Service Desk Chatbot: Top Use Cases, Tools, and Challenges

Is your IT support team overworked?

Do they have overflowing service requests, and are most of these repetitive queries?

These could essentially mean your entire IT support team’s productivity is at risk. And you are not alone. A Springeworks survey conducted among 631 individuals shows that 'the biggest issue with their current help desk was repetitive tasks that lowered employee productivity & caused a decline in revenue.' The same survey also indicates an uneven degree of employee satisfaction with IT help desks.

IT service desks must resolve employee queries faster without IT support admins facing burn out. That’s precisely why service desk chatbots came into the picture.

Service desk chatbots automate routine employee queries and provide IT support admins a breathing space. Once repetitive employee queries are on auto-pilot mode, support admins can spend more time resolving critical challenges and incidents.

If you are still unsure, this article will help you learn more about IT help desk chatbots, their benefits, use cases, AND challenges.

What is a service desk chatbot?  

An IT service desk chatbot or help desk chatbot answers routine employee queries by extracting information from your knowledge bases and help centers. Service desk chatbots can be integrated with your existing workspace communication tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams and are available 24/7 to provide instant support to service requests.

Once you add these chatbots to your IT support workflow, support admins’ time is freed up, and they are more productive and invested in resolving complex challenges.

Benefits of adopting a service desk chatbot

Emails, phone-based support, and service request tickets all have a common problem: the declining productivity of the IT service team. While emails and phone calls are difficult to track, repetitive service request tickets overwhelm the IT support teams. In all of these cases, the end-users' queries remain unanswered.

The service desk chatbot addresses all these challenges with automated, instantaneous, and accurate responses.

• Service desk chatbots are cost-effective. Suppose you have a team of 50 employees and receive 100 support tickets every month. If each ticket costs $10, your support cost will shoot up to $1000. This could increase further during peak periods like performance evaluation and promotion seasons. A single service desk chatbot will automate 1000s of queries and resolve majorities within seconds. This means you can maintain a lean and productive support team without spending a whopping amount on IT support.

• Service desk chatbots are available 24/7. For remote teams with different employees working in different time zones, service desk chatbots provide instant, proactive support without fail.

• Help desk chatbots can keep your knowledge base updated by from the maintaining a repository of employee conversations. IT support teams can use this to improve the chatbot accuracy and also understand the level of employee satisfaction. Once you segregate the past conversation repository into specific use cases, resolving similar types of queries and challenges becomes simpler.

Top 6 IT help desk chatbot use cases

Below are some of the major use cases that service desk chatbots solve within seconds and without any involvement from support admins:

1. Answering repetitive queries via Slack/MS Teams

A help desk chatbot instantly helps employees with repetitive queries related to leave policies and old/new laptop issues within Slack and Microsoft Teams. Once you integrate a helpdesk chatbot into your workplace, it centralizes your knowledge bases and wikis. That means employees don’t have to switch between multiple applications or are not forced to hunt down critical information in a 100-page document.

2. Automating password reset requests

Did you know that the yearly cost of password reset is close to $85K for IT teams? Yet, many businesses still don’t consider implementing self-service resets. A service desk chatbot enables autonomous password reset workflow without involving a single human agent in the loop. All you have to do is pre-define how to verify employee identity once locked out, and the AI chatbot can take care of the rest.

3. Automating software access requests

Employees seeking software access is another repetitive request that IT support teams have to deal with, whether it is GitHub, Salesforce, or JIRA, and access requests never seem to stop.

A simple way to address these challenges is by automating the tool-specific access requests once and for all. With the service desk chatbot, access request automation takes only a few seconds.

When an employee requests access, a service desk chatbot understands the request, presents available access options, notifies the respective approvers through Slack or Teams, and adds employees to the correct AD group post-approval. It also notifies employees about access approval so they can get started.

4. Automate VPN troubleshooting issues

VPN troubleshooting is another critical challenge employees seek help for. A service desk chatbot extracts the steps to resolve VPN issues from existing knowledge bases and guides employees throughout the process, solving the issue without the IT service team’s involvement.

5. Automate the addition of employees to email ID or DLs

Integrating a service desk chatbot within your employee onboarding workflow makes adding employees to relevant email lists and Slack channels easier than ever. IT support teams no longer need to do these manually for each employee.

6. Raise incidents or asset requests easily

Incidents need to be addressed fast, or they can have a mild to massive impact on your team’s productivity. Human agents may overlook critical incidents due to a large volume of service requests. A service desk chatbot is trained to identify and cluster incidents quickly so IT support admins can prioritize incidents. Help desk bots notify the relevant stakeholders so they are in the loop till the incident is resolved.

5 Best service desk chatbots for IT support teams in 2024

Which service desk chatbot should you pick for your IT support needs? We have shortlisted the best ones:

1. Zendesk

Zendesk’s EX platform modernizes your internal support systems, organizes employee service requests, and automates IT support workflows to elevate employee experience. Zendesk’s service desk bot can help you with:

• Interacts with employees through automated, relevant conversations in their preferred channels
• Built-in NLP engine helps the bot learn from past conversations and improve service responses
• IT service teams can customize Zendesk Bot’s responses, add customized greetings, and manage multiple languages

2. Workato

Workato offers an enterprise service chatbot platform that enables organizations to integrate various applications, automate workflows, and create sophisticated business processes without extensive coding.

Workato can help organizations:

• Create and manage tickets in a conversational manner
• Use internal communication platforms to process requests
• Integrate with existing IT tech stack for robust operations

3. ManageEngine

ManageEngine is a self-service IT service portal that standardizes IT service delivery with automated workflows. ManageEngine’s IT service desk bot called Zia helps with:

• Hands-free service management anytime in native apps
• Providing direct answers to support queries in third-party tools like Jira
• Contextual responses to users’ frequently asked questions

4. Workativ

Workativ is a gen-AI self-service employee support portal that resolves employee IT issues instantly with conversational chatbots. Its built-in knowledge AI converts your internal knowledge base into support chats.

Workativ’s service desk chatbot helps with:

• End-to-end digital onboarding of employees
• Supports multiple custom-made workflows to manage approvals
• Seamless live agent handover in Microsoft Teams and Slack

5. Happyfox

Happyfox is an IT help desk and customer support software solution that offers an IT chatbot to help businesses:

• Offer contextual self-service help to employees
• Send out proactive requests and issue resolution updates
• Handle basic approval workflows

Limitations of chatbots for IT service desks

Chatbots are great for your IT service desk with the number of automation options it serves. We’re not debating that. However, they have their flaws. Let’s look at three of the biggest challenges with chatbots.

• Suitable only for basic queries: Traditional chatbots are built based on predefined scripts and rule-based logic which means they can handle only a specific set of requests in a specific, linear manner. If faced with variations of the same requests, these service desk chatbots give up easily, frustrating the end users. Despite infusing machine learning and NLP technologies, these bots struggle to detect intent accurately and result in broken user experiences.
• Requires regular maintenance and updates: Since these help desk bots run on pre-defined workflows, your IT team needs to periodically revise the bot flows and fine-tune the configured rules for optimal bot performance.
• Limited integration with other systems: Basic chatbots are often seen as programmed interfaces that can automate responses. They can respond and interact based on immediate context but can’t integrate and learn from multiple data sources to drive highly contextual employee engagement.

Evolution of service desk chatbots post-GenAI: The era of AI assistants

GenAI is already making a lot of noise for all the right reasons. A survey by Atomicwork shows that 75% of IT end-users are already familiar with tools like ChatGPT for their work.

In the world of IT support, GenAI has left quite an impact. GenAI has elevated service desk chatbots to be more people-centric. It has redefined bots to be actual assistants to employees and IT agents.

This new breed of AI assistants, powered by generative AI, has broadened the scope of automating service desk tasks in the following ways:

• Contextual engagement: Taking more advantage of natural language processing capabilities, GenAI assistants can not just understand the intent of queries better but alos generate human-like responses that improve the quality of service interactions. Trained on large AI models and not confined to rule-based logic, these assistants can hold contextual and personalized conversations at scale that enhance employee satisfaction.

• Minimal maintenance: GenAI assistant win in their ability to keep themselves updated, thanks to the large language models (LLMs) they are trained on. Your IT team doesn’t have to manually tweak flows or upgrade it’s performance as these assistants are largely self-taught! With robust AI guardrails and governance frameworks in place, you can ensure that the assistants give appropriate responses to employees.
• Deeply integrates with systems: With GenAI in the picture, AI assistant can easily integrate with your workplace tech stack and learn from multiple sources. They can intelligently feed answers to employee queries right within Slack or Teams by pulling information from different knowledge sources–without them having to switch between applications. This alos eases the adoption challenges that companies may face while rolling out bots since AI assistants can be accessed directly from common collaboration platforms.

How an AI assitant can transform your service desk operations

With an intelligent AI assistant, enterprises can make their service desk interactions more contextual and their workflows more effective than what a basic service desk chatbot can execute.

For instance, Atom–Atomicwork’s native AI assistant–can:

• Deeply integrate with your internal knowledge sources hosted on Notion, Sharepoint or Confluence and centralize updated information to answer employee queries instantly
• Personalize answers based on the employee’s permissions, location and department
• Allow employees to raise requests directly from Slack or MS Teams without taking them to clunky portals and also logs them at the backend for agents to work on
• Automatically run through repetitive steps for password resets, VPN troubleshooting issues, and remotely install software
• Link relevant incidents smartly and alert admins and users with auto responses for faster action.

Conclusion

While implementing a service desk chatbot may have got the ball rolling at yout IT center to automate repetitive tasks, it’s now time to transform your IT operations with next-generation AI assistants.

As a forward thinking IT support leader, you can take the first step in modernizing your IT infrastructure by embedding generative AI in your workflows–making them smarter and more effective.

With a modern ITSM platform like Atomicwork, you can have it all–AI assistant, AI agents, and core IT service and enterprise management capabilities–within one comprehensive solution that enterprises can use easily. If you’d like to see them all in action, sign up for a demo now!