Workplaces can benefit from AI when employees experiencing technology issues are hesitant to seek help. With its rise, AI has established itself as a transformative trend. AI can improve productivity and efficiency, while protecting against operational downtime and can proactively identify and resolve IT issues, benefiting employees who may not seek help and improving their overall experience.
These “silent sufferers” might be putting up with glitches and connectivity issues, but they’re reluctant to ask for help. Instead, they might try to fix the problems themselves, which could lead to further complications, either immediately or later, especially if they exacerbate the original problem. Worse, they might continue to ignore the problems altogether. If that happens, the problems they were tolerating (most of which the IT department could have solved) will undoubtedly make those silent sufferers much less productive and unhappy at work.
So how can IT help those silent users? First, they need to understand why these end users are silent. Often, silent users don’t report an issue to IT because they don’t want productivity to suffer while IT is fixing the problem or they don’t want to have to ask the 20 questions IT asks them when they don’t have visibility to see the problem. Others may have bad intentions, such as not causing a fuss or drawing attention to themselves, or they may think they can fix the issues themselves. Whatever their reasons, their silence can cost businesses a significant amount of time and resources.
From a technology standpoint, IT departments need to collect data to identify who these employees are and what problems they have. With this information, IT teams gain a complete view of their IT infrastructure and can then apply AI to achieve efficiencies.
In fact, advances in artificial intelligence are changing the way employees interact with the IT help desk. AI technology can improve support for silent patients, IT staff, and the organization as a whole in three ways.
Vice President of Solutions Engineering at Lakeside Software.
Proactive and predictive problem identification and resolution
A common frustration in IT is not knowing what impact changes made might have. AI can process large data sets to identify correlations and predict potential conflicts, preventing many digital disruptions that cost time and money. This capability allows IT teams to proactively address issues.
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 entire IT park to identify similar issues. AI was able to provide engineers with a broader picture of the magnitude of the impact and revealed that 800 users experienced the same issue but had not reported it to the IT department. The team used AI to be proactive rather than waiting for employees who may or may not have called the help desk to report the issue. AI-powered technology can identify these unreported issues, allowing for a timely resolution that can be implemented for all affected users.
Think of AI as a tool that quickly highlights anomalies within a technology environment. An AI-powered anomaly detection platform continuously scans systems and compares current data to historical data to provide unprecedented visibility. This proactive approach helps prevent less critical issues that affect silent sufferers and large-scale problems that might otherwise escalate to late-night calls to the CIO.
In fact, for larger issues, such as an IT service outage, many organizations turn to a reactive approach: wait for an outage to happen, assemble an operations room, and work late into the night, often with lots of finger-pointing against the network team, application team, desktop team, security team, and so on. To prevent this, organizations need to proactively collect essential data in advance. By using AI and ML (machine learning) trained on this IT data, businesses can quickly identify and prevent issues, ensuring business continuity.
Empowering all employees, especially silent patients, with automated self-service
People who suffer in silence often prefer to solve problems themselves, and with the generational shift in the workforce, this trend is likely to continue. Tech-native generations have grown up fixing their own problems on their own devices, and they want to do so on their business devices as well. While changing this mindset can be challenging, it can provide them with automated, technology-based solutions. For example, AI-powered tools can combine real-time device information with automation, allowing users to resolve recurring issues without needing to approach the help desk. One multinational bank, for example, automated a solution for a frequently requested recovery key, reducing help desk calls by about 800 per month.
The rise of “self-healing” IT tools means that problems can be addressed proactively. Automated testing tools identify and prevent challenges that arise from user interfaces, web applications, and other popular platforms and systems that are constantly changing. When a problem is detected and the correct solution is already known, it can be implemented immediately rather than waiting for users to report it.
This automated resolution approach is ideal for those who suffer from issues silently and prefer to avoid interactions with the IT department altogether, as the self-healing tool can autonomously resolve issues without manual intervention. Well-designed IT solutions can also be scaled quickly, providing employees with immediate assistance, which in turn only helps to lighten the load on already overworked IT teams.
Bridging knowledge gaps
Employees, especially those who experience problems silently, often spend time searching for IT solutions. They may search the Internet, browse the intranet, or ask colleagues if they can find an answer more quickly than by calling the help desk. However, each of these methods consumes valuable work time to bypass the help desk and skip the wait for IT support. An AI-powered help desk can dramatically reduce this wait time by providing instant answers to IT agent queries. With high-quality data, AI can significantly expand the IT support knowledge base, making it accessible to a wider audience.
Improving IT support across the organization
By deploying AI to transform the IT help desk experience, self-service support can be automated, enabling better answers to be delivered faster and preventing issues from arising. 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 isn’t.
So, instead of having an IT helpdesk that might not be as effective for all employees, by implementing an intelligent AI solution to work alongside the IT team, those who are silently suffering could become happier, more engaged employees.
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