Behind the Scenes: A Day in the Life of an IT Service Desk Agent

A day in the life of a service desk agent can be tedious, repetitive and stressful. Discover how AI and automation can relieve agents of the heavy lifting, transforming service delivery, and improving efficiency.

Service desk agents play a key role in IT support, but their day-to-day responsibilities often involve handling repetitive, low-value tasks—password resets, status updates, and recurring queries that consume time and sap morale. What if these mundane tasks could be automated, freeing up agents to focus on more meaningful, complex challenges? 

Automating your service desk can free up valuable time for your staff, allowing them to focus on high-value tasks and in-person support, delivering the personalised service that the bots can’t! 

Let’s explore the challenges agents face on a daily basis, and how ServiceHive can take the heavy-lifting out of their role, enabling focus to be placed on other more valuable tasks.  

The day begins with a review of pending support tickets. IT service desk agents prioritise tasks based on urgency and criticality. Emails, voicemails and chat messages are checked for any new issues reported overnight. Typically, a service desk agent needs to be handling one phone call and three support chats. You can only imagine the quality of service with the almost impossible task of juggling four queries simultaneously. 

Service Desk Agents dive into the sea of support tickets. They assess each issue, categorise them, and prioritise based on the impact on users and business operations. Urgent matters are addressed first, ensuring minimal downtime for end-users, with less critical tickets being left in agent’s queues for as long as possible to avoid more allocated tasks.  

The phone starts ringing and callers are greeted with delaying tactics that we all recognise , “We are experiencing an unexpected high volume of calls at the moment, please provide your name and unique reference number and we’ll be with you as soon as possible”, helping provide more time for agents to answer the phone. Patience and clear communication are key as they guide users through troubleshooting steps, but with close monitoring on call times, agents inevitably do not provide the level of service required to ensure positive customer interactions and often fail to complete security authentications.  

Some issues require expertise beyond the service desk. Agents collaborate with specialised teams to resolve complex problems. When tickets get passed right, the standard wait time for ticket resolution starts all over, again providing poor customer experience.  

As the day advances, the pace often picks up. IT service desk agents juggle new tickets while following up on ongoing issues. Under pressure to maximise support, tickets are sometimes returned with vague responses to buy more time for agents to address them. This practice is generally accepted, as the common “three-strike rule” allows tickets to be exchanged up to three times before a resolution is mandatory. 

Continuous learning is a part of an IT service desk agent’s journey. Whether it’s staying updated on the latest software updates or acquiring new skills, agents should invest time in professional development to enhance their troubleshooting abilities. In reality, there is little time for training and progression. As a result, siloed knowledge becomes an issue, with agents utilising their knowledge to support their own progression, without sharing or documenting their skill-set so others can’t develop, and thus when the agent leaves the business, so does their knowledge. 

There has to be a better way? We thought the same thing. So here’s what a typical day in the life of a Service Desk agent could look like… 

All of the laborious tasks that First Line support have to deal with perpetually throughout the day, have already been completed without the requirement of any human assistance, with multiple queries being resolved simultaneously. Those that are remaining are only the more complex issues that require human input to resolve.

Targeted triage questions are asked to gain deeper insights into the issue, and troubleshooting guidance is provided by utilising resources from its knowledge base or trusted web sources. If the user confirms that the issue persists after triage and troubleshooting, a ticket will be raised, prioritised, categorised and assigned to the appropriate resolution team. A detailed summary of all triage steps and self-help efforts is included, ensuring the assigned engineer has a complete troubleshooting history for efficient resolution.

Authenticated users can securely receive help to resolve their own issues with IT and company intelligence at their fingertips. Users can request information on their tickets through chat to ask for updates or add information.

Tickets that can’t be resolved are escalated to the correct team.

Human-touch is still pivotal in any organisation, and continuous learning should still be on the agenda for all employees. With Ai and Automation taking much of the heavy lifting away from Service Desk agents, their focus can be on enhancing their knowledge and upskilling in other areas valuable to business requirements.

With an automated service desk, it will work relentlessly behind the scenes resolving multiple and simultaneous tickets, even when your agents go on their lunch break!

Once intelligence has been learned, it documents and retains valid knowledge forever, meaning that siloed knowledge is no longer an issue.

There will inevitably still be some tasks that need resolving by humans, however, with AI and Automation being able to resolve queries 24 x 7 x 360, it can help provide a sense of relief that issues are still being triaged and self-help guidance being provided beyond 5 o’clock.

The Common requests that consume valuable IT resources, such as software installs and password resets are automated, significantly reducing repetitive, manual tasks. This means that Service Desk agents can spend their time completing other more valuable tasks.

Automating your service desk provides the capability to resolve unlimited queries simultaneously, reducing the wait time from minutes to seconds, and puts the entire IT knowledge at the fingertips of users whenever required; not only enhancing client outcomes, but greatly reducing the risk of SLAs not being met, ensuring your business meets costly requirements whilst also reducing costs.