Automating Service Desk Ticket Resolution

Most help desks or service desks have an IT Service Management (ITSM) tool that allow them to manage IT requests, incidents, problems, change requests and service level knowledge. When a new request is created, it is generally referred to as a “ticket”. Quickly handling these tickets directly impacts an organization’s costs and revenues, customer retention, and public brand image. 

The costs of IT incidents can be significant, consequences include: 

• Generates high costs to IT departments and organizations
• Impedes employee productivity
• Disrupts business operations

At first glance it may appear that an enterprise’s incident management needs are fully addressed by an IT Service Management tool. But how does an ITSM impact the resolution of incidents? Enterprises aim not just to track and report on incidents, but also resolve them faster, more reliably, and cheaply. As a result, automating service desk ticket resolution could bring many benefits to the organization.  

What are the Benefits of Automating Service Desk Ticket Resolution? 

Automating incident resolution has the potential to reduce expensive manual efforts, errors, and escalations. By promptly identifying service issues and quickly validating, diagnosing, and resolving IT incidents, businesses can drastically reduce costs, improve customer satisfaction; and mitigate other risks associated with infrastructure or service failures. With a growing number of in-house systems, clouds and users to manage IT must investigate the potential of automation.   Automation can help the organization manage increasing numbers of systems and users without adding costly head count. 

For simple incidents, end-to-end automation can accomplish the entire resolution process with no human interaction.  More challenging incidents affecting mission-critical systems can be facilitated by providing automated diagnostic tools, and automation bots that can speed resolution. 

Move to an Automated Service Desk with Readibots 

Readibots automation allows you to get things done quickly and accurately with zero effort.  Here are just a few examples of what Readibots can automate. 

Provisioning

Managing the lifecyle of users is one of the most common tasks in IT. Use Task Bots to guide anyone through the steps. Even integrate with your IGA and extend it.

Emergency Termination

Relying on normal procedures to remove access in emergencies can result in hours, if not days, of vulnerability. Task Bots allow for instant removal of access when needed.

Reporting

Automate reporting on anything your service desk and IT need to manage. Even automate the formatting, reporting and alerting as changes are discovered.

Change Management

Humans make mistakes. Increase your change success rate, by taking human error out of the equation. Train Tasks Bots to faithfully execute changes consistently. 

Cloud Provisioning

Single-tenant, multi-tenant. Single-cloud, multi-cloud. Doesn’t matter. Service agents and IT can respond to incidents consistently across boundaries.

Service Management

No need to give direct access to servers to manage services. Start, stop, and configure them from one place, with zero standing-access and 100% control.

Legal eDiscovery

Take the service desk and IT completely out of the picture when legal needs to conduct eDiscovery. Delegate the pre-made Task Bots of inside and outside counsel. 

Automated Diagnostic Tools

Create powerful automated diagnostic tools with guided contextualization of data to speed up triage, diagnosis and resolution of issues

Readibots provides a library of pre-built automations, building blocks, and connections to 3rd-party systems. Building custom automation should also be easy, Readibots allows non-developer IT service desk staff to quickly build and edit automations. This enablement not only saves IT operations from having to wait on support from an external development team, it’s also a way of retaining and implementing IT experts’ consolidated knowledge. 

Building a Business Case for Automating Service Desk Ticket Resolution

Readibots has recently worked with a large enterprise that has a worldwide footprint to help automate incoming tickets to their Messaging Group.  In order to justify the acquisition of Readibots, the Messaging Group built a business case with real financial analysis.  Their analysis only considers savings to the Messaging Group.  The actual savings from ticket automation to the whole organization would be much larger.  The logic of this business case could easily be adapted to other organizations looking to cut service desk costs and improve customer service. 

The main inputs to this business case are:

1. The average labor cost per hour for the messaging service desk.  The labor cost in this organization was $41.03
2. The average time to resolve a service incident.  The average time in this organization was 0.7 hours
3. The number of service desk incidents received by the messaging group.  The Messaging Group received 1,350 incidents per month.
4. The percentage of service desks incidents that can be automated (incidents like adding users to groups, changing passwords, removing access etc.)  The organization stated that 90% of their incidents could be automated. 
5. The percentage of incidents that have a material effect on the productivity of business users waiting for resolution.  This was estimated at 10%.
6. Opportunity cost of business users waiting for resolution.  This was estimated at $41.03 / hour.

As can be seen, the Messaging Group estimated total annual saving of $672,549.  If automated ticket resolution could be applied to the whole organization, the annual savings would be multi million dollars. 

For more information see the Readibots web site.