it has happened.
- Proactive Issue Identification: Monitoring systems detect abnormalities in system behavior and either alert human agents or take automatic remedial actions before the problem affects end-users.
- Automated Ticket Status Updates: Requestors receive automatic updates regarding the status of their tickets created, assigned, in process, and closed.
Benefits of Service Desk Automation
Service desk automation allows IT professionals to solve tickets efficiently, decrease time spent on repetitive processes, and provide a consistent level of service.
The following are some of the advantages of service desk automation:
- Quick Problem Solving: Automation of routine processes allows you to resolve problems more quickly.
- Reduced Expenses for IT Support: Helps decrease manual effort and process a larger number of tickets without increasing the team size proportionately.
- IT Team Efficiency: Allows IT staff to concentrate on complicated cases instead of routine activities.
McKinsey predicts that applying generative AI to customer-care functions could increase productivity by 30–45% of current function costs.
- IT Support Availability 24/7: Self-service and AI-powered agents can deal with common inquiries outside of working hours.
- SLA Compliance: Automation allows teams to achieve compliance by making the process of prioritization, routing, alerting, and escalation more efficient.
- Enhanced User Experience: Faster response times, automated updates, and self-service features are available for users.
- Scalability: Service desks can process increasing numbers of tickets using automation without requiring the same level of effort.
- Consistent Support Process: Standardized processes make it possible to provide consistent support to users.
Microsoft research found that customer-service workers using generative AI resolved 14% more issues per hour, with novice and low-skilled workers seeing a 34% improvement.
Service Desk vs. Help Desk Automation
These two terms are often used interchangeably, but they are different in their scope of application:
- Help desk automation deals only with issue resolution and password reset.
- Service desk automation includes incident management, problem management, change management, access management, and SLAs monitoring within the whole ITIL-based service life cycle.
How to Get Started with Service Desk Automation
- Audit ticket volume by category. The first high-volume, low complexity categories to identify are the ones you want to automate.
- Fix the knowledge base before building automation on top of it. Automation magnifies the level of existing documentation.
- Begin with rule-based automation for deterministic processes and follow up with AI for triage and conversation.
- Work out the human hand-off processes before go-live, not after: exactly what goes where and how much context.
- Compare pre-and post-go live: ticket volume, average resolution time, SLA adherence and human time freed up.
- Optimize your process based on actual usage, especially the AI pieces, which get better with feedback loops.
How Thunai Supports Service Desk Automation
AI-powered service desk automation goes beyond rule-based workflows by understanding user requests, retrieving relevant knowledge, and helping resolve IT support issues faster.
Gartner predicts that by 2030, 25% of IT work will be performed by AI alone, while 75% will be done by humans working with AI.
By automating repetitive tasks across voice, email, tickets, and knowledge management, businesses can reduce manual workloads and improve IT support efficiency.
Here Are Some of Thunai’s Service Desk Automation Use Cases:
- AI Voice Agents for IT Support: Thunai AI voice agents can handle common IT support requests 24/7 using your organization's knowledge base, allowing human agents to focus on complex issues that require intervention.
- Jira Service Desk Automation: Enables teams to create and manage Jira tickets through AI voice and email agents, reducing manual ticket handling and speeding up issue resolution.
- AI Email Agents: AI email agents can understand support requests and generate relevant, personalized responses, helping IT teams manage high volumes of support emails more efficiently.
- AI Knowledge Base Automation: Thunai can help create, update, and surface relevant knowledge from documents, conversations, and calls, making information easier for employees and support agents to access.
- AI Agent Assist: Thunai provides real-time suggestions and relevant information to human agents, helping them resolve complex IT support requests faster and more accurately.
Want to see how Thunai can transform your support in real time? Book a demo to see it in action.
FAQs on IT Service Desk Automation
What is the cost of service desk automation?
The cost will largely depend on the scope and can be relatively inexpensive when you have a limited rollout, utilizing existing ITSM capabilities. Pricing models will generally include per-ticket pricing, per seat, or per agent usage.
How long does implementation take?
Automated workflow processes for a small number of tickets, depending on rules can be implemented within a couple of weeks. A bigger initiative involving an AI-based solution will require several months.
Is it possible to integrate it with Jira or ServiceNow?
IT Service Desk Automation platforms integrate with popular ITSM solutions (Jira Service Desk, ServiceNow, Zendesk, etc.), meaning that automation will generally be implemented on top of your ticketing system.
Is service desk automation worthwhile for small IT teams?
Yes, smaller teams suffer more from ticket repetitiveness, and even automating a couple of request types will save disproportionate amounts of time compared to the team size.
Does service desk automation mean that you no longer need IT staff?
No, service desk automation helps eliminate low-level and repetitive tasks so that IT staff can deal with issues requiring decision-making, troubleshooting, etc.
Do you need good documentation before implementing automation?
Yes, as automation just scales what you currently have documented. If the documentation is bad, then the automation will be bad as well.
