Bright Horse always look for new innovations, tools and services that can help our customers on their service maturity journey.
Everywhere, the talk is of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and NLP (Natural language processing), and the rise of chatbots and virtual agents are seen as core routes to improving the experience of IT support for today’s workforce.
So where do you need to be on the maturity journey for chatbots to be appropriate and how do they improve and modernise IT support as we currently know it?
Nexthink recently published an article ‘Evolving Digital Employee Experience – The Next Generation of Chatbots is Powered with Actionable Insight’ (LINK TO ARTICLE) which is relevant as we are currently running a series of events with Nexthink entitled – From Service To Experience, which charts the IT maturity path from ‘chaos’ to optimisation’ and all the steps in between. (EVENT URL HYPERLINK)
The bigger reason this is so relevant, is that our customers ask “what must we have in place to make this a reality?”.
According to Gartner analysts, “By 2021, more than 50 percent of enterprises will be spending more per annum on bots and chatbot creations than on traditional mobile app developers”.
What abilities, capabilities, technologies and supporting processes should be embedded to ensure the adoption of new technologies delivers not only on ROI but on results and business objectives for improved productivity and experience?
At the most basic level, surely it has to be about the quality of the underlying data used to inform the chatbots. The integration of front-end communication channels can only satisfy user requests if they are able to access information that is accurate. There is a technical requirement to integrate chatbots to an existing ITSM tool (suite) or new toolset for any organisation, but also to have real time information feeding it that provides the required level of service expected by users.
Service requests are primarily managed by the service desk and therefore whichever chatbot technology is chosen, it must route users seamlessly if it cannot answer the question through the appropriate escalations to match their expectations. People don’t want to be ‘passed around’ from one support channel to another, for example, from self-service, to email, to telephone.
The beauty of Nexthink technologies is that it provides the ability to find and fix issues and incidents faster than ever possible with a traditional tool, because it views the infrastructure from the end points’ perspective; back in towards IT, rather from an IT perspective out. It informs the ITSM tool and the chatbot about the user’s equipment and devices, which applications and versions of software are installed, as well as connectivity.
If it is possible to automate a higher percentage of low level, manual repetitive tasks and queries, then perhaps staff can be freed up to focus on the higher value work, making everyone more productive and cost effective! That would then be a very positive outcome for the overall employee experience.
There is a great BrightTALK webinar—it’s free to sign up to the platform if you are not already—called ‘The Bots Are Coming! An overview of Virtual Agents and How They Modernize Support’ by Richard Graves of Luma.
If you want to talk to us about how we help you with any aspect of your IT service maturity journey (regardless of where you are) we would be delighted to help you identify which of our automation partners can help you to deliver your business outcomes for employee experience.
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