Fast, accurate answers to business-critical questions

How do you define an IT hero? In the world of IT, the unsung heroes are help desk technicians who are trained across various departments or applications. They quickly find answers to help solve a user’s problem. But how do organizations find these tech warriors? They often turn to the expertise of a managed service provider (MSP) to augment their help desk capabilities.

MSPs and their highly capable teams strengthen help desk services for organizations. However, they often face significant challenges due to the increasing complexity of IT environments and elevating customer expectations. Over the past two decades, MSPs have helped businesses focus on core competencies while managing their IT infrastructure, with help desk technicians often troubleshooting diverse applications for multiple customers simultaneously. Despite their efforts, approximately 50% of customers still perceive their issues as inadequately addressed upon ticket closure.

CrushBank, an award-winning AI application designer and IT service provider in the New York metro area, understood these challenges firsthand after managing support for various enterprises, from small law firms to large medical practices. Help desk engineers, expected to master multiple IT applications and client configurations, struggled to meet customer demands for immediate resolutions.

Brian Mullaney, Principal and Chief Revenue Officer at CrushBank, highlighted the inefficiencies of the existing help desk model. “In many organizations, engineers spend roughly 50% of their time searching for information in an ocean of data, much of it unstructured and not easily retrievable. This not only diminishes productivity but also inflates costs, funding more data retrieval rather than problem-solving.”

These challenges directly impact customer experiences and satisfaction, potentially leading to business losses. Due to data overload, companies and their help desks are overwhelmed, grappling with delayed decision-making and operational slowdowns.

CrushBank sought a solution that would use advanced AI technology to efficiently sift through both structured and unstructured data. They partnered with IBM and deployed IBM® watsonx.ai®, an enterprise-grade AI studio, to revolutionize how MSPs and enterprises interact with and use their data—enhancing efficiency, reducing costs, and improving customer satisfaction. To organize and manage this information effectively, CrushBank also uses IBM® watsonx.data™ as a central, governed store for structured and unstructured knowledge, ensuring the AI can reliably retrieve relevant content.

CrushBank’s strategic collaboration with IBM, particularly the integration of watsonx.ai into CrushBank Neuro, has yielded substantial benefits for their customers. A key advantage of this partnership is the significant reduction in average help desk ticket resolution time. “We’re seeing about a 40% increase in the number of tickets that our customers can close a day,” says David Tan, CTO at CrushBank. “So that obviously means they can grow the business. They can bring in more customers, they can expand without having increased headcount.”

Customers using CrushBank’s AI-powered platform have seen a 25% reduction in average time to resolution, significantly improving overall responsiveness. They have also realized a 20% increase in first-call resolution, reducing escalations and enhancing the customer’s experience.

CrushBank’s solutions offer more than just increased efficiency. They position internal and external help desk teams as integral parts of the customer experience, fostering deeper expertise often missing in remote support. This approach has also led to higher customer satisfaction scores and improved overall customer experience, driven by elevated first-level resolution rates and swift call responses.

Moreover, CrushBank’s applications help mitigate the financial and operational impacts of high staff turnover. By incorporating the collective knowledge of top-performing engineers into their data, CrushBank captures the patterns of expertise, ensuring that institutional knowledge is maintained and benefits the team. Mullaney clarifies that the goal of using CrushBank applications is not to reduce headcount. “We use the term ‘employee-machine partnership,’” he says. “We’re not looking to replace people. We want to make people better, faster and more efficient at their jobs. And we’re looking to make working at a help desk a better experience for the employee and the person they’re supporting simultaneously.”

Training and onboarding new hires has also become a more streamlined process with CrushBank. Instead of requiring extensive knowledge of various systems and resources, new employees can quickly locate solutions via intuitive searches, boosting productivity. “New employees onboarded in six weeks can effectively resolve customer problems because they don’t need to know everything,” says Mullaney. “They can find everything with a one-sentence search.”

In essence, CrushBank’s collaboration with IBM and the implementation of watsonx.ai in CrushBank Neuro have created a powerful synergy that empowers MSPs and help desk professionals to optimize their workforces, enhance customer experiences and maintain institutional knowledge, all while fostering a culture of collaboration between humans and AI.

Founded in 2017 in Syosset, New York, by two veteran MSP owners each with more than 25 years of experience, CrushBank developed the first AI-enabled IT help desk application. Using cognitive computing principles, the CrushBank solution analyzes, learns and informs decisions in the same way engineers and support teams do. CrushBank streamlines help desk operations, reducing escalations to Level 2 and above. Help desk engineers see an increase in productivity, and users experience increased satisfaction with more first-call resolutions.