There’s No Limit to Where a Virtual Agent Can Help

The best virtual agents can avoid the need for some tickets to be submitted to help desk by offering up information that a user can use to self-service an issue or by resolving the issue directly by triggering an automated workflow such as a password reset. When a ticket does need to be submitted a virtual agent can ensure that tickets are fully-formed and “actionable”. Virtual agents can also relieve analysts from chasing down users for more information and handling repeatable mundane requests.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise, therefore, that many of the most forward-looking IT organizations are already leveraging virtual agents to transform their service desks.

Who Is Using Them?

What is interesting, perhaps, is that these organizations are not limited to any one industry or type of business. Here are a few examples:

• City government—wanted to accelerate issue resolution and improve IT costs with a conversational approach to issue determination and resolution; deployed a virtual agent to drive self-service uptake and improve automation; and expect a 30% improvement in costs, along with enhancements to user satisfaction and service desk productivity.
• Global software company—hoped to streamline user interactions by completing and triaging tickets (or deflecting them altogether), and surveying users once issues have been resolved; installed a virtual agent to optimize the number of requests directed to its service desk catalog and automate as many workflows as possible; and forecast a 35% improvement in overall support costs.
• Managed service provider—decided to offer a key customer a solution which improved user satisfaction by reducing telephone support wait times; implemented a virtual agent in front of the customer’s interactive voice response system to divert users’ inquiries to a self-service knowledge base whenever possible; predict a 30% reduction in call volumes and a similar improvement in customer wait times.
• Multinational electronics manufacturer—resolved to increase the productivity of employees by enabling them to report issues on mobile devices removing the need for them to leave the manufacturing floor to access a computer terminal to do so; deploy a virtual agent as a first point of contact, enabling simple requests to be diverted to a knowledge database and issues resolved intuitively; anticipate at least a 30% improvement in support and service costs.
• State government—elected to improve the adoption of self-service resolution of issues by providing a more intuitive way for users to obtain assistance; installed a virtual agent as a conversational interface with simple issues routed to relevant sections of a help desk knowledge base for self-service resolution; expecting a 3x increase in the amount of issues resolved without analyst involvement.

The ability of the best virtual agents to have an impact in such a wide variety of businesses and governments is, in part, due to them being agnostic to the ITSM environments into which they are deployed. They can, consequently, be deployed anywhere.

Insight and Learnings

Luma, the virtual agent that we’ve developed here at Serviceaide, and purpose-built for IT service management, already integrates seamlessly with leading ITSM solutions from  CA Technologies, Cherwell, Freshservice and ServiceNow, and we will be are adding other leading ITSM platforms. And, of course, Luma also connects to our own Intelligent Service Management solution.

Organizations, across a variety of industry sectors, have deployed Luma, or are in the process of doing so. I’m excited about these successes and look forward to sharing more details about them with you in future blog articles – I’m especially eager to describe the interesting things we’ve learned during the development and onboarding process in each instance, as I’m sure that this will be very insightful to others about to embark on a virtual agent deployment. Thanks for reading. We hope that our blog articles can inform and start conversations. If this article piques your interest, but leaves you wanting more, let me know.