How to Implement Elite ITSM in Your Organization

Last week we looked at three reasons why call deflection is vital for your customer support efforts. While it may not always be correct to think of your employees as customers, when it comes to internal support and ITSM, it’s reasonable to draw a parallel between your customer support organization and your internal support system. The “consumerization of IT” as it’s often referred to, is a logical endpoint for ITSM considering the technology-driven consumer market that an organization’s employees are all a part of in their personal lives.

When someone forgets their Twitter password or realizes they mistakenly ordered the wrong size of a product from Amazon, they can rectify the error in seconds, on their own. Twitter automatically sends them a password reset email, Amazon offers a chatbot or invites them to adjust their order. This is the sort of streamlined self-service support consumers expect and, more importantly, want. That desire carries into the workplace where employees expect the same technology-supported, seamless self-service support they get as consumers. At work, they’re even closer to the silos of information containing their answers, so it makes no sense that those answers should be harder to come by. Likewise, the help desk shouldn’t be wasting valuable time and resources manually resetting passwords — they need better ticket deflection.

However, many ITSM organizations do struggle to deliver those answers efficiently and to provide self-service options for employees. That’s where intelligent solutions platforms like Attivio come into play. Take a look at the two principal challenges facing ITSM organizations today and how Attivio resolves them:

Problem: Content is locked away in disparate silos

Solutions to frequent internal inquiries may reside in traditional knowledge bases like SharePoint or other traditional knowledge bases, but they may also be spread around in numerous other sources. Everyday support agents may have developed solutions via email or in chats that haven’t reached the common information hub. Engineers working on building and maintaining internal apps may have another answer in a system like Jira, and so on and so forth. Different teams deal with different FAQs, and different teams may even have different answers to the same question. When support techs look for answers, they spend too much time combing through multiple sources of content to find the right answer. When employees do it themselves, it’s typically a non-starter.

Solution: Content unification

Attivio indexes and analyzes all relevant sources of enterprise data and content across silos — from knowledge bases, Google docs, cloud services, ticketing systems, email, Slack, and more, regardless of format or structure. This minimizes the time it takes support reps to find the best answer for any inquiry and makes it even easier for your employees to serve themselves, thereby freeing up ITSM for more important or complex tasks. Attivio even integrates behavioral data about how the individual user has sought and responded to information in the past, so that experience is personalized and streamlined.

Problem: Inability to offer self-service systems that work

Many organizations have attempted to implement self-service options for employees, generally around FAQs, but those systems frequently fail if the request is any more complex than changing a password. Again, lack of unified content is one of the chief culprits here. Weak self-service options lack not only the ability to look across multiple sources of content, but they suffer from their own literal nature. They need things asked a very specific way to meet the constraints of how information is tagged, limiting nuance and failing to account for the literal hundreds of ways employees may ask the same question. It’s foolish to expect employees to enter a self-service portal and frame the same question a half dozen times until they’ve conformed to how the system needs.

Solution: Intelligent insights and answers

Attivio uses AI techniques like machine learning, natural language processing, text analytics, and recommendation models that make querying natural and simple. Even better, these techniques make identifying and delivering optimal results considerably more efficient. Being able to understand the intent of a service query and then instantly tap into the full depth of your information sources allows efficient self-service answers that are relevant, complete, and current. It deflects internal calls allowing IT to focus on the bigger problems and keeps everybody involved in the chain happy.

The bottom line

When assessing whether to make a change to your ITSM, it’s important to remember that all your employees are customers too. They carry their preferences over from their personal lives to the office. Like external support, great ITSM begins with effective internal ticket deflection and seamless self-service. To hear more about this topic, plan to join us on Wednesday the 19th for our webinar, Extreme Call Deflection with Intelligent Search.