Switch to Atomicwork: 8 key reasons to ditch your old IT support and service desk

As a team building conversational ITSM software, IT admins ask us a lot about why they should move from their current IT service desk stack to Atomicwork.

Sometimes, it’s because they’re unsure if the current crop of AI offerings is a fad. Sometimes, it’s because they don’t think AI adds enough value to the workday beyond just being a better way to search the web. Sometimes, it’s because they think that the security and ethical risks AI possesses might not be worth the time, energy, and money spent implementing it.

Long story short, this is a business decision every IT manager and CIO needs to take for their own organization. We decided to make a list of all how Atomicwork is better for your service management needs than legacy ITSM software.

From AI-generated answers to employee questions to an experience that’s primarily driven through Microsoft Teams and Slack, we’ve got a lot that you might be looking for in a modern IT support helpdesk.

1. Slack and Microsoft Teams first, over portals and email

We’ve repeatedly heard from our customers that portals are are far from the best possible experience their employees can get when it comes to reaching their IT and HR teams with questions.

Very often, employees don’t remember the URL to their service desk portals, and “Where do I raise a ticket?” becomes a question in itself for teams already burdened with a lot of work.

In the last five years, another fundamental change has also occurred. Slack and Microsoft Teams have become de facto means of workplace collaboration over email. Several IT and HR teams we’ve spoken to also mentioned that they have public channels on Slack and Microsoft Teams where their employees can reach out to post questions about software access, device issues, their payroll, taxes, etc.

This is why we built Atom with Slack and Microsoft Teams first in mind. On these platforms, Atom is reachable through DMs and can answer questions from your employees around the clock. When employees post questions to channels where Atom has been added, it takes the first stab at answering questions based on your docs and even shares the right service catalog forms wherever necessary.

Your employees can fill out these forms, vote if answers are helpful, and create requests - without ever having to leave these collaboration tools. This works particularly well if you have employees who are out in the field (like in stores, customer sites, etc.). They can access these forms and answers from Slack and Teams mobile apps without remembering a portal URL or struggling with desktop versions.

2. AI that doesn’t share links but instead generates contextual answers like ChatGPT

Remember those bots that throw out links from which employees are expected to find those snippets and deduce the answers they were looking for? After ChatGPT, consumer expectations around search have changed radically. People don’t want ten blue links and to look for answers by wading through several pages; they want instant, summarized answers based on all the information out there.

Atom understands your employees' questions and surfaces an answer summarized from the content it has learned from your docs and internal conversations. Atom doesn’t do a simple word-based search - it really attempts to understand the meaning and context behind each question that it gets and tries to surface the best possible answer based on all relevant documents.

When you ask Atom a question, here’s what it surfaces to the employee:

Even better, if you have different holiday policies for employees in different regions, Atom can surface different answers to employees in different regions.

If you’re looking for ChatGPT for employee support with fewer hallucinations and no enterprise data leakage, Atomicwork is a good bet.

3. AI skills to resolve common IT questions with zero human touch

We’ve learned from early customers that a good chunk of questions that come to IT are requests for access to new software, new reports, and, not to forget - the never-ending stream of asks for password resets.

Every time such questions come in, your agents spend an average of four to ten clicks on different tools to grant your employees access, reset their passwords, etc. Just ten such questions can lead to a hundred clicks and several hours of repetitive tasks for your agents.

That’s why we built AI skills. Atom can understand questions requiring actions in different places for resolution and automatically execute those actions without human intervention.

Don’t believe us? Here’s an example of Atom resetting passwords for a user who is locked out of their Okta account autonomously:

With legacy software, you often have to set up catalog items and workflows that run based on fields in the catalog item form and order the workflows to execute as expected. You have to hope every time that things will go smoothly, only to discover at least a dozen times that there’s something wrong in the workflow configuration before they actually start working.

Atom skills, on the other hand, are like plug and play - requiring no implementation engineers or additional setup cost.

They just work out of the box and help you automate most IT support grunt work: resetting passwords, access to Jira, Salesforce, and any software in your stack post manager approval, allowing your teams to easily apply for time off and download pay stubs - all without human intervention.

4. Learning from Slack and Microsoft Teams conversations, because docs are outdated

Most teams don’t have the time to go back and update existing documentation whenever policy changes or new information emerge.

Today’s businesses move at breakneck speed - a lot changes every few days, and much of the new information is posted to Slack and Microsoft Teams.

Public channels where employees post calls for help contain threads with messages from agents guiding employees with troubleshooting, often containing more useful information than outdated Confluence or SharePoint documents.

That’s why we’ve ensured Atom can learn from past conversations on Slack and Microsoft Teams channels and generate answers based on what it’s learned from conversations when employees ask questions.

Here’s an example where Atom surfaces content both from internal documentation and past conversations, to help the employee with as much information as possible:

Atom can learn from the last year’s worth of conversations when you add it to a channel and refresh its knowledge continuously every 24 hours based on new information in public channels. If an employee posts a question similar to what’s already been posted, it’s likely they’ll get a solution instantly because Atom will point to the recent answer.

5. Unbelievably fast setup - things take a few clicks or a few days, never months

We’re all connoisseurs of good software ourselves as much as we’re builders. That’s why we’ve made the experience from setup to use as seamless as possible.

It takes 2 clicks for Atom to get installed in your Slack workspace. Five, if it’s Microsoft Teams. Three clicks if it’s SharePoint, four if it’s Notion. We know that this sounds too good-to-be-true but we’ve got these gifs to show you how things work:

We’ve had customers who have uploaded their docs and PDFs, connected Slack, and started testing Atom all by themselves with very little assistance in just two days. They didn’t have to allocate engineering resources to implement our software, and neither did they have to go through a long struggle to discover how to do a certain something in our product.

Dare I say it? Setting up Atomicwork and connecting your internal documentation and collaboration tools is as easy as ordering an Uber. Okay, maybe it’s a few extra taps, but it's well worth all the impact it would create in eliminating repetitive questions to your internal support teams.

6. Purpose-built for employee experience, not customer support

What we’ve heard from customers who use customer support helpdesks to run their internal IT support is that these tools, while perfect for external customers, need a lot of work for internal support.

For instance, you might have to tweak customer-service features to make them work for your use cases instead of purpose-built IT helpdesk features like a service catalog or approvals. This might mean you must spend a lot of time making something work for you. For example, since approvals aren’t available natively, you will end up setting up workflows to notify approvers, record their decisions, convey this to the agent, and notify the requester.

Atomicwork is targeted specifically at IT teams who help their employees day in and day out, so everything in our product priority list is targeted at making lives better for these teams. Natively, Atomicwork supports service catalogs, approval policies, notifications to DMs and channels on Slack and Microsoft Teams (and even learning from conversations in Slack and Microsoft Teams)

There’s also asset management, problem, and change management coming soon, too - this should tell us how we’re thinking about really enabling your teams to unlock as much productivity as possible without you having to tinker with our software too much to make it work for your basic use cases.

7. Faster approvals and higher survey response rates through Microsoft Teams and Slack

Speaking of approvals, a common cause of delay in fulfilling service requests is approvals getting delayed.

Legacy service desk products send email notifications when approvals are pending on managers, but as tends to happen with emails - they get missed. A lot. We’ve heard from people that approval times are longer than a few years ago because people spend more time on Slack and Microsoft Teams than on their email inboxes.

We’ve seen prospects use Power Automate and Workato to create workflows that notify approvers on Slack and Microsoft Teams. In our case, just like Slack and Microsoft Teams are the de facto medium through which Atom notifies approvers about requests waiting for their decisions.

Without any additional workflow setup, Atom can also notify employees when their requests get approved and inform agents working on the request to reduce the chances of any delays in fulfilling the request.

8. Speed is a habit - for both our support and product velocity

Unlike a lot of well-established products, we move fast. Just in the last three weeks, we’ve launched more than a dozen updates, including:

• Learning from your SharePoint docs (including .aspx pages)
• Insights on how Atom performs, along with request-related metrics
• Powerful workflow automation that allows you to pass data between different actions, helping you automate any business process seamlessly
• Skills to automate repetitive IT work around software access, password reset questions and more, out-of-the-box

We’re actively working with our early customers to identify pain points, improving our learning and answer generation capabilities while doing so many things that unlock new possibilities.

If you’re looking for not just a vendor but a partner who is willing to work with you, understands your needs, and helps you move away from your current stack of clunky software, you should give Atomicwork a shot.