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.

Is 2020 the Year of the Chatbot for CHROs?

There is significant evidence that, in 2020, CIOs are allocating budget for artificial intelligence (AI) in the form of chatbots for IT service management (ITSM). Successful implementations will yield a quick return on investment as Tier 1 support becomes automated. But are CHROs motivated to do the same thing?

Join Conner Forrest, Senior Analyst, Workforce Productivity & Compliance, at 451 Research and Pat Calhoun, CEO and founder of Espressive, as they discuss whether 2020 is the year of the Chatbot for CHROs. Conner will explore these topics:

• Why 2020 will be a race to improve the employee experience through intelligent automation
• Why consumer-like self-service experiences are expected by employees and will be a differentiator
• How workforce productivity has become both an IT and an HR issue, giving HR a bigger seat at the table
• Why IT should take ownership of the overall chatbot strategy for the entire enterprise, ensuring success for HR while avoiding "chatbot soup"

Conner Forrest, Senior Analyst, Workforce Productivity & Compliance, at 451 Research

Conner Forrest is a Senior Analyst with the Workforce Productivity and Compliance team at 451 Research. His areas of focus are content management, HR tech and corporate performance management. Before joining 451 Research, Conner worked as a senior editor with CBS Interactive, covering a variety of enterprise tech trends. He received a Bachelor of Science in Communication from the University of Louisville and a Master of Science in Journalism from Northwestern University.

Pat Calhoun, CEO and Founder of Espressive

Pat is a visionary leader with an intense focus on user experience and customer adoption. As CEO at Espressive, Pat is set to transform the enterprise self-help experience to a consumer-like approach that drives employee adoption and significantly reduces help desk call volume. Pat’s first startup, Airspace, grew revenues to over $80M in two years before being sold to Cisco for $450M. Pat served as senior vice president of product at ServiceNow, general manager of the network security business for McAfee, CTO for the Cisco switching, routing, wireless, and security access business, and GM of the Cisco identity business. Pat holds 35 patents and has been published in more than 16 publications.