IT Support in an company should serve as a single point of contact between users and IT service management. In its most modern conception, it must function as the nerve center of all the IT processes that guarantee a better service.
IT support is essential for companies to be more productive. Whether it supports the performance of activities or optimizes procedures through automation, the Information Technology area is now more important in the corporate environment, thanks to advances and management innovations, which update and optimize processes of the different departments that are part of a company and of a market by extension.
But technical support has to deal with several challenges, so it is important to know the common processes, the most cost-effective optimization and the use cases.
IT support usually takes care of several tasks, namely:
Incident management: It is responsible for reestablishing the normal operation of a service in the shortest possible time to minimize negative impacts on the company.
Problem management: It is responsible for eliminating repetitive errors and incidents by looking for the root causes.
IT training and onboarding: It takes care of training staff on the tools and software needed for operations.
Configuration management: Supports all company processes helping to configure IT tools and keeping them updated.
Change management: Ensures that the company is staying efficient and if not, finds a series of timely changes to move forward.
Release management: It ensures that before following any change, technical and non-technical aspects have been taken into account so that said change is viable.
One of the best practices in IT support is to seek continuous innovation. Automation is one of the most important competitive advantages of our time.
In first place it is important to do all the updates of the pertinent systems and in the second place it is vital to find all those repetitive but structural tasks that can be automated through a program such as a chatbot.
Chatbots are programs that have helped support companies in the last five years. In the case of IT support, many tasks that take time and require resources can be optimized.
Using a chatbot, bugs can be reported and a log is kept that the IT specialist will later look at to find the relevant solutions. This is one way to optimize incident and problem management.
Chatbots also serve to measure the degree of efficiency of the company's IT services. If the machines, tools, and equipment in a company's technology system are working well, users will be pleased and the company's productivity level will be high. On the other hand, a company can notice through communication with chatbots the changes that are necessary in operations and machines to improve efficiency.
This is how chatbots can help companies optimize IT support from all the management areas that it usually covers. Let's look at some concrete use cases.
Specifically, a chatbot can take care of:
Automate service requests: Chatbots respond 24/7 to routine incidents and service requests. They can suggest relevant articles to users that fix problems, thereby encouraging self-service. Users get an immediate response and this greatly improves their satisfaction with the system or the company.
Ticket management: Chatbots can take care of ticket categorization and save valuable time for the IT support team. Simply put, bots can take care of delivering problems to the right agents to fix them. This saves time in problem solving and wins more satisfied customers.
Agent assistance: Bots are not only an aid for end users, but also for agents to find information faster and solve problems in less time. Chatbots can deliver reports, deliver addresses where pertinent information is located, broadcast messages internally within an organization, and more.
Automation of workflows: IT departments handle large volumes of service requests and change approvals; it takes time to analyze all cases, but chatbots can automate workflows with instant approval and notification to the users involved.
Bots can also help new hires onboarding use of an IT system by making all relevant resources available.
Access management: Chatbots can filter the user by the department where they work, the type of request and their position, to send the approval to the administration and that it is in charge of granting access if appropriate. Chatbots can also remove a user's access automatically if necessary.
Reset password: Another thing that can be automated with bots is a task as routinely as changing the password. Any IT company knows that a large number of support tickets have this issue. You can configure a bot to reset passwords, connect to the central server, and configure temporary passwords for users. This avoids any manual intervention by agents.
