Careful choice of intelligent and right-sized solutions can overcome the hurdles organisations face in modernising their IT Service and Operations Management.
This is according to Nirmal Krishnamoorthy, product marketer for Freshservice, who was addressing a webinar on Intelligent Service Management.
Krishnamoorthy said: “The past 18 months have accelerated the pace of digital transformation, and it is now front and centre of every organisation’s priorities. Technology has become the differentiator. If you aren’t digitising your products and services, you are losing to the competition.”
He noted that market changes are being driven by AI and automation, a need for unified solutions and the need to improve employee experience.
“Customers are expecting efficiency and speed like never before. Hyperautomation, Agile and DevOps are changing the way organisations operate. At the same time, businesses are moving away from siloed solutions and are looking for the unification of service management pillars. Today’s workforce wants instant gratification, and to be able to get their job done, regardless of channels or time of day. Employees today expect tools to be modern, intelligent, collaborative and consumer grade. Almost 77% of good employees will look for a better job if their organisation’s tools don’t enable them to do their jobs efficiently,” he said.
Against that backdrop, 80% of managers say modernisation is either critical or very important for IT Service Management. 9 out of 10 expect service enquiry volumes to increase by over 20% in the next 12 months; and for 23%, over 50% of daily requests fall into labour intensive or inefficient categories. 70% of IT managers say AI will be critical in the modernisation of ITSM to address this growing volume and reduce the amount of time agents spend on labour intensive requests, he said.
“The top focus areas for AI include chatbots as virtual agents, and IT services and helpdesk resolution. If you have a virtual agent, you don’t have to wait for office hours to address service requests, and you can refocus agents from labour intensive tasks, to address more important issues that are critical for the business,” he said.
Krishnamoorthy said: “AI has consistently surpassed IT’s expectations across multiple areas, including improved workflow automation, increased end-user productivity, reduced IT staff workload, reduced downtime, and reduced MTTR. However, the challenges in taking AI mainstream include organisations’ concerns around speed of implementation, training of bots, integration with third party systems and the overall cost of implementation.”
A poll of webinar participants aligned with this, with 33% saying what holds them back from implementing AI in ITSM is that AI is expensive, a further 33% saying implementation is complex, and 33% saying a lack of skilled professionals stood in their way.
Krishnamoorthy said he was not surprised by the findings. “What’s important is how you go about choosing solutions. A right-sized and intelligent solution is important, with pre-trained bots that add value from day one. This is also why having a partner-like engagement model is important, so that the organisation’s pain points, challenges and necessary technology stack are identified before implementing a solution. A smart solution and low code, no code platform overcome the challenges of a lack of skills within the organisation,” he said.
“Implementing a ‘behemoth’ solution is lengthy and resource intensive, and organisations may find they do not use all the features they have paid for; while taking a ‘band aid’ approach results in a poor experience and organisations have to replace them in a year or two. Gartner finds that by 2023, organisations will overspend by $750 million on unused features of IT software. It is very critical that the dollars you invest in a technology solution that actually produces results,” Krishnamoorthy said.
“Organisations need a right-sized solution somewhere between the ‘behemoth’ and the ‘band aid’, which is intelligent, allows them to scale, and offers fast time to value. Right-sized solutions allow organisations to start small, and later scale up and expand the features they use. This is where we think Freshservice is a right sized ITSM solution; it is intuitive, intelligent, extensible and offers a ‘partner-like’ engagement model,” he said.
“When you choose the Freshservice right-sized solution with AI, you are able to reduce costs, and improve resolution times, agent productivity and employee satisfaction.
“What it means for the business is a 6% increase in end-user productivity, a 68% improvement in operational efficiency and a 308% ROI realised in less than three months,” Krishnamoorthy said.
Freshservice is available as a free 21-day trial to allow SMEs to explore the features and functionality, he noted. In larger organisations, a Freshservice onboarding team will assess the challenges and requirements before making recommendations on an implementation.
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