Managed services
Automation is key
Serviceaide recently announced the availability of its winter product line update. Here, chief technology officer Bill Guinn talks to PCR about how service management is evolving.
What are the top trends in service management? Two elements stand out when thinking about the top trends in service management. First is improving service delivery and enabling more self-service. The more companies that can enable end-users to find the information they require and directly access the services they need the more productive and loyal those customers will be. This
applies to employees and business partners as well as customers. The second is the reduction of the cost of service, as well as the time spent
on resolution, by leveraging technology to automate and streamline service requests. The key is collecting information quickly and in an actionable format. This reduces the dependency on high-cost personnel to resolve repetitive issues.
How does automation help manage services? The key to a managed service provider’s success is providing the services needed at an appealing cost to their prospects. Managed service providers (MSPs) must be efficient, reusing what they are doing across their customers. Automation is a key to delivering timely, cost effective service to their customers and to streamline their own operations. By automating key IT business processes, MSPs can eliminate manual, mundane and error-prone tasks. This streamlines workloads, provides more visibility across teams, including collaboration when multiple teams are working on an issue or on changes, as well as when business processes involving multiple department notifications and approvals are involved. In the past, automation was typically only available to technicians, or behind the scenes. The key for MSPs is to expose automation directly to users through intuitive frontend systems which in turn trigger backend systems.
42 | April 2023
How is AI evolving within managed services to become a trustworthy resource? AI is an expansive field that includes a variety of technologies. In most cases, organisations think of predictions, recommendations, chatbots and virtual agents when applying AI to service management, although it’s not limited to these. In the end, business results matter and just having AI in your operation is not enough. Being able to show, indeed quantify, what AI is doing, its ROI, is where the trust comes in. Historically AI has been a black box, but by showing its effect on KPIs driving the organisation is how trust and value are measured. Our principles around AI are straightforward. Make it simple by ensuring it’s a seamless part of the process – and make it transparent so it’s clear what it’s doing and how it’s affecting KPIs, so that existing staff can understand and manage it.
Will chatbots replace experienced employees? Perhaps the most recent buzz is the quantum leap AI has taken with the introduction of ChatGPT. Questions arise constantly regarding if and when these technologies will be able to replace support personnel, and when we’ll see it happen. Serviceaide has been using Generative Pretrained Transformer (GPT) algorithms for over three years. What’s new is the massive amount of training that has now occurred, improving the ‘P’ aspect of the technology which enables the rest of the ensemble. AI is all about data and by training on trillions of pieces of
information, these new models are astounding. However, they are not a replacement for experienced staff that have an understanding of company-specific proprietary business practices, policies, documentation and applications which ChatGPT and other open models do not have visibility into, nor should they have access to. Our approach is simple – combine the two giving our customers the benefit of open models and their own proprietary information. By securely protecting our clients information but seamlessly combining access to open models such as the one powering ChatGPT, we are working
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