Now and then, employees need information to get work done.Enterprise search for knowledge discovery and access is imperative for businesses of all sizes.

Service or help desks are most organizations' sole platform for finding information. Unfortunately, broken or unsophisticated technologies make finding information difficult for users.

A legacy service desk is at the root of this problem, needing more essential features to help with information discovery and access for employees to work.

Enterprise search and knowledge discovery are inconsistent with most organizations' standards, forcing employees to struggle with the most common IT or HR support issues. So, it is common to have operational efficiency and employee disengagement issues.

Workativ’s conversational AI, which combines the features of Generative AI, facilitates faster collaborations and communications for knowledge discovery with great flexibility and helps improve operations efficiency and business resilience.

Our eBook emphasizes the economic impact of your investment in conversational AI in the long run and better cost optimization, which you otherwise fail to realize with the legacy approach, incurring higher maintenance costs and productivity losses.

To help you understand the benefits of conversational AI and Generative AI for employee productivity and operational efficiency, our comprehensive analysis of costs being wasted towards maintaining a legacy system gives you a clear understanding of where you are spending extra money, yet not leveraging benefits as your business needs to grow.

Workativ as a conversational AI is a significant impetus for enterprise needs to drive operational efficiency through improved employee communications and collaborations, helping them find crucial daily information to get work and reduce the cost of managing service desks.

Employee productivity losses and bottom-line implications driven by ticketing systems or old and legacy service desk systems are often overlooked by business leaders.

Businesses have disparate tools placed at different touchpoints for their employees to enable them to raise service or help requests.

Should requests have real-time responses, employees can expect rapid resolution of issues and increased uptime.

Incognizance of the efficacy of conversational AI and self-service preferences for traditional ITSM tools does not help but throw up more challenges.

• Inefficient communication results in a 5-hour loss during a 40-hour working week. The Workplace Productivity and Communications Technology Report conducted by Mittel and Kelcor in five countries on 2,500 business professionals observed that

• Nearly 15% of employees' time at work is wasted in a day, constituting about 1 hour of loss every day and 5 hours a week. The productivity loss occurs for the want of efficient communications systems.

• Inefficiency in communications costs the employers $10,200 annually per worker.

The cost of employee productivity loss or downtime companies experience happens for inefficient tools. It is a double blow on the company's balance sheet.

• Productivity losses or downtime costs

• The cost incurred to maintain multiple communication tools

Though the report involves unified communications systems, we can relate this to an inefficient service desk or a traditional service desk operations management that hinges upon emails, phone calls, or intranets. Being multichannel and not omnichannel, these disparate tools do not provide integrated views of either ticket escalation or lifecycle management, causing rising maintenance costs for HR and IT support and leading to employee dissatisfaction.

• Cost per ticket (CPT) is rising for businesses for service desks unable to handle scalability. It means a legacy model can increase the volume of tickets for incident and service requests when they fail first contact resolution (FCR). It can happen when manual processes are involved in ticket handling. Lack of tools and systems tier 1 agent use may be old and inefficient to handle tickets and causes ticket escalation to the next tier, raising ticket costs.

In reality, service requests are a lengthy process compared to incident requests, which combine to add to a weighted average cost per ticket.

• Since employees prefer service requests, an unanswered or delayed service ticket can quickly increase ticket costs and cause productivity losses. ThinkHDI claimed in its report that service requests cost more than incident requests. If employees need to wait for a software upgrade, a new system allocation, and a password reset, a company has to pay more for a ticket. For example, if XYZ company handles 60% of service requests and 40% of incident tickets, the weighted average cost per ticket would be higher than the company handling incident tickets in more volumes.

• The legacy infrastructure of a service desk model follows a break/fix approach and offers help only when there is a problem. It results in tickets with the same issue being raised to the service desks and agents addressing them repeatedly. From that perspective, a legacy model is more of a reactive platform than a proactive one.

• Modern service desks offer self-serve capabilities, yet they are manual and agent-dependent. Even though a modern service desk combines the power of artificial intelligence to allow employees or agents to automate ticket creation, it does not offer self-service help instantly. It is only as good as the legacy service desk that enables employees to create tickets and wait for the agent to hop in and provide help.

• The wait time for a ticket increases, causing high costs for each ticket.

• The average cost for tickets addressed by voice is $17.19.

• Chat ticket support costs $15.72 on average.

• Email support costs $16.13 on average.

The figure above describes the benchmarking ranges for CPT for North American Service Desks.

• If agents for specific channel support are absent, the escalation can move to the next channel support, increasing the costs per ticket.

• Manual interventions are more likely to involve errors and repetitive ticket handling of the exact service requests, causing productivity losses for agents and employees.

Elimination of manual intervention for service requests and fostering operational efficiency at scale

Manual help for problem-solving can be intimidating because the assistance employees want may not turn up on a particular day. Unfortunately, it can take another day or two for the help to come.

Auto-resolutions of service requests through conversational AI and Generative AI are productive and transformative for employees.

A conversational AI and Generative AI solution can define a chatbot platform as more sophisticated and advanced than a regular chatbot. It gives answers to natural language queries by detecting the context and intent of a query rather than answering from predefined conversation templates.

Workativ redefines workplace automation for common employee queries.

Workativ’s conversational AI combines Generative AI in its interface for users to make finding information fast and quick without needing additional effort to read through long articles. It also provides real-time auto-resolution capabilities for users to solve problems instantly.

Companies can empower employees to surface information regarding common service requests and resolve them at scale while ensuring uptime.

Answers to common employee questions such as password reset, account unlock, VPN settings, and many more are real-time and autonomous for employees who need no human interventions or wait for the ticket to escalate to move to the next tier for resolution.

Employee flexibility on Workativ

• An integrated service desk solution is Workativ’s significant flexibility for employees who no longer need to interact through a service desk platform, create a ticket, and wait for the agent to provide help. Workativ provides app workflow automation for service desk platforms and allows users to sync with Teams or Slack to auto-resolve issues through LLM-powered Knowledge AI search flexibility or custom FAQs.

• Employees can have an omnichannel-like compact experience by leveraging a unified conversational AI interface, eliminating the need to seek service requests or help via emails, voice calls, or complicated intranets. Workativ’s conversational AI is the perfect example of a self-serve or autonomous help interface to simplify problem-solving through pre-defined IT or HR support scenarios or custom queries using deep neural networks or large language model search capability.

• Seamless knowledge discovery through Knowledge AI integration ensures employees find answers to a question easily on the Workativ Conversational AI interface and can work quickly.

• Change management is fast with Workativ conversational AI that feels more familiar and easier for employees to adapt to a whole new experience and leverage it to capture information for common questions at the workplace. This seamless change management improves employee problem-solving at scale and increases employee productivity.

Organization flexibility with Workativ

• There are no higher overheads for organizations, for they take advantage of a no-code SAAS-based cloud platform, which requires no additional costs for infrastructure maintenance similar to what is associated with a total cost of ownership.

• Workativ encourages faster time to market. Organizations should only consider the right development of conversation flows for HR and IT support use cases, not the implementation and deployment in the live environment. Workativ does not require a steep learning curve, critical technical abilities, or coding skills to work with its conversational or Generative AI platform. The deployment can easily take place with a few details, workflow automation syncs, and integrations.

• Seamless app integrations or app chatbot development for service desk platforms or ITSM tools, Identity Access Management platforms, project management tools, CRM, ERP, etc., are highly effective in creating chatbots for particular apps and take control of functions through familiar collaborations and communications channels.

• Ceaseless connections across value chains give organizations the best ability to keep everyone in the loop, such as business leaders, managers, employees, and other stakeholders, and help keep track of how employee productivity is managed, service delivery is taken care of, and what should be the right steps be taken to improve any inefficiency across the touchpoints of employee interaction and information delivery.

Exploring Workativ’s cutting-edge technology

Workativ is built on the technological advancement of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Large Language Models, or Generative AI. Workativ is not limited to predefined conversations; it can answer any questions.

• The conversational AI platform brings natural language processing or NLP engine, chatbot builder, and dialog management modules to help users build complex to simple dialog flow or conversations for employee queries such as printer issues, search documents, unlock accounts, password reset, etc.

• The NLP module leverages intent detection and entity extraction to efficiently execute tasks or workflows no matter if a user’s NLP query is simple or complicated.

• Multiple intent detection can easily handle multiple requests within a single conversation flow.

• Auto-corrections and spelling checks let users surface the correct answer even if the query includes spelling errors.

• Context switching is more valuable and effective if users want to switch context midway through the conversion and still surface contextual answers.

• Disambiguation helps improve and reduce ambiguity and provide clarity in conversation.

• Chatbot automation helps users automate app workflows, integrate with apps, and facilitate approvals. It also allows setting alerts for apps to remind users of necessary actions to perform.

• KnowledgeAI provides a large language model capability to help build a ChatGPT-like dialog channel that turns your knowledge into Generative AI answers.

• Live agent handover is critical to advancing a conversation when it is repeated or has no answer in its database.

• Chatbot analytics and performance give a single pane of glass view into bot session, performance, failed calls, etc.

All these features and technology advancements have a solid focus for Workativ that aims to enrich the user experience by improving problem-solving for everyday workplace issues.

Employee engagement and cost savings enabled by Workativ

Workativ's conversational AI platform aims to help businesses introduce digital transformation or modernize their current processes, which are otherwise unattainable due to the high costs associated with tools and technologies and critical digital transformation barriers.

With a no-code chatbot builder, AI or Generative AI engine, prebuilt conversation templates, easy app integrations, and other significant features, Workativ helps businesses streamline processes through automation, remove manual dependency and continuous repetitive task handling and costly mistakes, and promote a collaborative culture to build a thriving business by enhancing employee experience and engagement and customer service delivery.

Workativ continues to provide scale to employee support no matter how many employees increase through its real-time knowledge discovery service for autonomous problem solving for businesses. High-tech firms, IT consultancy firms, manufacturing firms, sports goods-producing firms, and many others have brought efficient and effective modernization to their existing processes and automate for true digital transformation at half a cost.

Overall: Very positive experience. We are able to grow the bot based on our internal needs. The cost and support can’t be beat for all the features the tool provides

Pros: It just seems to work out of the box. If you have a decent outline of the needs the bot needs to fill it is really straightforward to set up and test. Their deployment team offers insight on where to focus time and provides resources to go to quickly resolve questions on your own. Truly self service.

Cons: No complaints right now - when we have had issues they respond quickly with a plan and their follow through is excellent

Reasons for Choosing Workativ Assistant: Cost and the willingness of Workativ to answer questions and ensure our internal business requirements were being met.

Dan Bottiger

Director of Information Systems

Explore success stories

To understand how your investment into Workativ can turn out to be effective for your bottom-line investment, analysis of benefits and cost-savings is a critical factor.

Quantified benefits

HR operations benefits

• 5X lower MTTR boosts cost optimization for HR operations. Even a simple request comprising ‘I want to apply for leave’ or ‘I want to know my salary structure’ can take about 20 minutes to 4 hours for an HR personnel. Workativ helps you automate most of your employee HR inquiries and requests using an advanced HR Chatbot with in-built HR workflow automation.

• Employees do not need to write to HR. Automated workflows with known and standard HR use cases can be useful for them to ask a direct question to the conversational AI or Generative AI bot from Workativ and get a direct answer.

• Simple and fast adoption of the Workativ chatbot allows employees to autonomously reduce common HR requests by themselves and instantly reduce the number of requests to the IT service desks.

• 90% first contact resolution (FCR) saves HR operational costs by restricting the ticket escalation to the next tier, such as level 2 or 3, helping solve HR requests at level 1, and encouraging time-saving of up to 3 hours.

• Human resources can save massive resources, freeing senior HR executives from everyday administrative tasks and helping them handle more critical organizational tasks to provide an excellent employee experience.

• With the flexibility of self-service functionality, employees can automate their queries and resolve issues, helping HR work more effectively and efficiently driving cost savings and revenue growth.

IT operations benefits

• 80% of repetitive IT support can be automated using Workativ conversational AI and Generative AI. Service desk or IT help desk teams can remain calm while addressing critical IT issues and keep themselves out of the most mundane and repetitive common IT issues employees raise. Workativ makes it easy for the service desk or help desk users to handle IT support issues autonomously for service requests such as resetting passwords, unlocking accounts, adding users to groups, asset requests, employee onboarding, etc.

• There are 3 hrs to 3.5 hrs of time savings for organizations. The time-saving experience for IT support teams is similar to that of HR teams with Workativ. The duration of handling every ticket for common IT support requests that take up to 20 minutes to 4 hours, as per simplicity or complexity of the ticket’s attributes, can be dramatically reduced to less than 1 minute. It means service desk or help desk agents can save time up to 3 hrs - 3.5 hours per ticket.

• Workativ allows cost savings of up to 5X for FCR tickets through appropriate optimization of agent utilization. Every minute of time-saving constitutes excellent cost savings for the bottom-line expenses of an organization that predominantly needs to allocate a budget for service desk management. The benefit of Workativ for organizations lies in an appropriate optimization of agent utilization, helping organizations save 3546 agent hours annually, which further saves organizations costs up to 5X for FCR tickets.

• Service desk agents can achieve 3X productivity boosts while handling employee support issues. Workativ provides flexibility in harnessing Knowledge AI capabilities or Generative AI features to enhance knowledge discovery and help find information at scale autonomously that resolves problems at scale and removes the need to raise tickets to the agents. This gives agents and employees a 3X boost in productivity by reducing downtime impacts.

Workativ has collaborated with GoTo, an IT and software solutions provider company, to help transform their employee support through conversational AI and Generative AI helpdesk automation chatbot.

Unquantified benefits

• Increased employee engagement and productivity gains are two of the key unquantified benefits of Workativ for organizations. Employees are more at ease in solving their problems and less likely to involve a service desk agent in solving common and everyday IT support issues. Employees no longer need to suffer productivity issues of system downtime software upgrade requirements, etc. Similarly, service desk agents can have more time to focus on critical business objectives such as handling IT operations, asset management, etc

• Everyone at work can seamlessly gain elevated user experience. It’s an amazing experience for value chains across every department. Employees can get an answer easily using advanced LLM-powered knowledge discovery in the service desk automation chatbot and continue their work progress. Agents effortlessly use LLM-powered chatbots to see conversation history and gain context to add personalization to users’ IT or HR support issues. Also, business leaders in their high-level leadership roles, such as CEO, CFO, CIO, or senior-level executives, gain business benefits through employee productivity gains that bring excellent customer service delivery and gain customer trust.

• Workativ offers multimodal support for all departments beyond HR, and IT use cases. Finance, Legal, Operations, Marketing, and Sales can derive workflow automation benefits for a wide variety of use cases to remove manual dependency and streamline work processes through automation.

Comparing ROI with and without Workativ

Say the total headcount of your organization is 3000 and the number of monthly tickets is 5000. Out of 20 service desk agents, 10 handle L1 tickets, 7 handle L2 tickets, and 3 handle L3 tickets.

If we calculate that 80% of FCR tickets out of 60% of 3000 L1 tickets is 1440, we can easily assume that L1 agents can take 20 minutes to close FCR tickets on average, while 4 hours for non-FCR tickets.

If per ticket costs $15 for a company, the total costs of 3000 tickets at tier 1 will be $45,000 monthly, while only an FCR ticket costs $21,000 monthly.

Organizations are forced to face high ticket handling costs when they overlook the necessity of chatbot automation.

As an organization, you are highly likely to experience high-cost ticket management without AI or LLM-powered chatbots like Workativ for service desk ticket handling.

Let’s divulge how efficiently businesses can optimize resources and drive excellent cost savings for FCR tickets at L1 with conversational AI platforms such as Workativ.

With the Workativ conversational AI chatbot, the average handle time per ticket comes down to less than a minute, and the average cost per ticket reduces to $3. That means the total cost of resolving 1440 tickets comes down to $4,320, resulting in a 5X cost saving of $17,280 monthly and $207360 annually.

On top of it, you can save 3546 agent hours annually.

Employee experience is ultimate. Organizations continue to experience productivity issues due to the lack of a powerful yet economic digital transformation platform that can provide automation to streamline mundane and repetitive manual activities for common HR and IT support use cases.

Leveraging the latest in artificial intelligence, such as large language models or Generative AI properties, Workativ enables businesses to gain hyper-automation for the current business functions that are otherwise too mundane and repetitive, causing productivity losses and downtime.

Workativ builds resiliency into business processes for organizations to become prepared for predictive IT support issues and offer instant solutions to get back to work without much delay or prolonged downtime.

Password reset is the most common workplace problem that consumes a massive productivity time of employees every day. Considering the number of apps has shot up, it is tough for employees to remember passwords causing them to ask for password reset support occasionally.

According to a survey, there are a couple of findings concerning password resets.

• Employees worldwide spend an average of 11 hours each year entering or resetting their password. For a company of 15,000 employees, on average, this represents a direct productivity loss of $5.2 million.

• Companies spend 2.5 months on resetting passwords for internal business apps on average.

• Again 20%-50% of calls to the IT helpdesk comprise requests regarding password reset. A single reset ranges between $20 and $70, which increases IT helpdesk spending per year on staffing or agent utilization.

Workativ helps businesses overcome multiple challenges of password resets using app workflow automation and integrations with several tools, such as MS Azure AD, Okta, ServiceNow, etc. to avoid employee frustrations and improve their satisfaction.

• Not just password resets but also many other use cases that HR and IT support have can gain instant autonomous resolutions.

• With a 5X MTTR reduction in request-response delivery, Workativ increases employee satisfaction and makes customer service delivery top-grade.

• With Workativ, businesses can stay calm and have total peace of mind, for they no longer need to worry about platform security and data breaches like ChatGPT exposes risks to business owners.

• The enterprise-grade security features comprising E2E encryption, multifactor authentication, SSL encryption, and malware and spam protection make Workativ a powerful and robust conversational AI and generative AI platform that ensures all employees' details are safe, encouraging rapid adoption for effective change management.

Above the cut, Workativ offers great cost efficiency to improve faster adoption to conversational AI technology while allowing businesses to leverage the benefits of Generative AI features to remain competitive and modernize their workplace for ultimate growth.

Deployment and implementation costs

Workativ is a SaaS-based cloud platform. Organizations must take care of annual subscription fees, which vary by different plans.

• For the Starter Plan, organizations pay a fee of $1530 billed annually for the deployment of chatbots and implementation of workflow automation.

• The Professional Plan costs $2250 to be billed annually with a similar feature to the Starter plan, plus features such as 5 agent chat inbox, 4000 chatbot sessions, approval management, app triggers, approval management, bot notifications, etc.

• The Enterprise Plan has a custom pricing option. It includes all features of the Professional Plan, plus Knowledge AI, enterprise security, role-based access control, etc

• Workativ also offers a Free Plan for organizations to experiment with the efficacy of an AI-powered bot and visualize the real impacts of automation of mundane work processes.

Businesses can benefit from 10% additional cost savings on deploying and implementing conversational AI chatbots if they pay annually.

Businesses can also have a hassle-free implementation of the Workativ chatbot. Workativ can help businesses design, build, configure, and optimize their chatbot platform. Workativ also provides training to improve DIY implementations and deployment.

Workativ’s ROI has a significant impact on business investment. Businesses that lose numerous hours of employee productivity incur revenue losses and bottom-line implications.

Workativ delivers effective cost savings over time that accumulate to bottom-line savings and revenue growth by allowing employees to solve common IT and HR support autonomously.

Businesses can also gain the flexibility to leverage the latest technology advancements through the Workativ conversational AI platform that combines the power of Generative AI, enabling businesses to get a competitive edge and gain exceptional benefits for workplace automation.

Workativ can reimagine any business's current state, having not explored the power of conversational AI yet. With the app workflow automation, Knowledge AI search, and powerful integrations, Workativ delivers compelling information discovery flexibility, making finding information easy and enhancing the employee experience.

If you want to save on employee turnover and expedite business growth, Workativ can help. Schedule a demo today.