How Artificial Intelligence is impacting IT Service Management

Every single day, millions of dollars are being spent on call centers — just to answer repeated questions, thousands of times, over and over again. Let us see how AI is going to affect IT service management.

In this age of artificial intelligence, managers at all levels need to accept that a significant chunk of their jobs might be done better and more efficiently by machines. Researchers conducted surveys and found that managers at all levels spend the bulk of their time doing administrative tasks, such as making schedules or writing reports.

These are the very tasks that are the most likely to be automated in the near future. In fact, some companies have already made improvements by transitioning these tasks to AI.

Studies have shown that in order to succeed at work in this automation age, the skill managers need to have most of is judgment. Judgment emcompasses: thinking creatively, data analysis, data interpretation, and developing strategy. Other skills that stood out as important are social networking, coaching, and collaboration.

These are the skills that will help managers stand out when AI takes over the administrative tasks that managers perform today. Machines can never completely replace managers, but they can give managers more time.

The real priority for managers should be to refocus on the tasks that only humans can do using their creativity, collaborative attitude, empathizing nature, and the power of judgement.

Machine vs. human

AI is very good at eliminating human error. Humans, many times, tend to deviate from standard defined processes, which results in fatalities. Examples can be in various areas — a patient in critical condition operated upon by a team of doctors may die because of a minor human error or pilots who have to take care of thousands of computations while the plane is flying may cause the plane to crash. In such situations, a trained intelligent bot can make decisions that are closer to defined standards.

Let us try to understand why automation is being considered a threat to future jobs. It began with basic automation, where a particular manual task was programmed to be done by machine. The task, when done by machine, was completed faster and without any human error, of course. This led to more automation of menial tasks that resulted in improved efficiency. Hence, the productivity of the entire organization grew multi-fold.

Now, with the evolution of technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning, machines can actually learn on their own and be taught to do more complicated tasks that are currently being done by humans.

IT Customer Support is one such domain where we can have intelligence bots, well-trained with large sample datasets, who know how to respond to any kind of customer query or ticket. These bots are intuitive enough to adapt and improve themselves without human intervention. They become better with time.

Understanding IT service management (ITSM)

IT Service Management, also called ITSM, is the term used to refer to the implementation, management, and delivery of quality IT services in the best possible way to meet a businesses' needs.

It ensures that an appropriate mix of people, processes, and technology are in place to provide value to a business. Essentially, ITSM is about value — it is about taking your resources and capabilities and making something valuable for your business.

According to reports, the global outsourced customer services market is projected to reach $84.7 billion by 2020. Another study revealed that companies lose more than $62 billion due to poor customer service. Obviously, no company can afford to provide not-so-good customer support.

Why is AI required in customer service?

Every single day, millions of dollars are being spent in call centers, just to answer repeated questions, thousands of times, over and over again. Providing customer support is really an expensive task. A study on the customer support market found the following:

1. Around 270 billion phone calls were made annually to call centers, which cost around $600 billion.
2. One out of two incoming calls require escalation or are unresolved.
3. 61 percent of all calls could have been resolved with better access to information.

Entities involved in customer service

A customer support service has various entities involved. This helps us understand how AI is going to affect each one of them:

1. Agent : AI is going to recommend solutions and classifications, and help agents understand what the issue is, making the agent smarter. This also helps them provide the best reply to the customer.
2. Customer : AI can deflect cases by answering questions, such as what can be done on the website to help customers find a better solution. It can suggest how we can push the solution faster to the customer. AI, together with chatbots, helps to respond to customer queries faster and more accurately, based on real-time data analysis.
3. Operations : With AI, one can predict the close time of a customer issue and actually allocate the case to someone knowledgeable in that specific topic.

What AI has brought to the customer service business

The following are some of the areas where artificial intelligence has proved to be very efficient:

1. Increased customer satisfaction
2. Customer attrition reduction
3. Customer effort reduction
4. Higher customer service satisfaction level by agent
5. Reduced agent on-boarding time
6. Reduced cost per ticket
7. Improved business outcome
8. Reduced costs of service operations
9. Increased revenue

Companies improving customer service by using artificial intelligence

Let us take a look at a few startups working on automating the customer service process at various levels:

1. Neva.ai : Automates customer service and support using artificial intelligence and natural language processing.
2. DigitalGenius : Brings practical applications of deep learning and artificial intelligence to the customer service operations of large companies.
3. IPSoft: Assists with service desk support, helps field engineers troubleshoot, and supports procurement.
4. Next IT: Assists with customer service.
5. Digital Reasoning: Scans up to billions of communications from thousands of traders to spot language patterns and identifies potentially fraudulent activity.
6. Luminoso: Analyzes customer feedback to propose product design changes and reviews how consumers feel about food items or the grocery store experience.

What the future holds for ITSM

Artificial Intelligence is currently in a very early stage. It has a long way to go before it can replace the human task force — but yes, it is moving steadily towards this and making huge progress across multiple domains.

Someone who is concerned about his/her career should start learning skills that won't be affected by automation. This involves using human empathy, sensing the emotions of others, the ability to think rationally, and coming up with algorithms to solve problems.

We can sum up by saying that artificial intelligence is powerful— but it is still artificial — and does not have the natural powers that humans possess.

This post is originally published by the author here. This version has been edited for clarity and may appear different from the original post.