While large companies may have an entire help desk staff or department as part of their IT team, mid-size to smaller businesses rely on one or two people to handle all their IT problems. And often, the help desk is just a small percentage of their overall duties. These IT team members generally don't have enough time to service outstanding help requests in a timely manner, so they either need to figure out a way to replicate themselves, or hire someone to help, or find ways to move simple requests to the right people.
Help desk or service desk software saves some time by helping create tickets, track resolved issues and resolutions, and store team response-time metrics for analysis. Whether you use ServiceNow, Zendesk, or another help desk automation tool, it’s a critical part of maintaining a positive relationship with vendors, customers, and employees. But this software only solves part of the problem.
Luckily there is a way to eliminate the mind-numbing, repetitive help desk and service desk tasks your IT team performs daily. With robotic process automation (RPA), help your help desk solve its own problems with automatic processing of tasks, so they can keep their focus on the bigger issues that need resolution.
Generate, Receive, and Process Help Desk Tickets
Help desk systems have varying levels of automation for handling tickets but often stop short of performing any additional steps in the process. These applications can receive and generate tickets automatically via inbound email messages or web service calls, like with the ServiceNow queuing system, for example.
Combining ServiceNow with RPA software can create an automated workflow to queue up ticket requests, run a task that updates the related tickets with completion status, and capture runtime log information. This use case is great for an IT team or network operations center that might need to automate regular checks but also capture tickets for metrics and reporting.
Watch this video for an example of how ServiceNow integrates with RPA from Automate:
Generate New Users in Active Directory as They’re Onboarded
When it comes to onboarding new employees, it’s a joint effort between the HR team and IT team to manage user provisioning. This usually means mailbox creation, allocating equipment, and setting up software licenses. These processes can involve a lot of manual work. Another use case for help desk automation is generating new users in Active Directory.
With RPA, a software bot can integrate the HR systems with the help desk and other relevant applications to automate the HR onboarding process in a single automated workflow. HR can file a help desk ticket that automatically provisions Active Directory, as well as other business applications needing setup, and send an email to the new employee and their manager—all without manual intervention. The help desk RPA bot can also run audit queries against Active Directory on a regular basis for automating compliance reporting on disabled user profiles, and more.
Watch this video for more about how Active Directory integrates with Automate RPA:
Remediate System or Virtual Machine Outages
Most companies have network monitoring tools—and if they don’t, they should!—to send alerts if a network or server outage occurs. These tools help resolve issues faster with instant alerting, but when you add the power of RPA, it creates instant remediation.
When a network outage or event occurs, such as a VM image going offline, your network automation software can be configured to send emails or SNMP network events to allow the help desk RPA bot to perform a server snapshot and restart the VM. And then during server startup, the bot can do something that most monitoring systems alone can't do—it can make sure not only that the server's up and running, but all the appropriate services are running as well.
An RPA bot can ensure that everything else is up and running:
- Your Oracle, SQL Server, or other databases
- Apache server, the WebSphere or IIS web servers and web services
- All the TCP/IP ports are available
- And anything else essential to keep your network moving.
With a help desk RPA bot, you can perform this type of server remediation and monitoring for Windows, Linux, AIX, IBM i, and any other server type or device.
Automate Help Desk Issues
Start saving time by automating your daily help desk and service desk processes with RPA from Automate.