Find out how omnichannel ITSM can transform the customer experience, help your service desk get more done, AND slash operational costs—at the same time.
Part of our Omnichannel ITSM series.
Boost Quality of Experience
An omnichannel service desk strategy will improve the quality of your service experience by offering IT customers a choice of channels to suit what they need to do.
If their only option is to wait in a call queue, the support experience starts with frustration—because you’re offering a one-size-fits-all experience. You’re not giving customers the choice of which channel suits their current context. This is wrong. The service desk needs to flex to the customer, instead of the customer flexing to suit the service desk.
Every service desk deals with a range of different demands. The type of Incidents, Service Requests, and Information Requests your service desk has to deal with will depend a lot on the type of business you’re in. The profile of tickets in a manufacturing organization be different from the profile of tickets in a financial institution. Whatever your industry, you can be sure that the people across your organization have different needs and preferences—influenced by who they are, what they do, how they work, and where they do it.
An omnichannel service desk gives them the choice of how they interact (phone, email, web, mobile, walk-up, live chat and chatbot, and integration with their enterprise collaboration platforms) so that they can pick which support channel works best for them in their current context. The shape of an ideal service experience can’t be standardized—because it’s situational. An employee will select the channel they want to use based on their situation right now.
For example, if an employee has a minor issue which may be annoying but isn’t a barrier to their productivity, they may want to quickly log it through self-service, instead of losing productive time waiting in a call queue.
If a salesperson is having technical issues in an airport, they may deliberately choose to interact via the live chat channel instead of trying to have a voice conversation in a noisy airport lounge.
In both of these examples, offering a one-size-fits-all phone support option doesn’t work for the customer. It doesn’t meet their consumer-life expectations of how support happens. Omnichannel support options are now a must-have for a quality support experience.
RELATED: What’s the difference between Multichannel and Omnichannel support?
Increase Speed
Reduce Costs
The efficiency that an omnichannel ITSM strategy can deliver brings radical reductions in operating costs. Diverting demand to digital channels slashes the cost-per-call (versus traditional labor-intensive one-to-one support), releasing annual seven-figure savings for most medium to large organizations.
According to the Service Desk Institute, offering live web/mobile chat reduces the cost per ticket from $35 to $16.80—a reduction of over 50%. Implementing an AI-driven chatbot can further reduce the cost per ticket to just $0.80—a reduction of 98%. Likewise, tickets that can be self-served through a portal reduce the average cost from $35 to just $2.
Most organizations find that a majority of tickets can be diverted to these low-cost support channels—and the resulting reduction in cost and human effort means your service desk is finally able to tackle other long-awaited improvement projects to transform productivity.
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