5 AI features you (probably) didn’t know existed in ServiceDesk Plus

With the advent of AI, ITSM leaders are looking for ways to meaningfully integrate AI into their everyday workflows with a focus on efficiency and accuracy while also holistically improving service quality. To help you get started on deploying AI within your ITSM practices, here are five AI features you (probably) didn’t know existed in ServiceDesk Plus—ManageEngine’s AI-driven unified service management platform. We’ll go over how ServiceDesk Plus empowers your workforce—end-users, technicians, and process owners alike—with AI capabilities that cut down time spent on manual work, driving up productivity.

1) RAG-powered Solution Assist

Many enterprises maintain a comprehensive KB, documenting resolutions to incidents and problems. Users can read these articles, self-diagnose and resolve issues, or troubleshoot their incidents instead of logging tickets. However, many users are unaware of these articles or where to find them, resulting in to them being unread. Other times, users just prefer technician assistance. Here’s where Zia Solution Assist comes in.

When users ask questions using the Ask Zia conversational virtual agent, Solution Assist will discern their queries, extract the right KB article through RAG and summarize it using the Zia LLM. The KB excerpt can also be automatically appended to the ticket acknowledgement email using the $SolutionAssist delimiter.

Expected outcomes:

• Fewer L1 tickets due to self-resolution
• Increased usage of the KB wherever applicable
• More bandwidth for technicians to focus on major incidents and other high priority tasks as L1 ticket volumes go down

• Within Ask Zia
• During ticket creation/edits

You can Ask Zia for KB excerpts, with citations to KB articles, or raise incidents

Intelligent Solution Suggestions are displayed while creating or editing requests.

2) Conversation Summary and Reply Assist for reduced administrative overhead

Conversation Summary

Managing IT requests often involves sifting through lengthy email conversations to grasp the full context of an issue. ServiceDesk Plus tackles this administrative burden with Conversation Summary. This generative AI feature is designed to provide immediate context for ticket conversations, allowing technicians to gain contextual understanding at rapid speeds.

This reduces the time technicians spend sifting through extensive conversation histories, particularly during handovers, escalations, or when returning to an older ticket. The immediate provision of distilled, relevant information means technicians can save valuable time, which would have been wasted reading through ticket parameters and communications, such as the subject, description, notes, resolution, and email threads.

Reply Assist

Reply Assist plays a pivotal role in cutting administrative overhead. Powered by the native Zia LLM, or through public LLM service providers such as ChatGPT or Azure OpenAI, technicians can draft, paraphrase or refine their responses, generating replies with minimal effort, with multilingual support for IT teams that handle service delivery for sites around the world.

The combination of Conversation Summary and Reply Assist creates a powerful and synergistic loop for administrative efficiency. Conversation Summary brings technicians up to speed, ensuring they have all the necessary context. Reply Assist then enables them to craft a professional, accurate, and rapid response with minimal effort.

Expected outcomes:

• Decreased administrative overhead for technicians to handle
• Less time spent reading long email threads and ticketing communications
• Less time spent writing replies to end users for the tickets raised
• Central sysadmin and service desk team enabled to cater to end users around the world in larger enterprises via multi-language support
• Improved service quality and employee experience

Pro tip: Zia in ServiceDesk Plus offers you the choice of preferred LLMs among Zia LLM, OpenAI's ChatGPT, and Microsoft's Azure OpenAI. Zia LLM, ManageEngine’s enterprise large language model, is powered by open-source foundation models and is hosted within ManageEngine data centers. The prompts to Zia LLM, ticketing data, and the generated outputs do not leave our data centers, ensuring the highest standards of data privacy while bringing generative AI capabilities to you.

You can even select a different AI provider for every GenAI-powered capability.

3) Zia Problem Prediction: Proactive problem alerts on autopilot

In a world where IT service desks typically respond to incidents, it is often a struggle to correlate incidents and identify the root cause of problems. Zia’s predictive AI helps you analyze incident trends and patterns to identify and cluster similar incidents as potential problems that need to be addressed.

Problem Prediction intelligently alerts technicians while simultaneously eliminating the time spent analyzing and identifying the incidents that could be linked to the same root cause. Instead, technicians are alerted when defined incident thresholds are reached, allowing them to work on identifying and resolving the root cause directly.

Expected outcomes:

• Technicians spend less time identifying problems from very long ticket queues and instead quickly jump on RCA and fix the underlying issue
• Eliminates the cognitive overload of scrubbing through dozens of tickets to identify patterns
• More bandwidth to focus on IT transformation initiatives and changes due to quicker RCAs and decreased incident occurrence

4) Zia Sentiment Analysis: Intelligent insights into the end-user experience

Sentiment Analysis provides real-time insights into the emotional tone of end-user conversations, thereby gauging end-user satisfaction. Zia intelligently interprets whether a user's interaction conveys happiness, frustration, anger, or a neutral stance. By identifying negative sentiments early, technicians can modify their communication style and perform appropriate ticketing actions to improve the end-user experience.

Beyond individual interactions, the Technician Sentiment Summary widget in the Zia Dashboard provides insights on sentiments identified during an individual technician's interactions with end users. This dashboard widget helps IT service desk managers and administrators train technicians and improve their communication style and service delivery skills.

Expected outcomes:

• Data-driven insights into the end-user experience in real time, instead of reactive surveys post the ticket resolution
• Enables ITSM teams to drive continuous, targeted improvements to service processes and technician training
• Opportunities for better service outcomes and employee experiences by taking corrective actions in real time whenever a negative sentiment is expressed

5) Zia Code Generator for bespoke, low-code automations

One of the most impactful applications of generative AI in ServiceDesk Plus is its Code Generator, specifically designed for low-code Custom Functions. The Code Generator democratizes last-mile automation by enabling individuals without extensive coding expertise to create sophisticated bespoke automations.

Expected outcomes:

• Reduced reliance on specialized development teams
• Fostering greater agility to build out and customize processes faster

Conclusion

ServiceDesk Plus's commitment to high-value AI lies in ready-to-deploy, powerful AI, thoughtfully crafted to solve real problems that IT service desk professionals face. And the best part? ServiceDesk Plus’ AI capabilities are available without hidden overhead or licensing hassles, making advanced AI capabilities accessible to organizations of all sizes without prohibitive costs or complexities.

Other AI capabilities in ServiceDesk Plus include detecting asset receipts, categorizing and triaging tickets, generating solutions, and more. To see firsthand how ServiceDesk Plus can enable your AI-powered IT service management, sign up for a free trial now.