Virtual support agent streamlines service desk management
One of the biggest challenges for service desk teams is striking the right balance between business-critical projects and keeping up with everyday problems and requests.
To help relieve this problem, ManageEngine, the IT management division of Zoho, is incorporating Zia, Zoho's AI assistant, as a virtual IT support agent in its cloud-based service desk software, ServiceDesk Plus.
"While business end users want on-demand access to IT service desk personnel, IT support staff prefer to focus on higher priority activities and do away with attending to level 1 support. Zia brings perfect balance to service desk operations by offering end users the same quality of support they’d receive from technicians, relieving support staff so they can focus on far more important tasks," says Rajesh Ganesan, vice president of product management at ManageEngine. "We envision Zia will evolve into a smart AI-powered personal assistant offering contextual support, providing immediate assistance for every user in the organization, and elevating the user experience many notches."
Zia can perform a wide variety of day-to-day tasks, including, providing answers to straightforward questions, pulling up service desk data to answer more complex questions and triggering service desk operations through a tree-structured interaction. It's also capable of sharing relevant knowledge base articles based on end users' inputs. And it can automatically hand off user requests to technicians via live chat or by creating a new request.
As well as the standard functions, service desk teams can script custom Zia actions to answer questions and perform activities in external tools that integrate with ServiceDesk Plus. Each custom Zia action can be built with multiple conversations, and IT staff can add provisions for Zia to collect appropriate inputs at every stage of an interaction.
Zia is available in all cloud versions of ServiceDesk Plus and there's a 30-day free trial available from the ManageEngine site.
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