It can often feel like chaos working in the service desk. The uncontrollable proliferation of endpoints that need to be always connected from anywhere. Users’ expectations for an “always-on” and instant service. The rise in ticket requests. To deal with this level of disruptive chaos, organizations are looking to augment the endpoint experience and reduce the pressure on the IT team using service desk automation.
To help you form a strong business case for service desk automation, we’ve compiled a list of the top 5 reasons why you need to invest in automation for your service desk now.
Increase in demand
ServiceNow’s State of Work Survey shows us that, for service desk teams, demand volume is increasing by 20% year on year. But also, that 50% of businesses are already lagging behind, while most IT budgets only increase by 5% each year.
According to a June 2019 Gartner report, the 2019 Strategic Roadmap for IT Operations Monitoring, 32% of respondents said that the biggest consumer of their staff resources was troubleshooting performance and availability problems.
Lack of available skilled staff
There’s a general lack of capable resourcing when businesses cannot find the right people with the skills they need. Because endpoint technology is increasing in volume and complexity, typical IT Operations teams can spend much of their time firefighting instead of building long-term solutions.
There’s a human cost too. Not only do businesses find it difficult to find the right people, according to an Axios Systems ITSM trends whitepaper, IT Operation teams are under increased pressure, especially in the service desk operation. The indications are that these pressures will continue increasing.
Increasing endpoint complexity
Endpoints have more agents than ever competing for finite resources, often overlapping and causing conflict on the endpoint. This conflict results in reduced performance and reliability and an increase in ITSM incidents that further intensifies service teams’ workload.
Identifying the problem is only the first step. With this increase in the number of agents and associated problems, understanding the root cause of a problem leads to increased resolution times and a corresponding fall in customer satisfaction.
Decreasing staff motivation
Demands on the Service Desk and IT are often overlooked and misunderstood, and with increasing workloads, this is becoming more significant. Teams will feel overworked and underappreciated when it’s impossible for them to succeed. According to the ITSM Tools The Future of ITSM – Survey Results 2019:
- 72% of ITSM staff feel undervalued
- 55% believe working in IT is affecting their wellbeing
- 84% believe that this their work is going to get harder.
Reduced employee experience
Because tooling and technology are often overlooked in employee engagement studies, it’s one of the primary factors in Forrester’s The Employee Experience Playbook For 2019 report.
The impact of having the wrong tools is:
- Reduced employee experience, by not having the technology and resources to complete work
- Getting inaccurate and out of date information, and being unable to make immediate changes or measure their effect
- Being unable to complete a job which is frustrating for both users and technicians.
Conclusion
When IT can get more done and finish a job in a single thought process, they can fix more complex problems and create further automation. These kinds of improvements will enable junior teams to grow their skills and develop their confidence. The result will be happier staff and faster IT.
Ultimately, these must be the goals for Service Desk automation.
