Your opportunity: To extend automation and self service to the call center.

Every service desk has a voice. And integrating your phone system with your service desk will make yours sound sweeter and help unbury your service desk. Here’s how:

Phone integration and call deflection can do everything an agent can.

For example, a user calling to reset a password can be identified and authenticated via an API and talked through the reset—with alerts sent to that individual and their supervisor for security purposes.

Important information can be delivered automatically.

Telephony integration enables the nature of a call to be identified and relevant information sent to users and agents from your knowledge base.

Enables proactive problem management.

For example, if a router goes down, telephony integration can be used to answer the flood of callers, explain the problem, generate an incident, and notify users when the issue is resolved.

Supports higher activity while reducing costs and raising service levels.

Phone integration and call deflection lower the cost of service requests— even as calls rise in number—allowing service desk managers to focus on resolving more complex issues.

First Steps and Milestones: Mapping the Route

As with a service catalog, Ivanti recommends that you regard phone integration as a work in progress—it just isn’t “set it and forget it.” So again, stage it out—based on these critical first steps:

Analyze your current situation. Look at your metrics and survey your agents to get data about customer calls, frequency of issues, etc. It will be vital to optimizing your IVR system’s configuration.

Design your solution from the caller’s perspective. Rank callers’ top issues, cluster similar ones together, and represent them in the first menus of your phone system to ensure the shortest path to resolution.

Keep navigation simple. Don’t overwhelm users. Limit the number of decision levels and menu options, use clear and concise language for prompts, and enable users to get back to the main menu easily.

Start your engines. Execute with the automation engine driving the voice-driven workflow.

Keep measuring and optimizing! Once you’re rolling, keep an eye on your metrics, identify issues, find their causes, and address them. Users’ needs change—and it’s vital to keep up with them.

Arriving at the Benefits

Properly configured, phone integration can handle everything an agent can—from password resets to service outages. So, when incidents are solved without agents answering the calls, huge benefits accrue, including:

Big cost savings.

Automating routine issues such as password resets and software updates reduces cost-per-agent pricing when the number of assigned team members is adjusted accordingly.

Higher customer satisfaction and measurability to SLAs.

Users don’t wait for a response and selfsolve issues quickly—helping service desks meet SLA answer times and issue resolution speeds.

More productive and satisfied users.

Phone integration and call deflection can enable users to get back to work faster than if they attempt to resolve issues through the service desk.

Higher efficiency, less agent turnover.

Telephony integration reduces the stress and boredom of having to handle multiple issues with common causes—enabling agents to devote more time to more challenging issues.

Time savings.

Phone integration can provide tips that prepare callers for what information will be needed by an agent—rather than having to search for it when the agent handles the call.

Ivanti: Your inside track to service desk automation

As we said, however great a job you’re doing, it’s unlikely that you’ll be rewarded with enough budget to unbury your service desk. But the avenues we’ve just explored for unburying it by making better use of existing resources have been proven by Ivanti across scores of service desks. And we’d like to share more with you about how Automation, Self Service, and Telephony Integration—along with other proven methods—will enable you to:

  • Turn the consumerization of IT services to your advantage
  • Create strategies for workflow automation that cut your backlog of tickets, increase first-call resolution, and boost user satisfaction.
  • Determine where to start and the steps to take when setting automation goals, applying tools, and designing workflows
  • Develop, refine, and improve help desk services that ensure your role as strategic service provider to your company

Can AI-powered ESM help organizations maximize their IT operations to deliver better digital employee experiences? Read our latest report: AITSM: How AI is redefining IT service desk automation

Check out our other posts in this series: