Everything you need to know about service automation

Automation has been a major trend for service departments for quite some time – and it’s only going to get more relevant. In fact, Gartner predicts that, by 2025, 70% of organizations will implement structured automation – up from 20% in 2021.

But what is service automation? And how can your team make the most of it? Here’s everything you need to know about service automation.

What is service automation?

Let’s start by getting our terms straight. ITSM (IT Service Management) is the set of systems and processes organizations use to improve the way IT services are delivered to end-users.

Service automation means automating some of these processes to improve efficiency and reduce manual tasks for service desk employees, freeing up time for the work that requires a human touch. Simple as that.

Some examples of processes that can be easily automated are creating and tracking incidents and providing automated answers to simple requests via a self-service portal.

By automating easy tasks like password resets, you enable IT professionals to focus on higher level issues and more demanding requests. This can decrease service desk calls by more than 40% and reduce end-user downtime.

What are the benefits of service automation?

As well as making life easier for service desk employees, service automation also has several benefits for your organization, including:

Fewer repetitive tasks

Service automation also means you can reduce the number of simple, repetitive tasks that your service desk employees have to perform on a daily basis. By automating easy tasks like password resets, you enable IT professionals to focus on higher level issues and more demanding requests that require a human touch. This can decrease service desk calls by more than 40% and reduce end-user downtime.

Are password resets draining your IT department? Learn how to save time and money by automating these processes.

Smoother incident management

When a customer logs a request, it’s important that it gets to the person with the right skillset to help the customer solve their problem. makes the process of assigning incidents to the correct person easier by identifying the properties of incidents and service requests within a specific category.

It can also provide service desk employees with suggestions for other fields in the incident and service request forms, making them easier to complete.

Discover the benefits of service desk automation.

Improved customer experience as a result of automation

Your customers expect a seamless, personalized experience with your services. But they also expect it to reflect the positive experiences they have with B2C technology in their daily lives. Chatbots and conversational AI with Natural Language Processing (NLP) can answer customers’ straightforward questions by analyzing their written texts and interpreting their meaning.

This means customers don’t have to spend time searching for an answer or waiting for a response from IT. And the conversations between your customer and the chatbot can already provide a lot of helpful insights for IT, so you can get straight to work on the incident.

Find out what chatbots can do for your service desk.

How to get started with service automation?

All of this sounds good, but where should you begin when it comes to automating your service management processes? And which tasks should be prioritized? Here are a few tips:

Look at the kinds of requests your service desk gets most frequently, day-to-day. Go down the list and, for each item, ask: Do we always perform the same steps to complete this process? Can we determine rules for performing these steps? And, finally, does resolving this request add value for the organization? If so, then this task is a prime candidate for automation.

Find out examples of 5 IT tasks you could be automating in this blog.