How to use AI to supercharge your IT support

The challenges facing remote IT support

Within the world of IT support, as Artus put it, the challenge is “that service desk contact demand is still growing. So, IT departments are facing more and more requests, and they also have additional challenges like labor shortages and an aging workforce. So, it's difficult for them to keep up.”

More complex IT, cybersecurity demands, and the fact that more and more of us are working remotely all also play into this situation, increasing the need for — and pressure on — IT service desk workers.

Little surprise, then, that a recent survey found that 62% of IT professionals report feeling ‘physically and emotionally drained.’ And when you’re overwhelmed and constantly fighting fires, it makes sense that documenting support sessions is deprioritized.

But this documentation gap generates numerous problems. For one thing, it obstructs effective handover and wastes time solving problems that have in effect been solved before. Without a record of past support cases, there's also a lack of transparency in how your team’s time is being used. You’re also going without valuable insights into recurring problems, and the possibility of creating training that’s targeted to plug gaps in knowledge.

In short, you’re working in a kind of vacuum. And without the information that you need, it’s more difficult to share knowledge and provide the highest level of customer support. As Artus put it: “Whenever you have a service case handover — like escalating from level one to level two — if level one doesn't properly document what it did, then the level two agent starts from scratch, and that's more lost time.” And when you have hundreds of support cases, that’s a whole lot of time.

Introducing Session Insights and Session Analytics

Our brand-new AI-powered features respond directly to this context. Made in close collaboration with our customers, Session Insights and Session Analytics are designed with remote IT support teams in mind. They will be particularly helpful, Artus says, for distributed support teams operating across a large tech network.

So, if you’re an IT support manager in a medium to large-sized organization, these new features will reduce the workload of your team while also granting you the insights needed to optimize performance and improve training.

But how do they work?

The first feature, Session Insights (demo video below), automates documentation within support sessions. Eliminating the need to take notes, it will free up your team to focus on what they do best: Provide exceptional support.

The second, Session Analytics (demo video below), gives IT managers access to a dashboard with all past support cases. By studying these cases, they can then see what issues are arising most frequently and, for example, develop tailored training around them.

Some competitors are offering similar products, for example by summarizing voice transcripts, but two things really set our new features apart. The first is the level of granularity offered by Session Insights.

As Artus says: “If you want to escalate something, you need to make sure that every part of the IT expert's toolset, like terminal commands and registry keys, are granularly logged and captured properly. They need to be anonymized where necessary but kept specific where needed.”

And this is exactly what Session Insights delivers — meaning that when an issue is escalated, the team has a much more complete picture of the problem. No more reinventing the wheel. And with its ServiceNow integration, the feature offers even wider functionality.

The second distinguishing feature is the unique dashboard functionality of Session Analytics, which can track total sessions, average duration, and frequent issues to identify trends, optimize resource planning, and develop targeted training. As a bonus point, Artus points to the level of control we offer — permissions and device policies in particular, which are indispensable to larger teams.

The AI Opportunity

As our recent report The AI Opportunity found, more and more companies are now using AI as part of their daily operations. In fact, more than a third of all surveyed decisionmakers are using it every day. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the report also found that IT decision makers were early adopters of AI technologies and lead in terms of usage.

Of the 1,400 decision makers surveyed, 27% agreed that AI is critical for improving business efficiency. And with Session Insights and Session Analytics, we can see a clear payoff. A corporate customer handling 600 monthly support sessions, for example, will cut an average of 75 hours of work every month. At the same time, by increasing visibility of support operations, Session Analytics offers numerous efficiency-boosting features.

One issue also flagged by the report is that over two thirds (69%) of decision makers are concerned about AI security risks around data management. And as Artus points out, security was a key consideration in developing the features.

Crucially, our AI functionality is tenant-specific, so customers will only see their own solutions. At the same time, all data is anonymized. “Additionally,” Artus tells me, “all customers data is secured by state-of-the-art company-specific encryption. Our customers’ data is secured during transit and at rest.” Lastly, none of our AI models — Microsoft Azure OpenAI models — use customer data for training.

Summary