Everything your service desk agents do has the end goal of meeting or hopefully exceeding, customers’ expectations. This makes the customer satisfaction (CSAT) score extremely important. However, your agents can only go so far in improving the CSAT score without the needed support of automation.
Automation saves time, allows for quicker authorizations, avoids human error, enhances the rejection process, encourages customers to follow processes, and in the end – makes customers happy.
Here are just three ways your IT service desk can begin using automation to raise your company’s CSAT score:
1. Automatically Triage Your Incoming Incident/Request Tickets
Rather than having your service desk agents manually triage the ticket queue, automate these tickets to go where they need to. Any ticket that you know can’t be dealt with by first-line support can be automated to the required resolving team.
What are the key benefits?
1. 24/7 support: Automation works around the clock, which means that users’ tickets can be routed to the correct resolver team even when your agents are fast asleep. For instance, a customer that uses your self-service portal to log a ticket after the desk has closed doesn’t need to wait for the desk to re-open the next day for their ticket to be moved to the correct queue.
2. Met SLAs: Because you got your ticket to the right team the first time, the ticket is more likely to meet its SLA. It doesn’t sit waiting to be triaged, it doesn’t need to do the rounds to get to the correct team. Instead, it’s looked at by the right people from the get-go.
3. Fewer “chaser†contacts: When a ticket meets SLA, it means that your customer doesn’t have to call the service desk to chase their ticket. Your service desk avoided a call, or an email, to first-line support and now you’ve got one less ticket clogging up your backlog.
This may not sound too impressive when you think of it in terms of a single ticket. But imagine every incident or request that isn’t handled at first-line being automated to the correct resolver team as soon as it’s logged. That’s some serious time-saving.
All this together means your service desk agents have much more time to focus on more critical issues. For example, dealing with fewer tickets and handling fewer calls frees up time to write documentation, work through ticket queues, and increase outbound calls to update customers. Suddenly your IT service desk is moving into the realms of proactive end-user support.
2. Set Up Automated SLA Breach Alerts
In incident and request management, meeting service level agreements (SLAs) is an important key performance indicator (KPI) but, unfortunately for many organizations, this can be a constant struggle.
The longer a ticket stays open outside of its SLA, the more you risk unhappy customers chasing for updates and thus an increased workload on service desk agents. So, instead of having a ticket exceed its SLA, why not create automated alerts when it’s close to breaching to give your teams a chance to get it resolved?
What are the benefits?
1. SLA breaches prevented: When your IT support organization has an automated alert system in place, your tickets are less likely to breach SLA. The alert signals to the right people that a ticket is going to breach so that they can ensure it gets picked up and progressed.
2. A decreased backlog: The more tickets that get picked up inside the SLA, the smaller your backlog becomes. A backlog of tickets creates a vicious cycle of chaser calls or emails to the IT service desk and means your team can’t focus on the new tickets coming in. New tickets then breach SLA because they’ve had no attention and they only get chased when an angry customer calls to find out what’s happening. And thus, the cycle continues.
So, set up alerts to notify the right people when a ticket looks set to breach, to ensure that the correct personnel can resolve the ticket within SLA.
Your IT service desk’s customer satisfaction score will increase when it’s consistently meeting SLAs because there will be quicker fixes (and fewer breaches), and end users won’t be waiting for updates.
If you know that you can’t resolve a ticket within SLA, then reach out to the customer to explain the delay – because the easiest way to gain bad CSAT scores is to leave your customers in the dark.
3. Automate Customer Notifications
Automating customer notifications doesn’t mean bombarding your end users with generic emails about their tickets. All this will achieve is a sense of dissatisfaction because your customers will know that they’re receiving the same automated junk as everyone else. This doesn’t demonstrate that IT cares for its end users, it just makes them think that you don’t have time for them.
So how do you do it? Personalization is key. Just because a notification is automated, doesn’t mean it can’t be made personal to the end user receiving it.
Your service desk will also want to ensure that the notifications that are automated provide value to both, the customer and your IT department. For instance, a good notification will give the customer the information they want, therefore removing the need for them to call the service desk. It’s a win-win situation – one happy customer, one less call.
A great example of this is when a ticket needs further information from the end user before it can be fixed. Your ticket status can be changed to “Awaiting End-User Information†by the service desk agent – and when the state is changed, a notification is automatically sent to the end user to let them know what’s needed.
And here’s where it gets really good. Your customer replies with the information you’ve asked for. Their reply automatically gets logged in the system, directly into their ticket. The ticket then fires itself back to the resolver team it came from and changes its status back to active. As it does so, restarting the SLA.
What are the benefits?
1. Fewer emails: The email inbox is the bane of life for many service desk agents. With automated notifications, your service desk can decrease (and if it gets truly fancy, eliminate) manual emails from the service desk.
2. No wasted time: The customer gets flagged right away (via a personalized notification) that they need to provide more information and the SLA is paused. When the customer replies, their email doesn’t land in an inbox (which for many service desks can be a black hole) but goes directly into their ticket. Their ticket is then automated back to the team that needed the information for them to proceed with the fix. No time has been wasted waiting for agents to open emails and triage tickets back to the resolving team.
3. Win-Win: You’ve personalized the email notification, so your customer feels listened to, and you’ve saved heaps of time for your service desk agents.
This type of automation can take time to perfect but, once your service desk learns what works well for your organization, it can save bags of time and money. It can also remove the monotonous tasks, complete basic admin work, and handle your organization’s workload around the clock.
This article only looks at a handful of automation options. When you really dig into it, automation can improve your processes, alleviate the pressure on your IT service desk and, most importantly, increase your CSAT scores.