Service desk as a concept has evolved over time and has embraced technological advancements to address the needs of the modern workforce. In today’s world, with employees having the flexibility to work from anywhere, anytime, the IT service desk has gradually emerged as a crucial enabler in implementing an effective strategy for digital workplace transformations. It now becomes imperative to transition from a reactive, manual intervention-based service model to an intuitive, digitally enabled model to reprioritize the service desk objectives and support employees effectively and efficiently to ensure business continuity and their productivity irrespective of the location, devices, or channels.

Considering the millennial workforce’s affinity for personal digital touch points with the likes of Amazon and Uber, organizations are now envisioning their service desks to offer consumer-like experiences to their employees, leveraging smart technologies such as AI, analytics, and automation. Research indicates that millennials are more open to using a variety of emerging means to get the IT support they need. Instant messaging (71%), video chat (54%), and the use of mobile apps to resolve IT issues (54%) are most popular.

To achieve the envisioned service desk, the transactional first level IT support in the workplace will moderately be substituted by zero-touch service desk - an intelligent, automated approach to resolving trouble tickets without any active involvement of the service desk agents. It promotes self-healing, knowledge base portals, and self-service actions routing the service agents’ skills towards high priority issues. This transformation of the traditional service management was imminent as over-burdened service desk agents were resolving improperly assigned incident, problem, and request tickets in an untimely manner. Ineffective resolutions resulted in negative employee experiences and reduced productivity levels. The pandemic acted as a catalyst in driving this further due to the surge in the ticket volumes accounting for the remote working employees.  Challenges such as limited visibility of service experience levels, lack of intelligence in the system, emerging trend of BYOD, and aggravated pressure on the agents, compelled organizations to reduce costs and enhance productivity while optimizing the service desks.

Hence, there is a need for organizations to reimagine and build an effective support system which is all- predictive, proactive, and pre-emptive. The future-ready service desk must have a foundation of intelligent employee-centric integrations that will lead to the evolution of the service desk to an enterprise desk that can sense employee sentiments, seek feedback, and pre-empt issues. 

Persona-driven approach

The service desk of the future will not adopt a one-size fits all model but will incorporate persona-driven methodology that will help in creating user profiles of the employees basis the role, devices, workload, etc. The desk will then use these profiles to offer hyper-personalized resolutions aligned to the business, by identifying the devices and ascertaining the criticality of the issues as per the profile.

Experience management

The service desk will evolve into experience desks that will map the employee journey to identify “moments of truth” in the service levels. The employee’s experiences will be quantified with data to understand their sentiments and ensure that their expectations are being met. The outcome and value-based service desk with an XLA based approach will continuously move towards improvement to build customized knowledgebase by taking feedbacks for all digital touchpoints in the journey.

Automation integration

•        Leaner service desk

Evolution of the service desk with minimal human intervention will happen with zero-touch and automation capabilities. This will help in reducing the volume of service desk tickets and simplifying the process of ticket creation and resolution with automated ticket routing, to the appropriate agent skilled for that issue and intelligent swarming for end-to-end agent accountability for that ticket. The service desk is also becoming leaner with shift-left initiatives, wherein the level 1 tickets will be shifted to self-help and the other requests will be resolved through automation.

•        Self-heal

The IT teams are maturing, wherein they now look at unreported issues or the ones with the potential to disrupt the employee’s work continuity, rather than just addressing the raised tickets.  The changing workforces are placing emphasis on having proactive maintenance to address issues before problems arise, and the modern service desk must have the capability to meet these demands. Hence, the network and the device performance are proactively measured and monitored consistently to identify, diagnose, and remediate anomalies and issues using self-healing AI-driven automated capabilities. This approach prevents the issues from happening in the first place, reducing the tickets and improving employee productivity.

•        Self-help

It is observed that millennials attempt to fix workplace issues themselves as they do in their personal lives. According to Gartner, “end users require an IT self-service portal where knowledge is readily available, where passwords are easy to reset, and that is very intuitive to use”. Hence, an effective portal, accessible from multiple channels with a cognitive virtual assistant will allow the employees to find the answers easily around how-to requests, technical support, IT equipment ordering, and password reset requests. Resolving the latter issue with self-service information on automated password reset tools, for example, can save organizations the costs of supporting this type of request via more expensive channels. The employees should also be able to access service desk support from any device, anytime, anywhere.

Analytical metrics

The real-time data retrieval for conducting analysis of the data can help the agents in monitoring the employees’ ecosystem and identify potential issues to proactively resolve them in an automated manner. The analytics and reporting will capture the historical data and the feedback data which can be beneficial in visualizing a trend to create a hyper-personalized strategy.

Service desk has come a long way in terms of transformation. There is no doubt that the service desk of 2030 will look completely different from what it looks like today. For an evolved service desk equipped with advanced capabilities and focused on employee experience, organizations will have to aggressively invest in its transformation to enhance productivity and satisfaction levels.

To envision these digital workplace transformations with the futuristic service desk, Wipro offers a user-enablement platform, myUnihub which is integrated with cognitive virtual assistants and real-time digital experience monitoring capabilities and stages consumerized experience enabled through harmonized multichannel interfaces supported by smart automation and data insights. With Wipro’s design-led process backed by data accelerators, organizations can experience agility and flexibility in their service model while enabling next-gen employee experiences. 

Riya Bansal

Product and Practice Development Manager, Digital Workplace Services, iCORE–CIS, Wipro

Riya has work experience in Communication Networks, Business Development, Product Marketing and Management. Currently she is developing and managing digital workplace offerings that help Wipro’s clients in enhancing the experiences and productivity of their modern workforce.  

Lalit Mehar

Presales Consultant, Digital Workplace Services, iCORE-CIS Wipro

Lalit has work experience of solution designing in the field of service desk and device management. Currently he is designing solution for clients in end user services offering. He brings in a cross functional business acumen and has strong interest in new-age technologies.