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 Solar Turbines' IT Help Desk Dealt with the Sudden Work From Home Mandates

On April 21st we hosted a webinar – an opportunity for attendees to be up close and personal with the leader of a 500-person IT Client Support Services Team.

John Powers, head of IT Client Support Services at Solar Turbines (a Caterpillar company) and Pat Calhoun, founder and CEO of Espressive, discussed John’s world and how it was impacted by the sudden work from home mandate.

John walked through what that world looked like before March 16, 2020, what it looked like the following weeks, and what it looks like now. He demonstrated how and why he made intelligent automation part of his IT help desk business continuity plan before COVID-19 ever struck.

Speakers:

John Powers, Head of IT Client Support Services at Solar Turbines

Pat Calhoun, CEO and Founder of Espressive