Pulse Report: IT Service Management Strategies in the New Normal

Energy Company Cuts Costs While Achieving Employee Satisfaction and Productivity

Challenges

The IT service desk team at this financial technology (fintech) company used a public-facing IT channel on Slack as a means for employees to get help. This caused a strain on the service desk since agents had to constantly monitor the channel, negatively impacting MTTR and employee productivity. In addition, top use cases required agents to handle them, taking significant agent bandwidth for highly repetitive tasks. Also, while the company invested in building knowledge content in Confluence, they had no visibility into what content was working.

Solutions

By making Espressive Barista available via direct messages on Slack, the number of questions going to the public IT channel was dramatically reduced. Barista integrates with Slack as a native app, answering employee questions or creating tickets in Jira on their behalf. The company automated their top use cases, including one that required a custom integration between Barista and their CMDB, enabled by the Barista Control Center. Also, because Barista enables feedback at the end of every transaction, the service desk team can identify content gaps and required updates.

Results

With Barista integrated into Slack, employees save time by receiving immediate, personalized answers. And with fewer employees relying on the public IT channel, agents are able to focus on more strategic initiatives. Now Barista deflects over 3,300 tickets per month, including 500+ that are fully automated (e.g., VPN connection issues, password reset), significantly reducing MTTR.

With Barista integrated into Slack, employees save time by receiving immediate, personalized answers. And with fewer employees relying on the public IT channel, agents are able to focus on more strategic initiatives. Now Barista deflects over 3,300 tickets per month, including 500+ that are fully automated (e.g., VPN connection issues, password reset), significantly reducing MTTR.

Pulse Report: IT Service Management Strategies in the New Normal

Work from home mandates from COVID-19 created an immediate need for IT teams to enable employees to work remotely. For digital native enterprises where most employees were already equipped to work from home this was not a huge issue. But nondigital natives had to scramble to provision the services and hardware required to make this happen. This report looks at the impact that this had on IT help desks.

Specifically, the Pulse Report on IT Service Management Strategies in the New Normal addresses these key questions:

• Did IT help desk ticket volume rise as employees moved to work from home? Was time to resolve tickets impacted?
• Did the way in which employees contacted IT change? Did cost per ticket change?
• Are virtual agents in use for employee self-help? If not, are they being considered?
• How important is a virtual agent to business continuity?