While chatbots have been hailed by some as the future of IT support, some IT leaders say chatbots aren’t very robust. For example, IT teams still find themselves manually handling common incidents such as virtual application and desktop session “resets.”

In simpler terms, while chatbots manage IT tickets on the frontend, they still require manual help desk intervention on the backend — even for simple things. Citrix session resets have been identified as a “Top 5 use case” and the need for resets can be caused by a variety of factors, such as networking issues, forgotten passwords, or an issue with the IT organization’s chosen authentication policies, such as single sign-on or multi-factor authentication.

To help relieve this burden for IT teams, Citrix and ServiceNow have developed a new solution that helps integrate ServiceNow capabilities seamlessly within the Citrix environment. This empowers IT teams to deliver always-on, automated, AI-powered support natively through another chat application such as Microsoft Teams or Slack. Not only does this integration solve significant automation challenges (such as automatic resolution of common virtual session resets) for IT teams, it also helps deliver superior customer experience to all employees, regardless location.

For Global Systems Integrators (GSIs) and Managed Service Providers (MSPs), the Citrix/ServiceNow integration delivers five major benefits:

Helps to Enable User Self-Service

Self-service provides customers with the ability to resolve issues by themselves without reaching out to the service desk and waiting for them to respond. Employees can launch Virtual Agent and request an automated resolution to reset their secure Citrix session without having to take time to log a support ticket and wait for manual IT support resolution.

Alternatively, the GSI or the IT help desk can reset any end user’s profile directly from the ServiceNow interface, without logging in to Citrix Director. Historically, when there was a need to reset a user profile, the GSI or IT admin would need to navigate to Citrix Director to accomplish a reset.

For the customer this means no wait times, faster resolution, and improved service satisfaction. For the GSI, this translates into reduced help desk calls, improved productivity, and lower IT costs, and allows the business to reallocate resources to other strategic priorities.

Helps to Deliver a Seamless User Experience

Imagine this: An end user has problems logging into their virtual desktop or they can’t access a Citrix application. They need to reset their session. Traditionally, they would give the service desk a call and the agent would then find the session and perform the session reset. This might take some time to complete. Instead, GSIs can enable users to perform application or desktop resets directly from within collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams, Slack or conveniently from their mobile app. An automated, AI-enabled Virtual Agent can interact directly with end users and trigger actions that users want to do, such as resetting desktop sessions.

Helps Perform Faster RCA, Better Performance Monitoring

The automation built into the ServiceNow workflow enables details about the situation to be captured in the ServiceNow interface. This provides GSIs and help desk teams with everything they need to perform a root cause analysis (RCA) and identify issues proactively such as an upstream problem with an application or service provider and take steps to prevent it from happening again. Additionally, GSIs can drive continual service improvements, increase efficiency, and reduce costs by performing real-time analysis using the ServiceNow in-platform analytics engine on parameters such as customer usage, user experience, customer satisfaction, cost savings, and more.

As an example, data suggests that doctors and frontline healthcare professionals spend anywhere between five to 15 minutes performing manual session resets (doctor calling IT, admin responding and assigning the case to Citrix admin, Citrix admin then fixing the issue). The time saved by automating this process helps doctors unlock thousands of hours of productive time which can now be spent on delivering quality healthcare to patients.

Delivers Unmatched Benefits To Customers

The Citrix/ServiceNow integration creates numerous possibilities for GSIs to deliver unmatched benefits to customers. With the help of GSIs and the combined power of Citrix and ServiceNow platforms, customers can develop custom workflow configurations and integrations that help address unique end-customer problems, deliver a more streamlined end-user experience, improve customer engagement and loyalty and accelerate their journey to automation and the cloud.

Helps Enable ITAM, ITOM Integrations

GSIs can tap into huge amounts of data generated through Citrix and ServiceNow integrations to identify new business use cases and create opportunities for development of custom workflows. For example, GSIs can drive innovation by automating certain IT asset management tasks (ITAM) using Virtual Agent assistance such as automating a software request process or creating an offboarding process for hardware assets via Microsoft Teams. Similarly, GSIs can get creative and automate IT operations management (ITOM) tasks such as getting deployment messages, logs and system health information via Microsoft Teams.

For GSIs and MSPs, the Citrix/ServiceNow integration opens a new world of opportunities. For ServiceNow customers, the integration of ServiceNow Virtual Agent with the Citrix ITSM Adapter is directly available to ServiceNow customers by downloading the Citrix ITSM Connector via the ServiceNow Store.