You need these 5 features in your ITSM chatbot
With advances in AI, the obvious discussion arises, how to make work-life easier? How to minimize time spent on mundane tasks? How to save time and money while ensuring that your IT team is functioning as efficiently as possible? Now enter… the chatbot.
The virtual assistant or the chatbot is a significant AI-powered development with various use cases. It is an integral part of self-service today. In fact, you can even say that the chatbot has re-defined self-service. They are rising in popularity, among both consumers and enterprises and that’s not a surprise. Chatbots or virtual assistants solve a number of challenges and help businesses to:
A) Provide timely resolution of queries/problems/issue
B) Free up the time of service desk analysts, so they can take up more challenging work
C) Streamline requests and keeps things organized by using state-of-the-art AI/ML technologies
D) Last, but not least, give employee support by mimicking human conversations, in an intuitive and clever way.
According to findings by Forrester, companies have achieved impressive results by using chatbots, as good as deflecting up to 60% of inbound tickets. So, are you thinking of introducing a chatbot in your organization? Keep reading.
Here are 5 key features you should look for in an ITSM chatbot:
1. Available round the clock:
One of the biggest benefits of a chatbot is 24/7 availability. You can now empower your employees to reach out at any hour, from anywhere in the world. With Natural Language Processing (NLP) abilities, the chatbot is able to gauge employee queries and provide timely and relevant responses. Ensure that your chatbot is equipped with a robust knowledge base, in order to provide the answers that your employees will need. What’s more, once you integrate your virtual assistant into orchestration settings, it can seamlessly conduct services like resetting passwords, adding employees to distribution lists, providing access to tools, and more.
The best part? It’s all self-service, employees can do it all on their own, whether asking a query, raising a ticket, or requesting a service item.
2. Is one among the people:
Your chatbot should be a simple, no-code feature that can be accessed by everyone in the organization. It shouldn’t be a struggle to get questions answered or to transfer to a live agent. The main thing to be avoided is ‘robot-talk’. You want an intuitive, intelligent virtual assistant, that can make the process seamless for all employees whether in IT or beyond.
Here’s how it goes: employees ask questions in simple terms, the chatbot delves into its knowledge base and voila, there’s an answer.
3. Takes up the burden of mundane work:
A chatbot is providing useful services, only if it is deflecting queries from IT/service team agents and overall, saving time and money. If a significant percentage of inbound tickets are deflected from your agents, freeing them from mundane and repetitive tasks, the virtual assistant’s job is, undoubtedly, a success.
Virtual assistants provide automated, pre-defined resolution to many common challenges faced by employees day-to-day. This will take the pressure off your service team and ensure that their time is being more effectively spent on more important tasks. While, yes, time is money, actual money is also saved. This is because the IT team is operating efficiently and productive with only skilled employees that perform high-level tasks.
4. Available across platforms:
There’s a reason we believe in employee delight. Companies today need to be able to deliver consumer-grade experiences to their employees. This is all the more true due to remote and hybrid working options. Thus, the primary purpose of a chatbot is to make day-to-day work convenient for employees. A virtual assistant should be where your users are.
Chatbots should be available on an employee/self-service portal, on an Android or iOS app on a mobile phone, via email/text messaging, or even accessed via collaboration tools like MS Teams or Slack. This multichannel support goes a long way in providing a seamless employee experience.
5. Improves and evolves over time:
Implementing a chatbot is not the end of the story. You should be able to track the metrics and performance of your chatbot, in order to improve. With time, AI capabilities are being developed, and thus, so will your chatbot. As your business grows/scales up, you can work towards optimizing the knowledge base and service catalog too.
Are you convinced yet? If you are on the lookout for a new chatbot, let us introduce you to Freddy, the virtual assistant from Freshservice. Our goal is to provide you with a best-in-class unified employee experience with an intelligent, predictive, and conversational AI solution. The good news is that Freddy is available for free with your Freshservice Enterprise Plan.
Here’s an opportunity to try Freshservice for free for 21 days with no credit card required and no strings attached.
