You have probably heard of service automation before. But what does it look like in practice?
We spoke with Yoline Neegers, part of the Service Desk team at Ferranti, who uses service automation to reduce repetitive tasks, save time, and make work less stressful.
Why Ferranti decided to automate their services
With over 54 customers in more than 18 countries, Ferranti’s service desk deals with a wide variety of requests every day. Before deploying service automation, Yoline’s team often dealt with repetitive tasks, which were time-consuming and prone to errors. To make her team’s life easier, Yoline started exploring ways to automate tasks within TOPdesk.
How Ferranti uses Action Sequences to automate their services
Yoline and her team decided to use Action Sequences – TOPdesk’s most flexible feature for automating multiple steps in a process – to get rid of repetitive manual tasks. But what exactly did they automate and how? Here are a few examples that Yoline shared with us:
Generating documents automatically
“Whenever we hand out new hardware, the recipient has to sign a document which we used to create ourselves, adding the name of the recipient as well. But sometimes we forgot to do so and ended up with the wrong information. That’s why we automated this process using Asset Management’s actions. Now, we no longer have to manually set up documents, so we can spend our time on more pressing tasks. It also reduces the stress at work because you know that you can just automatically generate the document and it’ll be ready instantly instead of having to create it last minute.”
Learn how to set up this action sequence in knowledge item KI 11163.
Closing calls automatically
“When a call has been open for a long time without a response from the caller, the call now closes automatically. We use the same action sequence when we resolve a call. Having this setup helps us keep an overview of our open calls so the team workload is more clear.”
Learn how to set up this action sequence in knowledge item KI 11138.
Assigning operators automatically
“We also use an action sequence to automatically assign operators because we have rather large teams. To do this, we use the contact field in the operator groups. The action sequence checks who the contact of that operator group is and assigns it to that specific call. This helps us make sure that a call always gets assigned to someone, resulting in lower response times.”
Updating brief descriptions
Automating the brief descriptions in calls made Yoline’s team more efficient: “When a new employee started, the brief description would just say ‘new user’. But that didn’t give us enough information, so I automated it to include the name of the employee, their start date, and their function. On and offboarding someone has become much simpler which means we make less mistakes.”
Learn how to set up this action sequence in knowledge item KI 13930.
How can other organizations get started with Action Sequences?
“My first tip is to check my.topdesk.com because there are a lot of great examples there.”
“My first tip is to check my.topdesk.com because there are a lot of great examples there”, Yoline shares. “For our action sequence on brief descriptions, I went into my.topdesk.com and found a knowledge item, downloaded the JSON file, and imported it into our environment. All I had to do was change some field names, after which I tested it in our test environment, and it worked! So, my advice would be to check the knowledge base because it’s a very good starting point.”
And testing is key with automation. “Use your TOPdesk test environment so you can play around and experiment with your action sequences. This way, you can test whether you have connected the right event to your sequence”, Yoline shares.
Ready to start with service automation?
Do you want to test your knowledge on Service Automation? Take the Service Automation Quick Scan to find out how much you already know about automating your services in TOPdesk.
