Customers expect the company to take care of their issues and while some companies see this as a great burden, others see it as an opportunity to meet and exceed customer expectations. Our experience with customer and support indicates that there are different trends emerge and keep trending and being in tune with these helps companies to anticipate these trends and react accordingly.
The fluid lines of division between online and brick-and-mortar retail makes the business more competitive differentiated by customer support, convenience and personalization. Despite all trends customer service will depend to a large extent on the people aspect- the customer service representative.
Digital transformation is a topic that will be a key area of focus for the technology function in 2018 and is expected to dominate business strategy. Against this background CIOs would need to act as strategic partners. Needless to say, AI and IoT will be important areas for CIOs to expand their technology horizons into and think of committing to new operating models that add value. Another new area that we see gaining interest would be blockchain, more at a watchful level while quantum computing will also be of interest. Companies will look to leverage new technologies and developing capabilities in these areas that will help them stay ahead of changing customer demands and market scenarios.
Alongside these CIOs will need to tackle challenges as a result of new technology platforms, mainly cloud platforms, and the communication demand from customers. CIOs will find greater benefit if they leverage innovation ecosystems and technologies to support major shifts in their business.
Service desk Vis-à-vis Business and Tech Goals
Businesses are increasingly impacted by technology in profound ways leading to a new wave of business process automation and the same impact can be expected in service desks in 2018. Artificial Intelligence will have an important role in transforming the end-user self-service capabilities of the IT service desk, through chatbots and virtual digital assistants.
The emergence of Machine-learning (ML) technology will help data sets to be integrated. By making this accessible to service desk staff, the business can achieve more in-depth issue diagnosis and better-informed problem-management processes. ML will also help by aggregating, reconciling and correlating distributed data to put together the big picture in the context of the user and the service desk agent. Enhanced ITSM platforms will provide simpler and more efficient interfaces that support the complexities of enterprises and diverse business environments.
The use of cloud services will see an increasing number of fulfillment and IT support teams will be outside the organization for which managing the external interfaces, SLA compliance and user issues will become a key area of focus for service desks. We expect 2018 to be an exciting year for IT service desk functions, with technological advancements and industry trends enabling the rise of the IT service desk from a supporting function to an integral part of business operations.
Wolken Service Desk now integrates AI into its framework – it is called Wolken AI. The integration helps prioritize incidents and AI handles upto 80% of the level 1 issues. This lessens the agents’ workload since only the more complicated issues that need human intervention are taken up by the agents.
