A new survey conducted by IDG and commissioned by Freshworks finds 93% of businesses plan to use AI to streamline their help desk systems
Freshworks Inc., a leading software company empowering businesses to delight their customers and employees, announced the results of a recent survey with IDG on the state of IT Service Management (ITSM) and IT Operations Management (ITOM). The survey overall showed that Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology has hit the mainstream, as 93% of businesses are currently exploring or deploying some level of AI in ITSM.
“The data proves what Freshworks has been seeing with our customers for years — they expect AI to be deeply integrated within the ITSM tools instead of it being an add-on that requires additional effort to delight their employees,” said Prakash Ramamurthy, chief product officer at Freshworks. “As evident from the survey, users of AI want greater automation, reduced complexity, and a simplified approach with modern IT tools that delight businesses of all sizes. AI is no longer a futuristic concept, it’s a must-have.”
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Top Key Findings:
AI is seen as an ITSM/ITOM game changer. AI technologies are rapidly emerging as a way to delight customers and employees and not just a chat tool.
1. Virtually all IT managers (93%) are currently exploring or deploying some level of AI technology for ITSM/ITOM modernization; 61% deployed at some level and 32% exploring possibilities.
2. Nearly 70% of IT managers say AI is either critical or very important for upgrading and modernizing their service desk capabilities.
3. Among six representative AI use cases, ITSM chatbots are the clear leader in planned or actual AI deployments. On the flip side, a significant percentage of the respondents indicated that they have no plans to deploy these AI-powered capabilities.
4. Despite the expected and achieved benefits, survey respondents cited what they wanted to gain from implementing AI. The following four topped the list:
– Speed of implementation (40%)
– Integration with legacy systems (40%)
– The overall cost of implementation (38%)
Training the AI bots solution to return the most accurate response (39%)
5. The survey explored a key metric associated with today’s demanding IT environment: the number of IT service inquiries received by the IT support desk each day. That number ranged from an average of 44 inquiries per day for small companies to 725 per day for large organizations.
6. A large majority of the survey respondents indicated that any AI solutions for ITSM/ITOM should be intuitive, scalable, collaborative, and easy to deploy. For example, 82% mostly or completely agreed with the statement: “We need a fast, pre-trained, easy-to-deploy AI solution to meet our needs.” Also, 85% mostly or completely agreed that “the more intuitive an AI application, the more likely it will be accepted and deployed.”
Freshworks’ Freshservice contains automation and collaboration functionality that enhance user productivity, augment human engagement by automating processes to address and answer employee IT service requests. Self-service and AI-powered chatbots also help reduce the overall volume of customer service tickets. Freshservice uses AI to create a prediction model based on previous tickets in a service desk and uses the model to predict field values such as category, group, type, etc. for every incoming ticket. This saves 35% of agents’ time allowing them to focus on other more high-level tasks.
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Freshservice Customers:
Elsevier is a global information analytics business that helps scientists and clinicians to find new answers, reshape human knowledge, and tackle the most urgent human crises. Today, 700 agents use Freshservice to support 9,500 employees, close 15,000 tickets/month and manage 30,000 assets to delight their agents and customers.
Momentum Travel Group uses Freshservice and Freshdesk. The intuitive tools helps IT and customer service staff work faster and lower the resolution times to help employees and customers boost productivity.
The County of Fresno loves the user interface of Freshservice. The product enables quick, real-time changes while engaging and delighting the employee. The IT department went from 5% web portal usage to more than 40% usage using Freshservice.
PowerSchool, an education technology company uses Freshservice. The ITSM tool helped streamline processes resulting in 96% of the IT requests coming from the self-service portal and phone calls went down drastically.
In May 2021 IDG surveyed 850 senior and mid-level IT managers involved in these disciplines. Large organizations (5,000- plus employees) accounted for 34% of the survey base, midsize (1,000 to 4,999) for 42%, and small (250 to 999) for 23%. Collectively, the organizations are based in 14 countries and four regions: North America, UK/Europe, the Middle East/North Africa, and Asia/Pacific.
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