The advent of Artificial Intelligence has been accompanied by doubts, fears and trepidations from various quarters. The major concern has always been that someday these bots would completely replace humans and would slowly phase out the need for human interactions or human input in resolving the most basic tasks.

It is very important to state that some of these concerns are misplaced as they mostly stem from our natural predisposition to oppose any form of change and our unwillingness to adapt and evolve to a fully automated way of doing things.

Artificial Intelligence in service help desk is one typical instance of how AI is being utilized in our everyday activities. A relatable example is the voice prompt that helps you navigate through resolving issues when you place a call to your cellular network provider.

Chat box for customer service is now a common feature with service help desks and customer ticketing platforms. Chatbox and other auto-bots provide an intuitive way of acknowledging, processing and responding to customer queries once received. Depending on the level of programming and the complexity of the AI in use, different challenges or benefits may apply.

Pros:

• An automated service desk helps to create a perception of reactiveness in your customer support processes. Queries can be automatically acknowledged and attended to immediately they are received.
• The use of AI ensures that customer queries can be attended to 24/7. This drastically reduces the waiting period and helps optimize staff cost reduction.
• Repetitive or reoccurring queries and other mundane tasks once automated, can help to allow support staff refocus their energy to more productive activities thereby increasing overall productivity.
• Depending on the programming complexity, an AI bot can help in resolving challenges by leveraging on previous knowledge of similar issues from an existing archive.

Bottle Necks:

• Customers are yet to fully warm up to the idea of having automated bots attend to their queries. Bots tend to take-away the human aspect of customer relationship.
• Poorly programmed bots may end up causing unpleasant reviews from customers and end users as unsatisfactory results may be obtained from queries submitted.
• Some instances require smart judgment calls to be made on the spot. Most AI powered service desks still lacks the ability to make such decisions. At such points, human intervention is still required.
• The cost of maintaining and constantly updating an automated service desk system may become overwhelming for small or medium scale businesses over time, as it requires individuals with unique skill sets to keep the system relevant.

Finding the Balance:

Automated help desks are gradually proving to be indispensable. Regardless of the challenges they might currently pose, the traditional service desk system is not sustainable for a constantly evolving or growing service provider.

By utilizing AI, efficiency can be improved across the board by automatically handling mundane or basic queries and freeing up resources for purposes that are more productive.

In addition, a well-built AI service desk has the capability of seamlessly transferring a customer inquiry being handled by the automated system to an actual support agent when the questions get too complex for it to process or when similar instances cannot be found from its archive.

Lastly, different companies require different levels of automation depending on the complexity of their processes. As a result, the need and effectiveness of a fully automated AI help-desk system solely depend on the requirements of the enterprise and how well programmed the system it.

Abdulazeez Yusuf