Effective self-service portals require positive user experience, quick solutions

More IT teams are embracing self-service portals and tools in lieu of a fully staffed IT help desk. But are these self-service investments actually cutting ticket volume, or just adding to employees’ irritation?

Help desk teams can operate on the leaner side when it comes to budget and resources, often at the cost of longer response times. Atomicwork CEO Vijay Rayapati, told IT Brew that automating aspects of the help desk can reduce ticket volume reaching IT professionals, while potentially introducing more user irritation.

No employee likes dealing with automated menus and chatbots, in other words. But deciding whether to deploy self-service IT help (and in what context) is often a nuanced issue, especially when it involves AI integration.

“On one side, business is using AI to reduce work, but on the other side, business is also buying more technology, that means [AI] creates more work,” Rayapati said.

With automation, he added, “There are still [ticket] escalations, but it’s not like there are 10 escalations in a day. There are probably two, three escalations in a day.”

Still not quite human. Ramy Rahman, senior solutions engineer at ArmorCode, told IT Brew that users can quickly become frustrated with AI interactions, especially if they’re unsure if the tool will actually understand and solve their issue.

That aside, AI could add “scale and quickness” to help desk interactions, Rahman said, especially issues “that people normally don’t need…to talk to a human about.”

Kelly Candler, an executive business leader at IT services and consulting company DXC Technology, told IT Brew that AI-powered self-service is emerging as part of the IT help desk’s traditional options.

The trick to successfully integrating AI, Candler added, is to make agents as human-like as possible, as well as responsive—even if the initial response is that the agent needs a little time to retrieve information: “It’s that balance, that customer service approach.”

When to deploy. Experts like Sankha Nagchoudhury, SVP of digital technology intelligent operations at ServiceNow, agreed that self-service capabilities at the help desk are “very much” cutting down on ticket volume.

There is still some non-automated help desk support responsibilities, Nagchoudhury added, because “some people want to talk to humans always, or there are executives who need support immediately…so that’s where humans come in.”

For IT pros considering whether to automate at least some aspects of their organization’s help desk, Nagchoudhury said that it’s critical to evaluate how and what to deploy, starting with “easier” interactions such as installing new software.

Alex McLeod, CTO and co-founder at Serval, an AI-powered ITSM and help desk platform, echoed that a self-service support portal could help with functions such as FAQs and software access. These portals could also help triage users’ issues, such as slow devices or being locked out of accounts.

While McLeod said that it’s valuable to have a portal that looks like a website where employees can input self-service requests, chatting with an AI agent might end up being the best way to support employees through their technical issues.

“I shouldn’t have to go to different locations to get help for different types of issues, I should be able to go to one place, one agent…in a channel that I am comfortable with,” McLeod said.