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.

IT Service Desks Aren’t Meeting the Needs of the Hybrid Workforce

With phone, email, and tickets still being the primary ways that employees get help from IT, it is fair to say that employee self-help hasn’t evolved much since 1992. Attempts at self-service portals have historically failed and today’s world has only become more complex with the 7/24 demands of a hybrid workforce. 

Some enterprises have tried to automate employee self-help by building their own virtual agents, but without adequate time and resources, those efforts have not delivered on the promise. Employees expect virtual agents to be as strong as Amazon Alexa, but that isn’t possible without an advanced language model fed by an enormous amount of data.    

In this webinar, guest speaker William McKeon-White, Forrester analyst, and Pat Calhoun, founder and CEO of Espressive, will discuss this dilemma along with the opportunities and challenges in charting a path to automating your IT service desk.    

Speaker:

Pat Calhoun, CEO, Espressive

Pat Calhoun is a visionary leader with an intense focus on user experience and customer adoption. He has founded two companies – Airespace and Espressive. As CEO at Espressive, Pat is set to transform the enterprise self-service experience to a consumer-like approach that drives employee adoption and significantly reduces help desk calls. Espressive has helped companies like Dexcom, SurveyMonkey, and Guardant Health achieve high ticket deflection, containing costs while improving workforce productivity.    

Most recently, Pat served as senior vice president of product at ServiceNow where he was responsible for ServiceNow applications. Prior to that, he was general manager of the McAfee network security business. Pat holds 35 patents and has been published in more than 16 publications. 

Guest Speaker:

Will McKeon-White, Analyst, Forrester

Will McKeon-White works as an analyst on Forrester's infrastructure and operations (I&O) team, focusing on modern service delivery. His research helps enterprises understand and capitalize on advances in processes and technologies for more effective IT and business service delivery, including enterprise service management (ESM) and IT service management (ITSM) and the use of ChatOps and chatbot capabilities to facilitate better help desk and employee support, incident resolution, and IT team effectiveness.   

Prior to becoming a researcher, Will was a research associate with Forrester's I&O team, covering various technology topics, including ESM, automation, cloud, robotic process automation (RPA), disaster recovery technologies, infrastructure transformation, and composable infrastructure.