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.

The Definitive Guide to Virtual Agents

What You Need to Know Before You Buy

Cost containment, employee experience, and digital transformation are top business priorities in 2021 as a result of the pandemic. All of these have accelerated the demand for virtual agents for employee self-help.

But how do you deploy a virtual agent that will give you high ticket deflection, while improving employee satisfaction and workforce productivity? Do you build in house? Leverage a toolkit? Buy off the shelf?

This definitive guide to virtual agents will give you an in-depth understanding of what you need to know before you buy. In it you will learn:

• Virtual agent basics
• What's driving help desk automation
• How to determine whether a virtual agent is "conversational"
• What to look for in a language model that delivers high accuracy
• A checklist for what is important related to content, automation, and resolution
• The difference between light and deep integrations with ITSM tools
• Important considerations to ensure high adoption
• And much, much more

Download the definitive guide today.