Meet your new friend in IT: how GenAI is streamlining service desks

It’s every employee’s worst nightmare: your computer refuses to cooperate at the exact moment you have to complete an important report or respond to an urgent email.  

And that’s not the worst part – you now have to report the issue to IT service desk.

The prospect of lengthy, jargon-heavy menus to raise a ticket, confusing automated replies and an unspecified wait time fills you with dread.

This is where GenAI agents or bots can make a huge difference. They’re always available to help, they don’t send you complicated forms, and you can get straight to the point when you’re interacting with them.

You can choose to give them a call, or simply type your problem in plain language: “My email won’t sync!” or “Why isn’t my printer working?” The agent will understand what you’re saying without making you jump through hoops.

How we make GenAI your new IT service-desk agent

NTT DATA is reworking the IT service-desk experience from start to end. We’re doing this by combining our expertise in building custom and industry-specific AI agents that enhance the digital experience (DX), and in the integration of leading voice services, with Microsoft’s suite of GenAI capabilities.

We break down the service-desk environment into three layers: first, the users; second, the AI-DX Agents they will engage with; and then the human service-desk agents. Let’s explore what happens in each layer.

1. Making users’ lives easier

Any employee in your organization – from the CEO to the most junior assistant – can contact the IT service desk to raise a ticket through a range of platforms: email, an internal portal, a web chat or an integrated service number they call from their phone.

For multinational organizations, the language barrier is no longer a challenge. They can chat or talk in multiple languages, because the bot can do real-time translation.

And, while the AI-DX Agent is attending to an issue, it can give real-time status updates – “Just a moment, your issue is being escalated” or “We’re on it!” – to the employee, so they’re never left guessing while their urgent project deadline looms.

Along the way, employees can also learn how to handle simple IT issues independently if tutorials and tips are integrated into the  AI-DX Agent’s responses.

2. What the AI-DX Agent brings to the party

Copilot for Microsoft 365 is Microsoft’s powerful GenAI tool for smart workplace collaboration and communication across the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Microsoft has extended Copilot capabilities to its platforms Microsoft Copilot Studio and Microsoft Power Platform, allowing us to help build custom bots that work seamlessly with your choice of Microsoft platform like Dynamics 365 Contact Center or the Queues app in Microsoft Teams.

Dynamics 365 Contact Center is a fully fledged customer service platform with extensive features, while the Queues app is a Teams-native specialized tool for call management.

Our AI-DX Agent can handle queries on any of the channels available to your employees. Instead of immediately forwarding every query to a human agent, it can automatically respond to frequently asked questions by sourcing answers from your organization’s knowledge base.

This means your employees get instant replies to their questions. They might ask, “How do I book a meeting room?” or “How do I download an app?” The AI-DX Agent will check the knowledge base and give them a set of easy-to-follow instructions in conversational format – it won’t just copy and paste vague quotes from a tech manual.

The same goes for the basic user-related tasks that take up time for every organization’s IT service desk, such as resetting passwords and PINs. The AI-DX Agent can act on these requests instantly without involving a human agent.

• ALSO READ → How Copilot for Microsoft 365 saved me 6.5 hours in five days

3. Human agents can now focus on priorities

If an employee has a more serious problem or need that should be escalated, such as asking for a software license activation, the AI-DX Agent will capture the details and context of the query and forward the information to a human agent.

For a large organization, this might be a central global IT team using Dynamics 365 Contact Center to manage calls. They receive the full context of the request from the AI-DX Agent, so the employee doesn’t have to repeat everything again.

A high-priority call – for example, a report of a cybersecurity breach – or a request from a VIP in your organization might be sent to a priority IT team. A complaint about speakers not working in a meeting room would be routed to a local IT team to initiate repairs.

These IT teams can use any type of queue-management app, including Dynamics 365 Contact Center or the Microsoft Teams Premium Queue app, to handle their incoming call traffic.

The power of a partnership

Using GenAI in this way to streamline your IT service-desk environment illustrates the power of NTT DATA’s partnership with Microsoft of more than two decades. Microsoft supplies the innovative technology; we customize and deploy it in your organization, train your employees and work with you to review and update your business processes.

Over time, as your employees interact with the IT service-desk agent, we also make sure it learns from its experiences and gets better at understanding your organization’s unique needs and offering more relevant solutions.

We can also analyze the AI-DX Agent’s output to identify IT problems in your organization for which better solutions need to be defined.

Which organization wouldn’t want a workplace where their employees’ IT issues are resolved in the blink of an eye, leaving them feeling empowered and informed, and where the IT service-desk Agent becomes a trusted companion?

It’s time to bring your service desk into the GenAI age.