Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 40 | Page 52

FEATURE: ITSM ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// production. When fully adopted and driven by senior management, the benefits of using AI capabilities for IT service desks will justify the time and effort you’ve put in, from 24/7 availability, faster ticket resolution, proactive engagement and cost optimisations. • Link your users’ questions straight to your knowledge-based articles • Provide step-by-step instructions on some of your simpler high-volume type tickets • Automate the provisioning of passwords or access requests Solid foundation Agents also need the right knowledge base to help them and they may not always know the right questions to ask to find the right information. For example, AI could be used to help identify seemingly unrelated incidents for Problem Management and would suggest that the agent then opens a problem record. Before we can even consider a chatbot, you definitely need to have a solid foundation in place first. I’m talking about a self-service portal that’s been adopted by the business over the last year or so, one that is familiar to everyone and already has high usage in terms of day-to-day enquiries and requests. The Axios Systems self-service portal can be the first port of contact for your business Craig Whytock, Solutions Consultant, Axios Systems IN TERMS OF YOUR USE CASES FOR CHATBOTS – THE SKY’S THE LIMIT. users instead of them trying to contact you over the phone or email. The first thing they would see is a range of business services they can pick from. It certainly feels like a shopping experience as you can include shopping baskets if you want and FedEx like tracking progress bars for workflows in the service requests. The portal can be tailored to meet the needs of a business and be expanded to include other departments like HR, facilities, properties and travel so it becomes your one-stop-shop for Enterprise Service Management. You could also re-brand the whole portal to your corporate look and feel which always helps with user adoption. Live chat agents There’s a search engine, so staff can search for knowledge FAQs to help them fix their own issues. assyst tracks the usage of these FAQs, so that over time you can improve the content based on what’s working and what’s not. Your staff can even feedback and rate each FAQ. Knowledge Managers can then search on the one star and two star rated FAQs and replace them. As users navigate around (the service catalog), it feels like a shopping experience – I once heard Fife Council say to its business that assyst is your ‘Amazon for IT’ and its staff quickly adopted it across a range of shared services. 52 INTELLIGENTCIO Built into the self-service portal is the live chat agent. Just like any commercial websites, you can speak directly to an agent. The agent can ask more pertinent questions, capture better information up front and the system will automatically log an incident in the background capturing the full discussion. So the self-service portal, the service catalog (‘The Amazon for IT’) and the agent chat – this is the foundation you need for a successful chatbot. Chatbot integration capability In terms of your use cases for chatbots – the sky’s the limit, especially if you involve your DevOps team too. They can: • Allow your users to find the right service request in your catalog first time without searching around In assyst, a similar search engine will use the event information to proactively push incidents/problems/known errors, and changes so you don’t need to re-search the knowledge base. AI could vastly improve this capability. Forecasting issues AI could also start to forecast issues based on previous experience. That would be quite interesting as the engine could start to do an impact analysis before users are impacted and escalate this information to Service Desk Manager. In assyst, we currently capture all your assets and configuration data together with all previous history of incidents, problems and changes/releases in the one database. So, AI could be applied to this data to predict future Service-Level Agreement (SLA) performance and escalate when it thinks you as the Service Desk Manager need to allocate maybe extra resources to focus on a particular service before it becomes an issue to your business. The benefits of metrics The biggest gain from a chatbot is the metrics it can provide to you. You might be struggling to track these metrics right now from your current knowledge base usage. For example, the benefits include: • Coverage: The number of questions that the chatbot can answer correctly – you don’t tend to get that from a standard search engine unless there’s an option like in assyst such as ‘yes, this fixed my issue’. www.intelligentcio.com