Clustering for Service Desk Tickets
There’s one thing you can always count on when working in the service desk environment: there’s always too much going on and not enough people to solve the problems. The challenge is that until the work can be summarized, categorized, and analyzed, it’s hard to get an understanding of the entirety of the actual problem. Without a full understanding of the issue, decision-makers are left powerless to decipher the right support requirements to help right the ship.
IT Service Management (ITSM) Systems recognize this and have built-in categorization system to help tackle the problem head-on. In theory, whenever users submit tickets, the ITSM system would self-identify the category which the ticket fits into. The ITSM system can then pull together analytics to help inform and break down the entirety of the problem in a way that helps inform decision-makers and influence the solution overall.
In theory this idea is great but, in reality, users tend to incorrectly categorize their service ticket. This either skews the entire analytics of the ITSM system or drives a large manning requirement to fix each problem.
The question is, how can we capitalize on the benefits of categorization without putting additional restraints on either service desk employees or the users who need assistance?
Using state of the art natural language processing (NLP), service desk operatives can look across the tickets in their system and quickly group them by using the words in the tickets, rather than through a user-defined field. This helps IT professionals understand the volume coming over the wire, the actual dialog in the system, and what types of problems exist. Without human bias, computers can help organizations find “hidden” problems or at least a group of submissions that aren’t immediately recognized to be queued up for human analysis. NLP can help identify trends and root causes that might be otherwise invisible to the naked (or human!) eye.
With this AI-powered technology in place, IT professionals can confidently address the issue, accurately report statics to management and act on the data by using the actual dialog compiled within the ITSM System. AI enabling the service desk – tackling the constant and extensive needs of IT professionals, one ticket at a time.
Blog Author
By Brad Mascho Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer, NCI