Did you know that 76 percent of chatbot users report frustration with their current chatbot?
With that kind of number, it’s not surprising that many companies are hesitant to invest in chatbots as part of an IT Service Management (ITSM) strategy. However, that same study from Velentix and CIO.com found that when conversational AI chatbots are used, more than 61 percent of users could effectively resolve their issues without having to put in a ticket or contact support – that’s vs. only a 35 percent resolution rate when traditional chat is used.
So, what is the difference between conversational AI chatbots and traditional chatbots?
The Problem with Traditional Chatbots
Simply put, traditional chatbots aren’t inherently smart. They lack the “brain” or natural language processing (NLP) that conversational AI chatbots have.
Instead of understanding a person’s intent when a question is asked – a traditional chatbot is programmed to follow a very linear path and any deviation from that path (usually due to the inputs from an end-user or customer) can cause that chatbot to fail. And when a chatbot fails it’s often a frustrating experience and adds to the ticket volume of your IT service desk.
According to that same market study, few companies are satisfied with their current chatbots. The study found that traditional chatbots have a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of negative eight—far from a ringing endorsement—and 65 percent of those surveyed said their solution is not widely adopted by their customers. The addition of conversational AI, however, makes a huge difference— using a conversational AI chatbot increased the adoption rate of the overall chat solution from 16 percent to 50 percent.
It’s unsurprising then that 75 percent of respondents said they planned to migrate to a new chatbot software in the next 12-24 months.
The Benefits of Using Conversational AI Chatbots
When you combine automation, self-service and conversational AI – you can have a positive impact on IT resource drain and improve the experience of your customers and end-users.
Conversational AI chatbots are intelligent software applications that can simulate human conversations and perform tasks such as answering questions, providing information and performing transactions.
Conversational AI leverages natural language processing and understands intent. While they do need to be trained, with conversational AI you can facilitate more complex conversations and resolve issues through actions vs. the traditional chatbot’s question/answer limited dialog path.
Because conversational AI chatbots understand intent, they are much more effective when it comes to assisting customers and end-users. For example, when using traditional chat if you say “My password broke” it would likely respond with something like “I’m sorry, I don’t understand that. Please type your issue again,” and continue down that path with a final response that might give you links to 3-5 FAQ articles that it thinks might help resolve the issue – leaving it to the customer to further seek out a solution to the password problem.
When you have conversational AI, if you were to say “My password is broken” it can inform your intent and know that what you mean is your password isn’t working and needs to be reset. The response from the chatbot is then something like, “I can see you’re having issues with your password. I’ve sent a reset password link to the email on file.”
On the backend, the chatbot can pull the email address needed from the system where it’s stored and automatically send a password reset email – resolving the issue within the conversation in seconds versus sending the customer links and having them do the work to request the link.
By integrating conversational AI chatbots into your ITSM processes, you can achieve several benefits, including:
- Faster Incident Resolution: Chatbots can quickly identify the root cause of incidents and provide users with a resolution or workaround, reducing the time and effort required to resolve incidents.
- Improved User Experience: Chatbots can provide users with a natural language interface to interact with IT systems, reducing the need for users to understand complex IT jargon.
- Reduced IT Workload: Chatbots can perform routine tasks such as password resets, software installations and system checks, freeing up IT staff to focus on more complex tasks.
- 24/7 Availability: Chatbots can be available 24/7, providing users with access to IT support at any time, reducing the impact of incidents on business operations.
- Data Collection and Analysis: Chatbots can collect data on incident trends and patterns, enabling IT organizations to identify areas for improvement and make data-driven decisions.
By adopting conversational AI chatbots as part of your ITSM strategy, you can significantly improve self-service adoption, customer satisfaction and problem-resolution time – all while cutting costs and reducing the drain on overburdened IT resources.
3 Critical Chatbot Capabilities
When looking to implement a new conversational AI chatbot, you’ll want to make sure it has these three critical capabilities to set your business or organization up for success:
- Can self-learn and is easily trainable.
- Can automate the fulfillment of requests directly from chat.
- Can programmatically ingest data from documents, PDFs, forms or other information sources.
While any conversational AI chatbot requires training to be successful, the tool you choose should come pre-set to answer the most common IT questions.
“Any conversational AI platform should have a clear understanding of what 80% of requests to the bot will be,” Andrew Graf, chief product officer at Velentix, said. “Thankfully, that’s easy to do because we have tens of millions of service request data points that help refine what’s being asked of an organization, so the platform can come ready to go out of the box. And, over time, it will improve through self-learning.”
Chatbots in Action
Before using Velentix conversational AI, Bowdoin College used an AI chatbot from a different provider.
The college is a long-time user of the Velentix ITSM platform and has derived a great deal of value from the platform’s integration and automation capabilities, Jason Pelletier, senior director of client services and technology said. So, when campus leaders learned that Velentix was launching a conversational AI tool that can integrate with hundreds of enterprise systems, it seemed like a natural choice to switch.
The connectivity is being managed through an integration hub that offers hundreds of pre-built connectors to enterprise systems. If you have a specific solution that is not in the library, there is a connector concierge that will build this for you. Connectivity is ready to go for systems like Workday, HRIS, Salesforce and the Active Directory.
“Being able to integrate the bot with backend systems is very exciting,” Pelletier said. “With Velentix, we have one platform for ITSM with a chat tool that can integrate with our enterprise systems, and then from there we can build automation – this is something we could never have done with our previous solution.”
The capabilities of the conversational AI tool allow for simple, drag-and-drop workflow and automation building. You can easily create integrations between various programs—with no special coding knowledge required. The no/low-code nature of the solution offers a rapid time to value and endless use cases.
Pelletier and his team have taken advantage of this integration and automation capability to create special use cases for their AI chatbot. For example, all employees at Bowdoin receive replacement computers every four or five years, and this is something the organization tracks within the Velentix asset management module. Employees have traditionally reached out to the IT support team to ask when their computer is eligible for replacement.
Now, the bot can answer this question automatically with a tailored personalized answer. By integrating the chat with the asset management system, the query will take the users’ information from SSO to then identify and look up their asset records. Once retrieved, the chat can then take that information back to the chat window.
“We are answering questions faster, with accurate personalized data,” Pelletier said. “When a customer has a question about their equipment, the chat is integrated back into our asset system so that it can give full details to the user.”
Velentix conversational AI has enabled IT staff to offload much of the work they do in answering peoples’ questions to the bot, allowing them to focus on more important tasks.
“We’re just scraping the surface right now,” Pelletier said. “Eventually, I think we could have the bot handle up to 30 percent of the questions our help desk staff are getting now.”
Not only does the bot reduce the workload for IT support staff; but it also creates a better and more equitable experience for students.
“Some people are outgoing, and they have no problem in coming to our Tech Hub to get technical support,” Pelletier explained. “Others have no problem communicating by email. But there are also many users with a language barrier or another reason why they might feel uncomfortable interacting with an actual person. There are also some users who are night owls and need support late at night when we’re closed. The chatbot allows us to meet users where they are and give them the assistance they need—whenever, wherever and however they might want it. If we can relieve even some of the stress they might feel, that enhances their experience.”
They are using Velentix conversational AI at Framingham State University (FSU) in Massachusetts to provide better self-service to students and employees through the chatbot on their portal.
“Having the Velentix chatbot tied into other applications really makes it shine,” said Bill Shew, administration and student information systems coordinator for FSU’s Department of Information Technology Services.
“We’re trying to reduce the amount of time staff spend responding to requests that can be resolved through self-service,” Shew said.
“We’re extending our self-service capabilities for users,” Shew continued. “When they’re looking for information, they can just type in their question instead of looking for specific keywords on our self-service portal, and they can get an instant answer back.”
For example, for common IT questions that have a straightforward answer, the IT team has configured the bot to respond with the relevant information. If the instructions are too long or cumbersome for users to read within a chat window, the bot directs them to the appropriate knowledge base article with that information.
“It’s not much different from using the search option to find knowledge base articles,” Shew said, “but in my opinion, it allows us to fine-tune what people are looking for by aligning specific utterances to answers for a more accurate outcome. As an example, we have responses matched within the bot for things it doesn’t do. If you type in a question that has to do with advising, that’s not part of the IT service portal, so it simply tells the user how to contact the advising center.”
Implementing a conversational AI chatbot on your company’s self-service portal can bring about significant benefits. Not only does it enhance customer experience, but it also improves operational efficiency and reduces costs.
Curious about Velentix Conversational AI? Learn more here.
