Reducing Employee Dependence on Calling the IT Service Desk White Paper

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.

Reducing Employee Dependence on Calling the IT Service Desk White Paper

IT service desks have been plagued with high call volumes for years. Research demonstrates that employees overwhelmingly choose phone as their top method for reaching out to IT, which is surprising considering their dissatisfaction with IT phone support. Yet in their consumer lives, most employees have left the idea of calling a phone number for help behind thanks to consumer apps that make it fast and easy to get help online.

How do you reduce employee dependence on the phone in their professional lives? One way is to deliver a consumer-like experience to employees with a virtual agent and to implement organizational change management (OCM) best practices that encourage them to adopt.

This white paper looks at how some organizations have managed to reduce or eliminate IT phone support successfully. You will also learn:

• Why employees still call IT despite initiatives to reduce service desk call volumes
• How to bring automation to your ITSM with an AI-based virtual agent
• The importance of OCM and best practices for helping resistant employees adopt
• Blueprint and three case studies for reducing employee dependence on calling IT