Digital Transformation Should Start with Your Help Desk.

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.

Cost Containment is Driving Digital Transformation

The 2020 pandemic brought seismic shifts to organizations, the economy, and the world, impacting both employees and employers. While work from home mandates struck in March of 2020, they are expected to stay.

And while the economy is recovering, budgets are not. A CIO survey at a recent Gartner conference revealed that IT budgets are only growing 2% in 2021. That means cost containment is still paramount, which is a primary catalyst for digital transformation.

Many enterprises have already experienced new mandates for digital transformation in order to achieve cost containment. This had a direct impact on the IT help desk, as they had to: (1) support a remote workforce 24/7; (2) handle a 35% increase in inquiries; and (3) support the launch of digital technologies. The traditional help desk no longer works—the negative impact to your budget, workforce productivity, and employee satisfaction are too great.

If you’re rolling out new digital technologies to reduce costs without first automating your help desk, your agents will be overwhelmed, and your employees won’t get the support they need. When that occurs, your efforts to save money might end up costing you more.

This eBook discusses:

• Why digital transformation should begin with your internal help desk;
• Case studies of enterprises who automated their help desks with a virtual support agent (VSA);
• Three key requirements for selecting a VSA for employee self-help.