Chatbot to improve employee's experience for support request

How to handle automatically more than 20'000 IT support requests with a chatbot and a bit of Artificial Intelligence?

A complex and time-consuming IT help-desk with 100+ forms and 20'000+ yearly requests

Our client, a Swiss manufacturer, aims to leverage digital innovation to continuously improve internal support activities. This initiative, part of its core strategy, has a precise goal to simplify and automate internal processes and tasks.

Until today, employees needing IT support, were required to enter a complex support process requiring them to select one of the 100+ request forms based on their needs and submit it to the helpdesk.
This process caused, due to its complexity, a lot of time lost to both employees and helpdesk support specialists handling a flow of 20'000+ yearly requests.

How can a chatbot reduce the IT Help Desk workload and give employees faster access to the information?

A chatbot is a software that converses in natural language (human) with its users in the form of a chat. It uses Artificial Intelligence to analyze the human language and understand the content of the interactions with its users. The chatbot gathers the intent from users' conversations and answers back following preprogrammed business rules.

Toward automating the creation of a request by a robot through a conversational user interface

We recommended using a chatbot for the creation of support tickets as it was addressing the 4 success factors identified during the assessment phase:

Repetitive process: Helpdesk agents frequently execute the same tasks and share the same information

Necessary human interaction: The initial process required costly resources whose time could be used for higher added value tasks

Expensive initial process: Long, complex, and misleading navigation in the initial process

New process easy to use via a conversational interface: The creation and monitoring of IT support requests is adapted to be used via a conversational interface

The final solution brought a large range of benefits

Time reduction to open a request: The chatbot proposes the right form based on the employee's answers

Errors reduction in requests: Employees are guided in filling forms with the correct set of information

Requests tracking: Requests can be tracked by the issuer in all stages, from submission till resolution

Load reduction to treat requests: Employees are pushed to find the information on their own via a knowledge database

The main features of the implemented solution are:

Conversational Chatbot

• Conversational user interface
• Guided submission of IT support requests
• Prefilled forms based on inputted answers via choice selection
  

Forms management and display dashboard

• Tracking of open and closed requests
• Automated reminders
• Comments input