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With SSO, the system understands the user’s identity. It can do things like look up asset records for equipment, access a variety of data such as address information, provision software licensing and more – any data element stored in the ecosystem can be retrieved and leveraged for quick service.
With conversational AI chat, you can empower users to solve their own issues without talking to a tech or putting in a ticket. In addition, a successful chat experience can help improve self-service adoption – meaning more users will use this, reducing ticket volumes and freeing up techs to work on other projects.
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.
Industry: Higher Ed
Top Use Cases:
Framingham State University (FSU) in Massachusetts is using a new AI chatbot on its self-service portal for students and employees. The chatbot is part of the university’s IT Service Management (ITSM) platform, Velentix—and IT leaders expect it will lead to better, faster customer service while reducing the burden on IT staff.
While there are many AI chatbot solutions on the market, a key advantage of using Conversational AI from Velentix is the fact that it offers an underlying integration and automation platform. This means you can easily personalize the conversation and take action by leveraging integrations to third-party software.
Action-based AI-driven conversations leverage enterprise system integration, automated workflows and dynamic forms. With Velentix you can benefit from a fully integrated platform and dynamic forms to help facilitate conversations and to pass data between the end-user and back-end systems.
“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.
His advice to leaders at other organizations interested in using conversational AI but hesitant to get started with the new technology: “Get on board with the program.” IT leaders need to stay current to meet evolving end-user expectations, he explained—and the benefits of using AI for IT self-service are numerous.
“We’re trying to reduce the amount of time staff spend responding to requests that can be resolved through self- service,” Shew said, and the Velentix conversational AI chatbot is helping to meet this goal.
You can put the power in the hands of those you serve by combining a stellar self-service portal and conversational AI. You can also put time back into your team’s day with automation.
What if you could reduce 20-30% of ticket volume with self-service? What if you could automate the requests so that you never had to touch the ticket? From password resets to onboarding, this is now a reality.
“We’re extending our self-service capabilities for users,” Shew noted. “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.”
“Having an underlying integration and automation layer is critical,” he continued. “Without this, we wouldn’t be able to do what we’re doing. We would have to hard-code a whole bunch of different integrations. Having it all in one simple ecosystem is extremely advantageous.”
Bring natural language processing together with integration and automation to reduce ticket resolution time and IT team resource drain.
One of the issues with traditional chat is that the system only pairs up questions and answers. With conversational AI chat you can personalize conversations, leveraging your own back-end system data from HR, payroll, CRM and more. Using Velentix you can link back to systems like Workday, HRIS, SAP or other applications and use this information along with forms to facilitate the conversation and automate processes.
At FSU, a few of the initial use cases are proving to be well-received, Shew said.
Check for outages: Through an integration with the application monitoring platform Pingdom, users can find out instantly if there’s a systemwide outage. When a user first engages with the chat interface, it will initiate connectivity with Pingdom to find out if any systems are offline across the ecosystem —and if so, the bot will share this information with the user.
“If they’re having an issue, they can find out right away if the service is down for everyone,” Shew explained, “or if the problem is specific to them.”
Ask how to do common tasks, such as download Office365 or connect to Wi-Fi: 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.”
Find out when they’re eligible for a device upgrade: If an employee wants to know when they’re scheduled for a device refresh, they can ask the chatbot—and it will pull this asset management information from the Velentix platform.
“We think this will be a popular feature,” Shew said.
Get a weather report for their current location: If a user asks about the weather, the bot will connect with the OpenWeather service and report on the current weather for their location.
“The caveat is, it goes by their IP address,” Shew said. “If they’re logged into a VPN or connecting through their cell phone, it might not be accurate. But as a rule, it meets most peoples’ needs.”
Giving users whimsical things to ask the bot about helps get them comfortable with using the tool, he added, noting: “This is more just a fun thing to do.”
Implementation of the conversational AI chatbot was simple, Shew recounts: “We had weekly calls with the services team from Velentix. During these calls, we were able to go through lots of setup options and talk about what other customers were doing. We got plenty of ideas, tips and tricks. We were supported all the way through the process, from beginning to end.”
One of the things the team likes about the AI chatbot is the ability to see how people are asking questions. “You get an idea of how you need to respond from seeing this information,” Shew said. “You can learn what your user base needs and how they’re asking for it. I find having those insights helpful.”
FSU is still getting questions that its IT team hadn’t prepared for, and the team is using these queries to create effective responses and evolve the chatbot. As their use of the chatbot matures, they’re building out further integrations with third-party applications as well.
“It keeps growing,” Shew observed. “The more people use it, the more we get ideas about what we can do with it.”
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