FEATURE: ITSM
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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.
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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’.
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