Hello and welcome to another blog post from Team Serviceberry. Today we will touch upon the impact of Chatbots on IT Service Management and IT Support Operations.
Technology is fundamentally changing the way we communicate in our personal lives as well as work life. Traditional methods of communication like email, web forms, phone are being replaced by real-time messaging platforms.
Consumers are demanding real-time support and assistance round the clock. Whether they are your employees or customers, providing them support when they need them is critical to your business success.
Given the volume of transactions and tickets raised in an enterprise setup, it becomes impractical for humans to support such operations. Automation of predictable, common support requests is the need of the hour.
Chatbots are already making noticeable strides in handling IT Support and IT Service Management requests.
Let us understand the impact of Chatbots in an enterprise setup.
What is a Chatbot?
Chatbot is an AI based app which interacts with people, provides them information and automates predictable human tasks.
Chatbots are built using Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning techniques. The idea is to instil human intelligence into a bot, so that it can perform common tasks which otherwise would require human intervention.
Use of Chatbots in ITSM and IT Support
Automation
Enterprises have several STP (Straight Through Processing) type workflows. These may be related to IT Asset Allocation, Onboarding, Release, etc. Chatbots can automate all such workflow requests based on predefined parameters depending on the requester, task and authorization.
Managers and Employees are spared from approving and processing such requests.
Common IT Requests
60% to 80% of IT Support requests are predictable and common in nature depending on the type of business and industry. These include requests related to password reset, user access, provisioning, FAQ, etc.
Chatbots can be trained to assist, automate and provide for all these requests. The load on human agent can be minimized by handling most common trivial requests.
Self Help
Chatbots can provide users with self-service resources and articles so that they can help themselves.
Bots can be trained to understand human language, use ML based algorithms so that they can direct users to the appropriate resources thus saving time and effort for human agents.
Agent Assistance
Chatbots can also act as an assistant to human agents. During peak load times Bots can automatically categorize service requests and assign it to appropriate agent based on priority and criticality of the request.
Bots can also assist agents in performing common tasks like fetching information from diverse enterprise systems, generating a report, notifying users, etc.
These are few examples, which can be extended to more use case scenarios.
Bottomline
Chatbots are here to stay. The current use of Bots is at a nascent stage where they are being used to handle common tasks. With advancement in AI, ML and NLP we can expect the usage will only increase with time. Early adopters are witnessing tangible benefits in terms of cost, time and overall efficiency of their IT Operations.
Are you using Chatbots to handle ITSM and IT Support requests?
Let us know the impact you are seeing in your respective IT Operations.
