21 Feb
Why Your Employee IT Self-Service Needs Bots Instead Of Portals
Robotic virtual assistants on the enterprise side are known for their ability to expedite internal inquiries and save time for employees. Reports estimate $8 billion in annual savings from chatbots, with 80 percent of businesses considering implementing them. Chatbots allow your enterprise to scale seamlessly with speed and alleviates from the limitations of human resources . Early Technology adopters are replacing standalone web portals with interactive chatbots.
IT HELP DESK PORTALS VS CHATBOTS
Outsourcing IT help desk needs have already achieved a certain degree of cost-efficiency, but the internal workforce productivity has not gained much. IT help desk portals do not allow interaction with the user since they are task-based. They do not work on the behavioural schema of the employee. Due to these drawbacks, the most aspirational SLAs that are defined as key performance indicators (KPIs) for an organization are often missed.
With portals, teams face many practical challenges in fulfilling these SLAs. Employees and helpdesk agents need to switch multiple pages to complete the desired action as typically most of these portals have substandard navigation flows and UX. All this hassle results in the low adoption of portals and thereby the ROI gets affected.
Portals built on the cloud have resolved information accessibility and workflow issues, but still fail to motivate, remind and allow collaboration with other helpdesk team members in completing the tickets raised on the portal.
Chatbots on the other hand, encourage conversations, interactions, non-linear collaboration, consistency and non-bias. They are omni-channel solutions that be accessed through multiple devices — mobile phones, tablets, desktops, kiosks, etc. You may not this experience with a web portal solution.
WHAT EXACTLY IS A CHATBOT?
Technically, a chatbot is ‘a computer program designed to simulate conversation with human users, usually over a messaging app’. Some people also view a chatbot as service, as it is applied for virtual yet tangible outputs. Chatbots are AI powered that come with the ability to understand human language without human assistance. Enterprise chatbots are built using bot builder platforms which allow seamless deployment, training and management of bots. BotCore is a robust platform to create chatbots and some of the popular chatbots serve as IT Helpdesk agents. This platform is fully deployable on both on-premise and cloud (Microsoft Azure, AWS etc.) environments.
In some cases chatbots have empowered humans by adding time and allowing them to do the more productive work.
HOW CHATBOTS RESOLVE YOUR EMPLOYEE’S IT SELF SERVICE NEEDS?
Since chatbots are designed to understand complex human language interpretations, it increases the entire enterprise’s efficiency including that of the internal workforce. A Progress Software representative has mentioned that, “A bot could give the user the immediate interaction they need, and perhaps even complete the task, without forcing them through ticket systems that are often tedious for both the end user and the help desk,”
IT help desk chatbots are designed for self service. They not only offer the initial interaction that an employee is looking for, but also resolve the issue without compelling the employee to run into the maze of a ticketing system. Employees do not have to deal with the complex user flows, this is managed intelligently at the back-end by the chatbot.
Also, chatbots ensure consistent delivery quality by letting the human employee perform more intelligent tasks. It also saves a great deal for the Enterprise. According to the Human Resource Institute, it costs companies $10-$15k to replace one frontline employee. IBM has confirmed with research that chatbots can help reduce service costs by 30%.
CHABOTS FOR IT SELF-SERVICE EMPLOYEES.
At Acuvate, we have created a AI powered chatbot that uses machine learning and natural language processing to attend to simple IT queries. As an IT self service request chatbot, it works as an AI assistant and fulfils the need and presence of a Level-1 IT support assistant. Chatbots extract info from a knowledge base, FAQs and user guides and bring it to the actively used messaging app like Skype for Business, Slack, Skype etc.
The IT Helpdesk bot is equipped to handle real time alerts and manage incidents, security and outage. Chatbots reduce ticket costs and increase the productivity of IT helpdesk staff by arranging tickets based on priority.
IT Helpdesk bot’s features include high-speed response, 24×7 availability, elimination of calls, real time alerts, seamless integration into existing self service systems and enterprise level security. This can free up the time of IT personnel by accomplishing simple tasks like resetting passwords, troubleshooting and more. The conversational interface of chatbots allow users to get answers by asking one question at a time.
If the user is unable to find answer for his query, the bot automatically initiates the ticket issuance process.
The scope of work can be further programmed to meet the service requests within your organization. In the upcoming years, the adoption rate of chatbots is only going to grow and enterprises will transform into tech-enabled conversational units rather than silo structures dependent on redundant human resources.
If you’re considering to deploy chatbots for IT helpdesk, do check out our IT helpdesk bot which is currently used in several Fortune companies. If you need more information, check out our recent eBook on choosing the best bot-builder platfrom.
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.
Jagan Jami is the COO @ Acuvate Software. He heads the delivery unit at Acuvate which had delivered 100+ intranets to companies across the globe. Jagan has been working with global CIOs and other business heads and consulted them on Intranet evolution and current trends.
Jagan Jami