Jay Srinivasan is the co-founder and CEO of service desk software maker atSpoke. Jay previously co-founded a mobile testing platform that he sold to Google in 2014, and he then spent a couple of years in product management at Google.
For the last 4 years or so, he’s been focused on building the next generation of service desk software at atSpoke and along the way, he’s heavily researched the market, the trends, and how the technology is shaping up.
He shares with us the three trends he believes will define the service desk in 2021 and beyond.
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Service Desk for All: Interview With Jay Srinivasan
[01:48] The first trend is the need for a service desk beyond the traditional users like IT. All of the teams across the organization need a system that helps them manage inbound requests.
[03:13] IT teams are the service desk experts. They can lead the way for the rest of the organization. Now that other teams will be using the service desk, there’s a need for something that’s not just optimized for IT. It needs to be intuitive and easy to use.
[05:22] It’s a good idea to take a step back and think about when you need a ticketing system versus a project management tool. A ticket is transactional and can be handled quickly by the right person. A project management tool is for multi-step, multi-week sets of tasks.
[07:36] The second trend is that machine learning is going mainstream on the service desk. Every service desk is either adding it or already has it built in. Machine learning is the perfect use case for the service desk because 70% of tickets are repetitive. Of those 30% can be handled automatically, with no human intervention.
[11:30] End users benefit from the machine learning experience by increased speed and efficiency. It also reduces repetition even for the agent handling the tickets.
[13:32] The third trend is the proliferation of tools and knowledge bases within a company. Service desks help by using APIs and integrating into everything the company uses.
[17:13] Modern software tools are easier to integrate with APIs. Service desks by definition need to be complex tools to keep everything running. If done right, a service desk can be the front end to all the key workflows across the company.
[18:41] IT teams need to talk with other colleagues across the organization. A lot of problems can be solved by taking the service desk lead. Understand the operational blueprint of your company and what workflows and requests each team has. Your service desk needs to work with chat systems and have machine learning. It also needs to integrate with other tools through APIs.
Links from this episode
- atSpoke
- atSpoke blog
- Jay Srinivasan on LinkedIn
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