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As the front door to the wider IT ecosystem, service desks put people and projects on the right path. Streamlining the employee and customer experience with proactive and predictive solutions is the way forward – and AI has a central role to play.
We asked Datacom’s General Manager of CX and Service Desk Propositions, Jai Moran, to share some insights into how service desks are changing, why organisations need to keep pace, how automation and more empathetic and human experiences can go hand-in-hand, and what “zero touch” is and why it matters.
Jai Moran: Traditional service desks were reactive and operated with a ‘break-fix’ mentality. No real curation of the customer experience existed. As the frontline for any IT queries, people called, you identified an issue, you looked into what you could do to help resolve it and escalated the problem to someone who could resolve it if you couldn’t. It was very much a one-size-fits-all approach with a focus on technology rather than customer experience.
We’ve shifted to a more experience-focused view. Our customers might be providing critical services, for example in the medical industry. They can't be impeded by technology. It's about understanding that customer experience from their perspective and making sure we're focused and curating services for that.
Datacom has a long history of running contact centres, which represent businesses to our clients’ customers. We’ve learnt a lot from that experience and apply it to the service desk — we see synergies and parallels between the two.
By leveraging artificial intelligence (AI), we are shifting from a reactive, one-size-fits-all model to one that is proactive and predictive.
A good example is automating an onboarding process. When someone joins an organisation, tasks like provisioning a laptop and making sure the account has relevant access, and the laptop has relevant software should happen seamlessly. The new team member shouldn’t even realise that an IT action had needed to be fulfilled.
We can also use these modern tools to detect anomalies on end-user devices and fix them, all before the person was even aware of an issue.
JM: Four important factors signal opportunity for modernising the service desk:
The maturity of AI technology is a big one. You can sense the excitement throughout the business that this wave is coming, and people are scaling up. There’s a push internally by our business and externally by our customers. People want to know what value they can get out of AI and how it can help them get these outcomes for their business.
Security and compliance requirements are becoming more critical. We know about huge data breaches, which can really tear down an organisation's image. Where we can automate certain workflows, we can ensure security and compliance is key, because it tends to be that human factor that’s really the weak point in security. Automation can reduce that risk of human error.
Generational workforce changes is another aspect that comes through. Younger generations are more comfortable and familiar with using newer technology tools and expect things to be streamlined when getting things done.
Digital transformation is an important factor. The hybrid work environments that came out of COVID have been another big driver.
JM: For many managed service providers, not taking advantage of technology innovations when other organisations are, means lost revenue. It also means that businesses will not be able to serve their customers in the way they deserve to be served. If we're not showing customers innovation, then they'll go to a partner that is.
Gone are the days where it's suitable to wait five days to get a laptop provisioned. If someone puts in a request, it's because they needed it yesterday. Automating systems can make this happen.
Another big thing that's front of mind is employee retention. If we're not taking advantage of the latest and greatest in tech, then why would anyone want to work with us?
JM: Different generations have different needs. Younger people don't necessarily want or need to speak to a human when engaging with the service desk. They have enough technical know-how to understand how key things work. They need an outcome fulfilled and they want it done as quickly as possible. In this case, putting a human in the middle of that workflow can be detrimental to their experience.
For example, if they want to add a printer, they’re familiar with the tech and know what the printer name is. All they need is a button that says, ‘install printer’. They don't want to have to speak to someone. You can see how that would fragment this customer’s journey. So, in this situation, we would establish a self-service portal or have an AI-powered bot that would fulfil that request end-to-end.
Individuals from an older generation might prefer speaking with a person directly, as they may be less familiar with certain digital tools, or where to begin. Their strengths may lie in other areas other than technology, so personalised support can be especially helpful. Where we identify these knowledge gaps, it's important to have a human come in with empathy: ‘I'm going to walk you through every step until we fulfil what you need. If you're unsure at any point, I'm here to help’.
Other people might sit in the middle of these generations and know enough to get started but need to speak to someone if things don’t go smoothly.
JM: AI can support customer profiling and customer journey mapping. It’s helping us understand different types of customers and building roles around what they ultimately need from technology. Then, we can map out how they operate and what an optimal customer journey looks like for them in the future.
We can also identify any sore points in the journey and how to fix them. In some cases, it may be through automation and in others, it may be including a human in the experience — it's about curating to the specific customer profile.
JM: Zero touch is the concept of removing humans completely from the support chain where appropriate. Automating stages of the support workflow significantly reduces costs for customers and frees humans to step in only when necessary.
If we look at what a service desk does and compartmentalise those stages a bit, it's about greeting the person that's calling, identifying and authenticating them, triaging and understanding why they’re calling, documenting the details and attempting to resolve it.
We've been looking at how you can automate each stage, where appropriate. Some businesses don’t want a human involved at any stage. For them we can use generative AI for the greeting that sits at the front and has a conversation with a customer in a natural way. We can also automate identification using services like multi-factor authentication. For example, it’ll send a prompt to your phone for you to confirm who you say you are. We can also use voice biometrics to authenticate you.
Once identity verification is complete, the system captures and transcribes the detailed reason for your call in real-time. A generative AI assistant references its knowledge base throughout the conversation to provide intelligent responses. For instance, when a caller requests a password reset, the transcription system identifies this need and queries the knowledge base, which returns the appropriate verification questions to ask. The AI assistant poses these questions to the caller while automatically documenting all responses. With the necessary information collected and verified, the bot can then proceed to execute the password reset request, having gathered all required details through the guided conversation.
The technology can also identify and analyse people’s feelings and attitudes on the call. So, it can detect when someone’s upset or frustrated. It can detect that speaking to a bot right now is not ideal and can divert them to a human. It can even factor in cultural quirks and sarcasm. So, instead of having a human taking every single interaction, it's about the human being ready and available for those difficult conversations.
JM: It’s not about choosing between people or automation. Automated service desk systems can augment the human experience. When stages of the service desk journey are automated, the human on a call is fed relevant information automatically and is then free to focus on the other human in the equation — they don’t need to deviate away from the conversation to look something up.
IT is a great example. We tend to have large, fragmented knowledge bases because they're traditionally curated by different parts of the business. A generative AI overlay can look at all the databases for you and come back with the most relevant article without you needing to search for it. For example, ‘it sounds like you're talking about a password reset for this system. Here's how you do it’.
It's about empowering human agents to use AI to get the right information as quickly as possible to make sure that the downtime is as little as possible for the person calling the service desk. It all comes back to being experience-focused and customer centric.
ITSM platforms like ServiceNow embed low-code workflows, AI and integrations to free humans for high-value interactions.
This hub allows people to drag-and-drop flows and use pre-built connectors to automate approvals, notifications and cross-system updates. They can do this without needing to have any scripting or programming background.
Here, machine-learning models classify, route and resolve incidents. AI agents can triage tickets, draft resolution plans and write post-incident reviews.
With these requests, workflows attached to catalogue items can orchestrate multi-level approvals, tasks and communications, ensuring every request follows the same path and audit trail.
Chatbots deflect routine issues, like password resets or software installs, and accelerate fixes and lift customer satisfaction while freeing up agents’ time for complex cases.
All these ITSM tools boost business consistency, speed and cost control:
The results speak for themselves — the modern service desk is innovative, efficient, cost-effective and user-friendly.
