IT helpdesk Archives - BotCore

Amid COVID-19, How Are Chatbots Solving IT Help Desk Challenges

Jagan Jami — Mon, 30 Mar 2020 11:03:00 +0000

Amid COVID-19, How Are Chatbots Solving IT Help Desk Challenges

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a serious wake up call for companies which put digital transformation and AI adoption in the back-burner. It made us all realize that adopting emerging digital and AI technologies is not so much an option but a necessity.

One significant area where digital transformation has become critical is ITSM. In the past few weeks, we have seen IT help desks in several companies struggling to manage the sudden unprecedented surge in incidents, issues and requests. Some of our key observations include:

Incidents are continuing to grow as a large number of employees are trying to access different types of applications simultaneously and remotely
In order to maintain smooth operations, organizations are rushing to rollout critical business apps without proper testing. Once the issues are detected in the production environment, more incidents come up
Incidents and requests range from simple ones like setting up VPNs, authentication issues to complex ones like accelerating the deployment of new digital initiatives to ensure business continuity
When troubleshooting end users’ issues with SaaS apps, it’s becoming difficult for service desks to determine whether the issue is related to the network connection, users’ equipment or the app itself

Ensuring that an IT helpdesk is running hassle free at all times has been an ongoing challenge for many enterprises even before this pandemic. Many of these organizations already face a shortage of help desk staff. And with the new unique challenges, the situation is becoming further overwhelming. Employees are being kept on hold for hours before their issue is resolved. Just imagine the loss of productivity.

How IT Helpdesk Chatbots Can Help?

A huge volume of requests are usually ‘basic’ or ‘simple’ questions that take a lot of time to answer. When most of your workforce is working remotely, the overhead on the helpdesk team to resolve such queries is huge.

One of the easiest ways to overcome these challenges is to deploy an IT Helpdesk Chatbot and enable self-service to employees.

A chatbot is not only a powerful solution to address repetitive and low-value requests but also super easy to deploy.

A chatbot will be available 24*7 on any device and can handle requests across the organization simultaneously. This will allow your IT staff to move away from a reactive environment where they are constantly putting out fires and focus on productive and proactive tasks.

Chatbots conduct multi-turn conversations (something most help desk requests involve) and guide users to resolve the issue through a series of steps.

In addition to solving simple requests and low-value tickets, chatbots are becoming increasingly intelligent to address several complex queries as well. The AI, NLP and ML integrated in a chatbot helps it learn from previous conversations, understand user intent better and deliver smarter responses.

When the chatbot can’t handle a particular query, it’ll handover the conversation to a human agent.

With low-code chatbot builder platforms like Microsoft Virtual Agents and BotCore, you can build and deploy a simple FAQ bot within hours and with limited resources! These chatbots also come with prebuilt connectors and easily integrate with your existing help desk platforms like ServiceNow, JIRA, Freshdesk etc.

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Benefits Of A IT helpdesk Bot

Easy and quick rollout
Seamless integration
Super fast responses
Reduced cost per ticket and IT support costs
Improved productivity of help desk agents
Eliminate calls and emails: The bot acts as a single point of contact for help desk requests
24X7 availability in both mobile and desktop devices
Real-time alerts
Enterprise level security
Employee self-service

Learn More: How AI Bots Can Revolutionize Enterprise Helpdesk?

Key Capabilities To Look For In A IT helpdesk Bot

Incident Management
Incident notifications
Incident creation
Submit change requests
New change request notifications
Task notifications and notes
Outage Management
Sends outage alerts
Displays real time outages
Sends outage reports
Security Management
Reset passwords for devices and network and generate tokens
Disable, wipe or suspend device
Real-Time Alerts
Access request notifications
Asset request notifications
Outage alerts
Authentication alerts
Human Hand off

The chatbot should be intelligent enough to recognize situations where it can’t help the user and should hand over the conversation to an agent. As soon as the bot learns that a human intervention is required, it should present users with an option to “chat with an agent”. Once the user clicks the option, an agent takes over the conversation.

Learn More: Chatbots Human Handoff

Get Started With A IT Helpdesk Chatbot

We are forced into the largest work-from-home experiment and many employees have little to no experience in adopting the new environment. Right from setting up their home offices, VPNs, to adopting video conferencing and collaboration apps, employees are facing a myriad of challenges and flooding the helpdesk with repetitive requests. An ITSM chatbot streamlines the helpdesk workflow, enables self-service and acts as a level-1 support agent.

If you’d like to learn more about this topic, please feel free to get in touch with one of our AI and ITSM experts for a personalized consultation.

The post Amid COVID-19, How Are Chatbots Solving IT Help Desk Challenges appeared first on BotCore.

10 Powerful Benefits Of Chatbots In Customer Service

Abhishek Shanbhag — Thu, 12 Jul 2018 11:34:00 +0000

10 Powerful Benefits Of Chatbots In Customer Service

Thanks to artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies, today’s chatbots have become invaluable tools for customer service operations. They are not only streamlining and optimizing customer experiences at every stage in the service process but are also proving to be helpful aids to customer service representatives. Here are 10 powerful benefits of adopting chatbots for customer service:

24/7 CUSTOMER SERVICE

Maintaining a support team that can care for customers at all hours can be very costly, but customers’ needs may arise outside of business hours. Frustration can build when problems are not addressed immediately, so providing a way for customers to ask questions and get answers at any time can be a major relief and a way to increase satisfaction as well as customer retention. Because chatbots allow customers to get help at any time, businesses can leave a positive impact on their minds even if service staff are unavailable.

RESOLUTION SPEED

A direct result of 24/7 availability is the obvious benefit of increased resolution speed. Quick response and fix to a problem can be the difference between keeping a customer or having them abandon a service. A chatbot can tap into a database and provide answers to questions immediately, at any time. Even if a human agent needs to intervene and provide further support, chatbots cut the workload and allow agents to focus on the more critical steps in finding solutions to customers’ problems.

INSTANT RESPONSE

As previously mentioned, even if chatbots can’t solve a problem immediately, they can at least provide an instant response relevant to the customer’s query. Customers do not like to wait for help but staffing costs do not justify keeping a large enough live team at all hours to guarantee that they get help immediately. Chatbots can be the first point of contact, reduce customer frustration, and fill in for agents when needed. Even if a follow up is required, the customer can feel well cared for due to the quick initial response.

REDUCED OPERATIONAL COSTS AND IMPROVED MORALE

One of the most immediate benefits of chatbots is monetary. Chatbots reduce operational costs by reducing staffing needs. A full-time support team is costly, so leaving the after-hours support to a chatbot provides enormous savings. Also, chatbots can handle tedious and repetitive tasks so human agents don’t have to. Agent productivity increases as they don’t have to answer repetitive and basic questions of customers. This saves time and money but also has the added benefit of positively impacting employee morale. People are much happier when they don’t have to reset passwords 100 times a day, for example.

LANGUAGE SUPPORT

Chatbots handle thousands of customer queries at once in multiple languages. They can not only work with several languages, but they can even understand different intents. This makes them very versatile and useful, especially for global companies. Sometimes it’s hard to find speakers of some languages, so these bots are a good alternative. While they cannot fully replace fluent human agents in all circumstances, they reduce the need to employ multiple language speakers as staff at all times.

CONSISTENCY AND ACCURACY (EVEN IN THE MOST REPETITIVE, LOW-VALUE TASKS)

The workload can be strenuous and tough on agents’ performance, especially when having to work on the same tasks over and over. Furthermore, they may sometimes experience off days, when they may not work to their full capacity. Chatbots have the benefit of needing no breaks and performing at the same level regardless of how many times they have to repeat an action.

DATA GATHERING OPPORTUNITIES

For people, it is hard to remember every part of a conversation, and it is even harder to analyze all the details in order to improve services and better meet customer expectations. Some chatbots, however, have the ability to gather analytics and can be trained to do so on the spot. Chatbots also give consistent responses that can be used to test customer responses without bias. This allows businesses to improve their service strategies.

REDUCED IVR FRUSTRATIONS

Most customers loathe the dreaded use of interactive voice response (IVR) systems during phone calls. Having to listen to the menu and being unable to get a personalized response is frustrating. To some people, it is even downright insulting. IVR systems are also too structured, and oftentimes leave no room for special requests or unique scenarios. Customers have very few choices and sometimes end up being routed to the wrong help team. Chatbots can fully replace these outdated systems. Customers can still be routed to the right team without the intervention of a human agent, but they at least feel like they are being cared for and understood. Finally, using a chatbot also reduces the time and cost associated with transferring a customer between different departments, especially if some of these transfers are wrong.

LESS CUSTOMER STRESS

Reducing stress and frustration happens on many different levels, not only when substituting IVR systems. Some customers may experience anxiety when having to contact the help department and explain their issue, for example. Having the option to speak to a chatbot instead reduces these fears. The immediate response and overall reduced resolution speed also lessen the negative emotional response that some customers may have. Chatbots streamline the entire customer service process and help keep customers happy and satisfied.

BETTER SELF SERVICE

Finally, while chatbots can help route customers to the right hands, some customers would rather find the solution to their issues independently. With improved machine learning technology, chatbots can direct customers to answers that will help them solve their own issues or gather the needed information. This helps keep a high level of customer satisfaction while simultaneously decreasing support tickets.

FINAL CONSIDERATIONS

Chatbots are becoming essential for a well-rounded and solid customer service strategy.
As you can see, chatbots provide responses and help that can either strengthen or substitute the need for two-way human intervention. This cuts operational costs and also leads to much greater levels of customer satisfaction.

BOTCORE – AN ENTERPRISE CHATBOT BUILDER PLATFORM

If you’re planning to customer service chatbots, you might be interested to check out our enterprise chatbot builder platform – BotCore which can be deployed both on cloud and on-premise environments. BotCore helps large and medium sized companies reduce customer service costs, improve agent productivity and enhance customer experience.

If you’d like to learn more about this topic, please feel free to get in touch with one of our experts for a personalized consultation.

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The post 10 Powerful Benefits Of Chatbots In Customer Service appeared first on BotCore.

How Chatbots Can Help IT Helpdesk Teams Hit SLA Target

Rakesh Reddy — Fri, 30 Mar 2018 21:26:00 +0000

How Chatbots Can Help IT Helpdesk Teams Hit SLA Target

30 percent of tickets are password-reset related despite the fact that 69% of support teams allow their customers to reset at least some of their passwords without contacting the IT helpdesk
– HDI

Ensuring that an IT help desk or service desk is running hassle free at all times is an ongoing challenge for enterprises across the world. IT is the backbone of the modern organization – all employees are highly dependent on efficient running of IT services. It is, therefore, not surprising that they expect an instant resolution for the IT issues they run into on a frequent basis.

Especially towards the end of holidays, complications seem to arise at a faster pace and at greater volumes. As employees return to work, there is a barrage of requests for password resets. Sounds like a simple task, but owing to its repetitive nature when multiplied by the number of employees across the organization, this endeavour becomes rather challenging and time-consuming.

A BRIEF LOOK AT THE CHALLENGES FACED BY IT HELPDESK TEAMS:

Employees waiting endlessly on call to get in touch with the IT team.
Manually creating tickets for every issue that occurs across the organization
Ticket dispatch to route all incoming tickets to the relevant technicians. As service requests can come from a variety of channels, such as emails, calls, chat, ticket dispatch can be challenging
Incident management, which is closely aligned with the helpdesk. The service desk is challenged with resolving any disruptions and restoring normal services as quickly as possible.
Lack of streamlined communication with end users on the status of the ticket. Too much time is wasted on operating across too many communication channels, such as email, chat, call, etc.
Several help desks are still stuck using legacy systems and outdated tools, which further complicates achieving efficiency and providing quick support. Both users and IT help desk staff are left fighting an uphill battle.

Interesting though, most IT helpdesk tickets are actually low-value items and typically repetitive. Often, they are issues related to password resets, or the VPN not working, etc. These are not issues that require extensive expertise to resolve, but they are still time-consuming and detract from your helpdesk from issues that require their deep-seated attention.

When your helpdesk is busy resolving low-value issues, it greatly diminishes the productivity of your employees as well as helpdesk teams. The subsequent outcome is that SLAs are often missed and the cost per ticket rises rapidly.

What organizations will need to consider strongly is finding a way to enable their support teams to spend more time on addressing complex issues and high-value tickets.

IT HELPDESK SLA BEST PRACTICES – CAN IT SELF SERVICE PORTALS HELP?

In an effort to address this challenge of the IT helpdesk expertise not being leveraged efficiently, several organizations have deployed IT self-service portals for automation.

However, they come with their own set of challenges:

Flaws in user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) across most of these portals has resulted in low adoption rates
End users find it bothersome to have to fill out the same information repeatedly, when creating an incident report
Checking ticket status can also be challenging due to inefficiencies in navigation
While a few portals have successfully overcome issues related to information accessibility and workflows, they still haven’t been able to set in motion a streamlined and collaborative method of ticket resolution

Learn more: Why Your Employee IT Self-Service Needs Bots Instead of Portals

HOW TO IMPROVE SLA PERFORMANCE -CAN CHATBOTS BE THE ANSWER?

Forward-thinking organizations are increasingly turning to chatbots in order to equip their IT helpdesk teams to perform with greater efficiency, as well as provide employees with a true self-service option.

WHAT CAN CHATBOTS IMPROVE SLA PERFORMANCE:

Employees can interact with the Bot to resolve most of the common issues without any intervention from Helpdesk staff, thereby effectively reducing the number of tickets
Bots can help employees raise a ticket which then can be routed to the right agent or the bot can seamlessly handoff the conversation to an agent if there comes a point where it can’t help the user any more: maintaining employee experience

Bots can help the agent resolve more requests by making all the relevant information available – Effectively reducing the time spent on each ticket
Agents motivation will be high as they can spend more time on high-value issues while the bot answers repetitive questions and resolves low-value requests.

Chatbots enable employees to raise tickets, find out ticket status and get their issues resolved, all by simply sending natural language questions to bots.

Below is a glimpse of important use cases that bots help accomplish:

Creating tickets and updating their status on an ongoing basis
Providing status updates and relevant details to the end user
Enabling lookups for access requests
Sending alerts for instant action and resolution
Enabling the bot to address frequently asked questions across various channels, such as live chat, Skype for Business, Email, and so on

Bots help save time and effort for the IT helpdesk staff, by addressing and resolving all basic queries from the knowledge basis. They also provide the option to raise a ticket, in case an issue is not resolved or even connect to a live support agent, in case of urgent and complex queries. Bots can be made to be available 24*7 to help employees across a variety of channels, such as Skype for Business, Microsoft Teams, Slack and so on.

As bots handle all day to day IT issues, a lot of time, money and effort is saved for your organization, which enables your helpdesk staff to concentrate on resolving queries that require deep expertise. As your staff becomes more productive, your cost per ticket diminishes by over 25%.

This is a particularly efficient solution for when your organization scales as well because the helpdesk would still only be approached for complex queries.

An efficient IT Helpdesk bot increases productivity, minimizes disruptions and keeps employees aware of ticket status. However, in order to truly harness the value, a bot can bring to your organization, ensure that it integrates with all of your current applications. This element of integration will further amplify employee engagement and collaboration across these platforms.

Are you considering leveraging AI bots for your IT helpdesk? Our AI-Powered IT helpdesk chatbot might interest you.

If you’d like to learn more about this topic, please feel free to get in touch with one of our experts for a personalized consultation.

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The post How Chatbots Can Help IT Helpdesk Teams Hit SLA Target appeared first on BotCore.

How AI will Impact IT Service Management

Abhishek Shanbhag — Mon, 19 Mar 2018 10:03:00 +0000

How AI Will Impact IT Service Management

If anyone were to put together a list of technologies with the greatest potential, Artificial Intelligence (AI) would undoubtedly top it. AI is maximizing effective utilization of technology in the workplace and altering the business workflow to its best form.

In fact, ITSM organizations have started using AI to achieve a new level of control and accelerate productivity like never before. Integrating AI technology in IT service management (ITSM) will create a smarter ITSM experience and enhance the way humans get involved with the service management process.

AI can improve ITSM experience in different ways; a basic one being by using AI-driven chatbots to handle low value IT support calls. Chatbots also have the capability to integrate with many of the legacy ITSM tools like ServiceNow, Freshdesk or Jira.

Gartner predicts that by 2020, 55% of all large enterprises will have deployed at least one bot or chatbot in production and AI augmentation will generate $2.9T in business value and recover 6.2B hours of worker productivity by 2021.

Enterprises are increasingly adopting chatbots for improving their business processes. Many B2B enterprises are looking forward to integrate chatbots on ITSM platforms, in order to eliminate traditional approaches and make the service process less complicated, less labor intensive and more cost-effective, all while also giving end users a higher level of customer service during every interaction with the IT service desk.

By implementing chatbots, organizations can witness tremendous benefits in the ITSM system:

Decrease in number of tickets raised and cost per ticket.
Fewer calls and shorter call durations.
Improved response times.
Enhanced employee productivity.
Reduced overall operational costs.

By 2019, 40% of enterprises will be actively using chatbots to facilitate business processes using natural-language interactions – Gartner

HERE ARE KEY AREAS IN WHICH AI TECHNOLOGY IS MAKING A POSITIVE IMPACT ON ITSM:

POINT OF ENTRY (INCIDENT/REQUEST CREATION)

IT Service Management systems are intended to help out employees at the workplace when affected with system issues. ITSM provides a self-service portal to raise requests and incidents whenever employees have trouble with their systems. Employees are required to fill out the online form to determine whether they are making a service request or an incident.

As per ITIL v3, incidents are split into two categories: service requests and incidents. An incident is an unplanned or unexpected interruption to an IT service which hampers employee work routine. For example, if an employee working on his regular activities encounters an unexpected interruption due to system malfunction or WiFi issue, he will then create an incident which will be attended to by an incident management team, to provide a quick fix.

Service requests are general requests originating from users requesting for something to be provided. For example, a service request can be raised to obtain access to the printer, upgrade to a higher version of a software or replace system components.

Unluckily, many service requests end up being incidents, and many incidents end up being service requests. As a result, service requests and incidents do not get resolved fast enough, subsequently affecting the employee experience.

However, IT service management organizations will continue to depend on human frontline analysts, until these types of challenges are resolved. This is because organizations fear that they might invest more time and money rectifying errors caused by miscommunication.

AI can make a difference here

Integrating AI technology helps to ensure information is accurately interpreted before it is entered into an IT Service Management system.

AI-powered chatbots will enable automated ITSM solutions with the capability to interpret incidents and requests accurately. As AI technology develops, we will see enhanced and personalized employee experience, in addition to improving the efficiency of the IT service management personnel.

Gartner claims that “Chatbots driven by artificial intelligence (AI) will play important roles in interactions with consumers, within the enterprise, and in business-to-business situations.”

AUTOMATED BACKEND PROCESSES

ITSM consists of backend processes that are designed to manage any request or issue entered into the system. Traditionally, these were entered by an analyst or an employee through a self-service portal.

Integrating AI technology in ITSM system can react to any issue based on updated patterns available in its knowledge base. AI-powered ITSM solutions can identify a ticket whether it is a service request or an incident and automatically open without human assistance.

Gartner states that “The next big shift is the convergence of technology products and services to create next-generation service offerings that will include AI platforms.

Further integration of ITSM with every system installed on the network will provide the ability to see much larger patterns, which makes it more efficient to solve issues and reduce human intervention in level 1 issues.

It can investigate the issue and cross-check the data with the IT security solution to find patterns that might explain the problem occurrence. ITSM solution identifies issues, provides insights and predictions about the problem and suggests steps to manage it.

As we move into the future, the AI-powered ITSM solution will be able to automatically correct level 1 issues without support staff involvement. However, human analysts will be engaged in more critical issues which will help increases overall employee efficiency and productivity.

KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT

ITSM systems with AI technology will have access to an infinite universe of knowledge that can help improve service management and employee experience. Knowledge-based ITSM solutions with AI will change the way employees ask for help and receive accurate answers to almost any question and in no time.

Since AI technology, including Machine Learning (ML), enables solutions to learn, these solutions will be able to access unlimited amounts of data in trusted knowledge databases and learn patterns that exist within an organization, which help to solve problems more efficiently.

These solutions will also help to solve problems based on infinite amounts of data and document these findings in knowledge databases which can be used by both support employees and data analysts when needed.

They will not only look to knowledge databases to provide answers to IT questions but also be able to provide training, tips and tricks for employees in the form of manuals, images, videos, etc. by applying deep learning techniques.

They will provide more current and relevant documents, and eventually override those created by human analysts. However, until AI is perfected over the next few decades, the human input will be vital for ITSM knowledge systems.

SELF-SERVICE FOR LOW-TIER INCIDENTS

In ITSM, a large number of service requests often small issues that don’t take a lot of time to get resolved. These low-tier incidents are quite large in number and force service desk agent to spend time doing repetitive tasks, forcing critical issues to remain on hold. Due to this, employee efficiency gets underutilized, which in turn affects their productivity.

AI technology can help resolve this challenge. AI-driven chatbots can deal with low-tier incidents by proving self-service options. These issues can be addressed by chatbots, thereby saving a lot of time for agents and employees alike. Besides, support agents can work instead on critical issues and maximize efficiency.

Acuvate’s IT Helpdesk bot is an IT self-service request chatbot, built using the powerful bot builder platform, BotCore. It supports IT helpdesk as a virtual assistant, providing real-time alerts and high-speed responses. This bot has 24×7 availability and can easily integrate into existing self-service systems.

THE FUTURE OF ITSM:

ITSM trends demand businesses to evolve continuously. In the future, ITSM analysts will shift their focus to major incidents (one-to-many), problem management, and change management.

ITSM system provides self-service portals integrated with AI-powered chatbots which resolve the low-tier, low value and level 1 issues without human intervention.

80% of businesses want chatbots by 2020! – Business Insider

Over time, human involvement for any low tier issues will continue to decrease. And expecting IT analysts to more focused on future business objectives instead of IT objectives.

Leveraging these AI technologies within ITSM creates huge opportunities for businesses to deliver outstanding employee experience. These technologies will amplify human support in real-time to meet the high demands of customers and increase productivity.

By 2019, IT service desks utilizing machine learning enhanced technologies will free up to 30% of support capacity – Gartner

Nevertheless, service management will never lose the spotlight on as a result of automation. As long as IT exists, ITSM will still remain the top priority of an organization needs.

If you haven’t adopted this trend already, you might lose big game!

Looking for a Chatbot that integrates perfectly with your existing ITSM tool. Check our BotCore an enterprise-ready conversation bot platform which is integrable on both cloud and on-premise environments. BotCore allows you to deploy enterprise chatbots, train, and manage according to your needs.

If you’d like to learn more about this topic, please feel free to get in touch with one of our experts for a personalized consultation.

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Different ways your business can use chatbots

Jagan Jami — Wed, 07 Feb 2018 14:43:00 +0000

Different Ways Your Business Can Use Chatbots

‘80% of businesses want chatbots by 2020’ is projected by Oracle. While there are some are rule-based chatbots built for simpler tasks, the story is treading towards AI powered chatbots for intelligent and complex tasks.

Businesses have created personas that are ubiquitous and have multiplied presence. Chatbots come with the privilege of responding without bias and with a consistent behaviour. A Business Insider survey in 2017 has reported that ‘48% of consumers prefer a chatbot that solves issues over a chatbot that has personality.’ The saturation of the app market and increase in usage of messenger apps led to the rise of bots.

Businesses have discovered many different ways to use these programmed personalities to solve business problems. Their functionality can be divided based on type of audience and business segment.

CHATBOTS IN THE BUSINESS TO CONSUMER (B2C)

B2C Chatbot success stories over Facebook platform and Kik have gained popularity for their versatility. Here are a few ways you can use chatbots in a B2C scenario

Many customer service automation bots like Flow XO, IMI bot are growing in number. A survey by Oracle claims that, ‘65% of consumers prefer using a messaging app when contacting a business’. The demand is rising because these bots are able to personalize customer service for each business
Bots also help in initiating an expression of gratitude to customers. Kudos bot lets you say thank you and organizes delivery. .
Gamification stitched with an altruistic objective. Karma collector bot that collects your karma and encourages people to help others in a gamified way.
Financial markets are not left out of the radar of chatbots. There are bots that monitor stocks as well as track simple domestic savings. My Kai is one such bot that helps manage your savings.
Freelancers, especially content marketing and writing professionals bet big time of content writing bots. Grammar correction bot, Grammarly in one such solution.
Giphy is an interesting search bot that sieves the entire web to find the type of GIFs you are looking for.
There are bots that work on lifestyle and behavioural issues too. Wysa is one of the robo-healers among many out there that help people in dealing with depression, break-ups and laziness.
Woebot uses chat conversations, sentiment and tone analysis and word games to help people who are looking for inexpensive therapy.
There is also a bot that helps people stay mindful all through the day, which happens to be a proven health enhancement technique. It is called Meditate Bot.
X, Amy and a few hundreds of bots out there are programmed to be a personal assistant. They help in scheduling meetings, sending reminders and drafting emails, setting auto-responders all through the day. This eliminates the hassle of training and attrition.
Hello Era, Sephora and 1800 are some chatbots that are directed towards influencing purchase for their respective brands. They are designed to offer personalized information for those trying to make respective purchase decisions.

Some of these bots are also applicable to a B2B scenario. Chatbots for customer support and engagement are used by B2B businesses too.

CHATBOTS IN THE BUSINESS TO BUSINESS (B2B)

For B2B, chatbot solutions are fewer in comparison to B2C. However, it is not too far to see this number growing. Bots are supporting companies in majority of the functions starting from marketing, finance, workforce management and recruitment. A survey by Hubspot has revealed that 57% of consumers are interested in chatbots for their instantaneity.

Interview process management bot. Helps you to organize and manage interview person for a candidate. Gecko is an AI powered interview bot that uses video to help you screen candidates.
Meet Alex and Mya are few other AI powered bots that can help a recruiter with screening candidates and job interview scheduling. Some bots are also created to help you with interviewer feedback and job advertisements.
Marketing is now about being personalized and targeting to only those who matter to the business. Bixtext offers personalized marketing using artificial intelligence.
Tata Capital has achieved 600% increase in lead generation with the help of chatbot. There is another bot called Drift that helps in generating qualified leads using conversations.

CHATBOTS IN THE BUSINESS TO ENTERPRISE (B2E)

Organizations are more concerned now about being future-ready than ever before. Chatbots have proven their productivity is delivering high ROI in other spheres of business. To empower different elements of an Enterprise, organizations are building their own bots using bot builder platforms. To grow internally organizations face many behavioural and adoption challenges. Chatbots help in filling these gaps and improving productivity.

Gartner’s research points that almost 40% of intranets fail due to low adoption rates. Once deployed on organizational messaging apps like Skype for Business Skype Slack etc Chatbots extract info from intranet and present it to employees via QnA interface. At Acuvate, chatbots can resolve this situation for Sharepoint Intranet initiatives. We call this MeshBOT. It is agile and helps in mitigating intranet adoption. It empowers employees to optimally utilize intranet. As employees interact with MeshBOT it gathers information and patterns, which enables it to provide a personalised experience.

Every company has ideal and aspirational SLAs for its IT team. However, either due to under resourced teams, lack of time or decision making bottlenecks, the IT helpdesk team fails to fulfil the criteria. The self-service IT helpdesk bot not only empowers the IT team, but with fast response, it also helps the entire organization by rendering information in time. Bots for IT helpdesk increase support staff and employee productivity. They answer simple and basic questions of employees such as password reset etc. and thereby reduce ticket costs.

There is a high demand for business intelligence bots. Bots eliminate the need for users to visit multiple BI systems and can boost BI user adoption. Our Sales Intelligent Assistant (SIA), an AI powered chatbot integrates with Data Warehouse/ Line of Business systems or your CRM and enables the sales teams to chat and quickly obtain relevant information regarding key metrics.

Company financial performance monitoring bot. This is an internal tool that could be run by the CFO and her team.
Chatbots are changing the face of how HR is conducted. They help in automating several HR tasks like onboarding employees. This onboarding bot helps a person to find the right things, complete tasks in the best order etc. Donut is an onboarding and pairing bot that helps a new employee complete all the necessary tasks in the designated time. Such bots also track with the progress of an employee’s essential tasks.

Strategically implemented bots offer a lot of use cases for enterprises. At Acuvate, we conduct workshops for enterprise business and IT leaders to recognize use cases with the organization. Our free e-book helps you discover how to develop resources, get started with a chatbot program and how to choose an enterprise bot builder platform . If you are eager to build your own chatbot, get started at www.botcore.ai.

If you’d like to learn more about this topic, please feel free to get in touch with one of our experts for a personalized consultation.

FREE EBOOK

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The post Different ways your business can use chatbots appeared first on BotCore.

How Can AI Bots Increase IT Helpdesk Support Efficiency?

Jagan Jami — Fri, 26 Jan 2018 10:36:00 +0000

How Can AI Bots Increase IT Helpdesk Support Efficiency?

In the rapidly evolving digital landscape, enterprises are constantly facing challenges to balance the act of minimizing costs and driving efficiencies.

In the enterprise, IT helpdesk has become an indispensable part of business operations. It is playing a critical role in supporting business users with uninterrupted technology services.

Without IT helpdesk, employees would keep running into level 1 general issues that could affect their productivity.

However IT helpdesk efficiency is affected by a plethora of factors. These include:

Having to attend to low-value tickets.
Ongoing resolution of basic issues.
Employees approaching IT support team for trivial issues such as password reset and subsequently having to wait long hours till the issue gets resolved.

Changing workplace dynamics are bringing in a growing range of variable affecting IT helpdesk support.

UNDERSTANDING CHATBOTS

Basically, chatbots are simple AI programs that interact with users through the conversational interface. The main concepts that are driving the development of chatbots are artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Chatbots are revolutionizing the way B2E, B2B, B2C and C2C interactions work. They are designed in such a way that they get better and better by understanding the user based on the inputs the user provides, thereby saving a lot of money and time for organizations.

“By 2020, at least 80% of new enterprise application releases will make reasonably strong use of chatbots for conversational, AI-rich applications” – Gartner.

Chatbots also have the capability to extract data from user/FAQ guides which help employees resolve issues without having to refer to a guidebook. Employees can get answers to their questions using regular messaging channels like Skype, Skype for business etc.

BENEFITS OF IT HELPDESK WITH CHATBOTS

Using AI in IT helpdesk will enhance human support in real-time to meet the demands of employees and increase productivity. Here are a few ways that chatbots can increase your IT helpdesk’s efficiency:

ACCORDING TO GARTNER, “BY 2019, IT SERVICE DESKS UTILIZING MACHINE LEARNING ENHANCED TECHNOLOGIES WILL FREE UP TO 30% OF SUPPORT CAPACITY.”

ASSISTING EMPLOYEES:

IT helpdesk support team helps in providing information regarding products and services of the organization, troubleshooting, answering FAQs and IT policies, whenever employee raises a request. Addressing these regular and repeated activities could affect their productivity and in turn affect the cost to the company.

Introducing chatbots in IT helpdesk brings in a perfect value add of productivity and cost efficiency.

Using chatbots in IT helpdesk, helps organizations to address level 1 issues(regular and repeated) activities, manage tickets and provide self-service options. This helps in increasing the overall staff efficiency and ensures best support capabilities.

It addresses level 1 IT support issues by a quick chat using conversational UI. Chatbot provides options like quick troubleshooting, spread awareness about IT policies & initiatives, FAQ’s etc., using which employees can solve their general issues easily.

24/7 AVAILABILITY:

Extending support after office hours is always a challenge in the enterprise environment. When an issue arises after office hours or during downtime, solving it gets tough. So, these issues are added to queue till the support staff gets time to address them which leads to a slowdown in productivity.

Introducing chatbots in the IT helpdesk system helps in overcoming these problems and resolving issues effectively. They provide a unique range of options to solve the issues immediately. One doesn’t need to wait for the support staff for the resolution. Employees working late would always have a virtual support staff member addressing issues on time.

IT helpdesk chatbot also provides different troubleshooting scenarios which come handy even if the support staff isn’t available immediately.

24/7 availability of a virtual IT helpdesk support staff brings in a superior value-add to the existing IT helpdesk. Talk to us to know more.

INTEGRATE WITH LEGACY IT SYSTEMS (ITSM PLATFORMS):

According to HDI: “As a rule of thumb, if an end user spends more than 10 minutes in a self-service portal, they cost the organization more money than calling the service desk.

With AI technology such as smart machines making their way into enterprise world, AI is, like it or not, going to be a dominant solution in any ITSM system.

There simply aren’t enough resources for analysts to get personally involved with so many requests and tickets. For better or worse, human intervention for every request or one to one incident will not be sustainable. We will see numerous organizations use chatbots with AI abilities as a way to deal with.

Do employees need to call the IT helpdesk or fill the lengthy forms online to address their issues? Chatbots change these circumstances.

With the integration of chatbots, ITSM can be easier, faster, and convenient too.

An AI-powered chatbot is a key value for ITSM framework. It has the capability to integrate with many of the legacy ITSM tools like ServiceNow, Freshdesk or Jira. With these integrations, Chatbot will also have the capability to search in the respective ITSM tool knowledge bases to answer the end user questions.

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Looking for an IT helpdesk Chatbot that integrates perfectly with your existing ITSM tool. Click here.

MODERNIZING INCIDENT MANAGEMENT:

Some of the IT helpdesk staff are often found working on categorizing/ routing incidents. Addressing these incidents manually is not only time-consuming but also error-prone. Indeed, even the most experienced IT support staff find it difficult to categorize a wide range of incidents raised at a given point of time. Due to this, most of the repeated issues stand in the queue and wait for its turn to get resolved.

Chatbot in IT helpdesk provide employees with quick links about troubleshooting technique using the conversation UI. If the issue raised is among the repetitive tasks a chatbot is trained to solve, employees will be provided with the resolving techniques. If not, chatbot pops up an option of registering the ticket in their legacy incident management system.

Chatbot helps the support staff in gathering the data from multiple systems to check the previous incident records of the employee for faster resolution and help an employee to keep track the status of the ticket.

Additionally, chatbot also helps the support team by generating a brief report on the number of tickets raised on a particular day. It gives detailed insights about tickets which are opened/ in the queue/ assigned. It also provides an option to search all open/high priority tickets for specific support agent and set up an alert for the support team.

SELF SERVICE:

For most of the issues, time is the main issue, even if it is a simple task like password reset. Employees tend to raise a complaint in IT helpdesk and wait for their turn to get access to their logins.

If the support staff is busy in fixing an issue, they may not be able to manage any incoming requests, even if it is a high priority. Due to this, employee work time gets underutilized, in turn affecting their productivity.

These issues can be better addressed by integrating chatbots into IT helpdesk applications. Chatbots create a self-service interface where an employee can instantly get access to the credentials within no time. During this process, employee validates their identity using Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) and get the issue resolved without any helpdesk support staff interference. Thereby, the employee can work uninterruptedly by resolving his issues without any dependency on IT team and make room for support staff to work efficiently on other high priority issues.

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Check out our IT Helpdesk Bot where employees can have the chat with a Bot available as a contact in messaging channels like Skype, Skype for business, Slack, Facebook Messenger etc. and reset the password using MFA.

LOW MTTR (MEAN TIME TO RESOLUTION):

Mean Time to resolution depicts the health of the IT helpdesk support in an organization.

Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) is the time between an incident being submitted and the time taken to resolve it. Tickets will be raised continuously and support staff may or maynot be available to address them in the expected time.

Service degradations and service interruptions can fundamentally affect both IT and business activities. IT support team should precisely measure incident response time to control service quality, outages and the cost to the company.

By integrating AI-powered chatbots in IT helpdesk, most of the repetitive tasks or issues will be addressed by the chatbot using self-service options/ troubleshooting techniques. This reduces the number of tickets waiting in the queue influencing the overall MTTR. Lower MTTR is the key factor in showcasing the efficiency of the IT helpdesk service.

The more the tickets received and the lesser the time it takes to resolve, there is an upsurge in the business productivity and eventually its bottom-line.

REDUCED COST PER TICKET:

For every organization, cost, or precisely unit cost, is basically important. Cost per ticket is a measure of how effectively an IT helpdesk service conducts work and leads its business.

“A RECENT HDI STUDY FOUND THAT THE AVERAGE COST PER SERVICE DESK TICKET, IN NORTH AMERICA (NA) IS $15.56. COST PER TICKET INCREASES SIGNIFICANTLY EACH TIME THE INCIDENT IS ESCALATED.”

Moreover, there are likewise indirect expenses for IT support directors/chiefs, equipment, facilities and training etc., that must be figured into the cost per ticket metric.

If chatbots are introduced in IT helpdesk, general issues get resolved and reduce the number of tickets which in turn lower the MTTR. The faster the MTTR, the lower its cost per ticket.

Minor/general issues will be resolved by chatbots using troubleshooting techniques and self-service options which help support personals not to keep running into general issues. They get engaged in resolving major issues which help them increase their productivity and cut the cost per ticket by working only on issues which are not addressed by chatbots.

TICKET ACTIVITY PERFORMANCE REPORTS:

IT helpdesk receive issues from different departments of the organization. If an employee raises an issue in the IT help desk application, the support staff or personnel will address the issue and continue to resolve other issues which are in the queue.

IT helpdesk cannot make a concise view where a similar kind of issues are occurring repeatedly. Resolving these frequent issues daily decrease the efficiency of the support staff.

Introducing chatbots in IT helpdesk helps in generating performance reports on the number of tickets raised, the number of tickets resolved, generate time-sheet and provide a report on frequent occurring issues.

By this report, the IT helpdesk personnel or organization can invest in the resource to reduce frequently occurring issues and helps in increasing work efficiency of the staff and increase productivity to the company.

MONITOR YOUR AGENT’S PERFORMANCE:

Monitoring IT infrastructures often involves tedious tasks multiple interactions and gathering reports from different legacy systems. This allows managers to identify problems, maintain quality standards and improve the overall experience.

Introducing chatbot in such a scenario paves a way to get the reports by simply having a quick chat with the chatbot. Chatbot can be integrated with AD/user profile servers/performance review system to track the overall progress of the employees and scale the productivity.

It can generate reports of the individual performance on daily/weekly/monthly basis and keep updating the status to the management team.

HUMAN HAND-OFF:

An AI-powered chatbot operates turn-by-turn discussion with the employee. Chatbots recognize keywords provided by an employee in the chat conversation and respond by matching queries with pre-set messages in its knowledge base and assist employees quickly.

Chatbots, unlike humans, don’t always guess correctly, and invalid responses will frustrate the user. So, to avoid all these users are provided with clear and smooth transition to human agents.

If the chatbot is not trained to answer a specific question, user will have an option to interact with human agents and address their issue.

Indeed, even after an operator is locked in, the bot remains as a background facilitator of the discussion.

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Overcome IT hurdles and provide consistent self-service answers with our IT helpdesk bot.

CONCLUSION

Chatbots have started to emerge into business consciousness and indeed acting as a major business productivity tool.

Gartner predicts that by 2019, 40% of enterprises will be actively using chatbots to facilitate business processes using natural-language interactions.

AI-powered chatbots can unplug IT bottlenecks and resolve the most repetitive questions effortlessly. Support staff can stay focused on the high priority tasks than time-consuming and mundane tasks.

If you’d like to learn more about this topic, please feel free to get in touch with one of our experts for a personalized consultation.

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The post How Can AI Bots Increase IT Helpdesk Support Efficiency? appeared first on BotCore.