Automation is not new to anyone. It is the foundation for any enterprise digitization. However, companies fail to establish a clear strategy for service desk automation. They cannot define areas of automation and set priorities and end up with islands of automation, automation using home-grown scripts and various point solutions which takes care of respective automation tasks. Automation knowledge is with chosen few SME’s and the dependency on them increases due to their subject matter expertise. Service desks struggle to cope with day-to-day administrative tasks and do not have a clear idea of where to start automating these day-to-day tasks.

Top Candidates for Service Desk Automation to Jump-Start Your Automation Journey

Password resets and account unlocks

Typically, password resets and account unlock requests comprise 30-40% of service desk tickets and are good candidates to start with. Moreover, laws and regulations such as PCI DSS, Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA have reviewed password requirements and now encourage or demand greater complexity such as multi-factor authentication. Resetting passwords manually wastes an enormous amount of time and money resulting in end-user frustration, customer dissatisfaction and compliance vulnerabilities. With wrong guessing of passwords, the user account gets locked which further adds to the ticket volume. Therefore, password resets and account unlock become the top priority candidates for automation.

Employee On-boarding and Off-Boarding

Bringing a new employee onboard involves several steps: setting up accounts, coordinating with HR, assigning equipment, and more. Delays in any of these tasks mean wasted time and money. Many organizations aim for a “zero-day start” where everything is ready on Day 1. Automation ensures all onboarding steps are handled seamlessly and on time. Offboarding is just as critical- especially from a security and compliance standpoint. If an employee’s access isn’t promptly revoked, it could lead to serious vulnerabilities. For companies with high turnover, automating this process helps prevent errors and frees up IT teams from manual, repetitive work.
Ad-hoc queries and Knowledge Management
A typical service desk supporting over 1000+ users handles over 1500 tickets a month. Many of these tickets are simple queries such as my printer is not working or what is my leave balance. With the new advent of technologies such chatbots, these queries could be handled by bots by integrating with back-end knowledge management systems, effectively relieving service desk team to focus on more value-added tasks. With AI and machine learning, context-based knowledge article searches become a powerful tool for introducing this self-service.
Common event handling
Frequent complaints like “My web server is down” or “My disk is full” usually go through L1 and then L2 teams, taking hours to resolve. With automation, such issues can be addressed in seconds. Whether it’s restarting a web service or freeing up disk space, automated workflows- even those accessible to L1 agents -can dramatically reduce downtime and improve response times.
Ticket classification
One of the most time-consuming and error-prone tasks in any service desk is assigning tickets to the correct team. Misrouted tickets waste resources, delay resolution, and frustrate users. Machine learning can be used to classify incoming tickets based on historical data, ensuring they go to the right team with the right priority automatically.
End-to-end automation Platform
Besides these top candidates for service desk automation, many other system administration tasks could be automated such as virtual machine management, distribution list management, producing health-check reports, office-365 management, providing VPN and WIFI access etc. End-to-end automation is possible starting with handling requests, queries or events to auto-fulfilment of these service desk tickets.

Emergys Managed Services Platform

Our Managed Service is based on AI-driven automation platform has ITPA (IT process automation) as well as RPA (Robotic Process Automation) capabilities. Moreover, the platform comes bundled with over 300+ ready automation adapters which make it easier to start the service immediately. We have our own AI-based methodology to identify candidates for automation from the ticket data.