Reimagining the IT help desk experience for “silent sufferers” with AI
Workplaces can benefit from AI when employees who struggle with technology issues hesitate to seek help. With its rise, AI has established itself as a transformative trend. AI can enhance productivity and efficiency while safeguarding against operational downtime and can proactively identify and resolve IT issues, benefiting employees who might not seek help and improving their overall experience.
These “silent sufferers” could be putting up with malfunctions and connectivity issues but are reluctant to ask for support. Instead, they might try to fix problems themselves, which could lead to further complications, either immediately or later, especially if they exacerbate the original problem. Even worse, they might keep ignoring the issues entirely. If that happens, the problems they were tolerating — most of which IT could have resolved — will undoubtedly lead to those silent sufferers being far less productive and unhappy at work.
So, how can IT support those silent sufferers? First, they need understand why these end users are remaining silent. Often silent sufferers don’t report an issue to IT because they don’t want to have further productivity impact while IT is troubleshooting the issue or go through the 20 questions the IT team ask when they don’t have visibility to see the issue. Others might have misguided intentions, such as not causing a fuss or drawing attention, or they may think they can handle the issues themselves. Whatever their reasons, their silence can cost businesses significant time and resources.
From a technology point of view, IT departments need to gather data to identify who these employees are and what issues they are having. Armed with this information, IT teams gain a complete view of their IT estate and then can apply AI to realize efficiencies.
Indeed, advances in AI are changing how employees interact with the IT help desk. AI technology can enhance support for silent sufferers, IT staff, and the organization as a whole in three ways.
VP of Solutions Engineering at Lakeside Software.
Proactive and predictive issue identification and resolution
A common frustration in IT is not knowing what impact any changes made might have. AI can process large datasets to identify correlations and predict potential conflicts, preventing many digital disruptions that cost time and money. This capability allows IT teams to address issues proactively.
For example, one organization I work with received two tickets about a slow network. While the IT team started working on these two tickets as isolated issues, AI analyzed the full IT estate to identify any similar issues. AI was able to provide the engineers the broader picture of the magnitude of the impact and revealed that 800 users experienced the same issue but hadn’t reported it to IT. The team used AI to be proactive instead of waiting on employees who may or may not have called the service desk about the issue. AI-driven technology can identify these unreported problems, allowing for a timely resolution that can be rolled out to all affected users.
Think of AI as a tool that quickly highlights anomalies within a tech environment. An AI-based anomaly detection platform continuously scans systems, comparing current and historical data to provide unprecedented visibility. This proactive approach helps prevent less critical issues affecting silent sufferers and large-scale problems that may otherwise escalate to late-night calls to the CIO.
Indeed, for larger issues, like an IT outage, many organizations resort to a reactive approach: waiting for an outage, assembling a war room, and working late into the night often times with a lot of finger pointing to the network team, to the apps team, to the desktop team, to the security team, and so on. To prevent this, organizations should proactively collect essential data in advance. By using AI and ML (machine learning) trained on this IT data, companies can instead swiftly identify and prevent issues, ensuring business continuity.
Empowering all employees, particularly silent sufferers, with automated self-service
Silent sufferers often prefer to solve problems on their own, and with the generational shift in the workforce, this trend is likely to continue. Tech-native generations are have grown up fixing their own issues on their own devices, and they want to do this too on their enterprise devices as well. While changing this mindset might be challenging, you can provide them with automated, tech-based solutions. For example, AI-driven tools can combine real-time device insights with automation, enabling users to resolve recurring issues without needing to approach the help desk. One multinational bank, for instance, automated a solution for a frequently requested recovery key, reducing service desk calls by an estimated 800 per month.
The rise of “self-healing” IT tools means issues can be addressed proactively. Automated testing tools identify and prevent challenges stemming from constantly changing user interfaces, web applications, and other popular platforms and systems. When a problem is detected and the right fix is already known, it can be implemented immediately rather than waiting for users to report it.
This automated resolution approach is ideal for silent sufferers who prefer to avoid IT interactions altogether, as the self-healing tool can resolve issues autonomously without manual intervention. Well-scripted IT solutions can also be rapidly scaled, providing employees immediate assistance, which in turn only helps to lighten the load for already overworked IT teams.
Bridging knowledge gaps
Employees, especially silent sufferers, often spend time searching for IT solutions. They might search online, browse the intranet, or ask colleagues if they can find an answer more quickly than calling the help desk. However, each consumes valuable work time to avoid the help desk and skip the wait for IT support. An AI-driven help desk can dramatically reduce this wait time by providing instant answers to IT agents’ queries. With high-quality data, AI can significantly expand the IT support knowledge base, making it accessible to a broader audience.
Enhancing IT support across the entire organization
By rolling out AI to transform the IT help desk experience, self-service support can be automated, providing better answers quicker and preventing problems from occurring. And that’s something everyone can appreciate. Using AI in help desk management means businesses can streamline operations and improve agent productivity. This allows the IT team to focus on providing high-value support where human expertise is needed and leave less complex issues to AI when it is not.
So, rather than having an IT help desk that might not be as effective for all employees, by implementing a smart AI solution to work alongside the IT team, silent sufferers could become happier and more engaged employees.
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Workplaces can benefit from AI when employees who struggle with technology issues hesitate to seek help. With its rise, AI has established itself as a transformative trend. AI can enhance productivity and efficiency while safeguarding against operational downtime and can proactively identify and resolve IT issues, benefiting employees who might…
