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.

Pulse Report: The State of ITSM

Traditional IT Service Management (ITSM) tools focus on solving the problems of the service desk, rather than the needs of employees. The result is that self-service tools fall short of employee expectations, so employee adoption is low and service desk call volume is high. That means a large portion of a CIO’s budget goes to answering repetitive calls versus strategic initiatives.

This survey is intended to gain a better understanding of what enterprises are experiencing relative to their ITSM tools. Here are a few of the things respondents were asked to report:

• Their top ITSM initiatives in the coming year
• The percentage of tickets that are resolved without humans
• What employees are saying relative to their ITSM tools
• Their current position relative to adding a chatbot/AI to their ITSM tools