5 Questions to Ask Vendors to Determine if Their Virtual Agents are Conversational

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.

How to Identify True Conversational AI

With a renewed focus on cost containment, many organizations are looking to use automation to help reduce costs while boosting employee productivity. With that in mind, you may be researching ways to automate employee self-help with an AI-based virtual support agent. If so, you need to understand what is meant by “conversational AI” before you make a decision.

Read this eBook to learn:

• The key requirements for AI to be truly conversational
• The five questions to ask a vendor prior to making a decision
• The employee experience resulting from true conversational AI

With true conversational AI, you should expect ticket deflection rates of 62% or higher. If vendor case studies are reporting less than that, that is a sign that you should keep looking. A virtual support agent with true conversational AI will not only help you save costs via automation, but will also give your employees a self-help experience that increases both satisfaction and productivity.