Chatbots deliver so much promise for business leaders to handle customers' or users’ queries and offer solutions to keep them satisfied and win their trust. But, more often, chatbots and AI-powered virtual agents are interchangeably used when business leaders evaluate their potential for their business use cases.
Although chatbots solve many user queries, they are rudimentary types of chatbots, meaning they follow a decision tree-like scripted or predefined conversation flow only to stop at a certain point when queries are out of the script.
AI-powered virtual agents use advanced or sophisticated AI and machine learning technologies to adapt to the changing needs of users by learning using conversation patterns and user behavior. That’s the most obvious reason AI-powered virtual agents have gained much popularity in this new era of automation and hybrid workplaces. According to a recent report, 50% of large companies are inclined toward investing in chatbot-based support systems.
Gartner also predicts that conversational AI will rise from 5% in 2020 to 40% by 2024 to be used in enterprise applications to enhance user expeirene. Another amazing prerequisite to expediting service requests so as to offer to personalize user experience and provide real-time resolution of problems is to hold onto Generative AI potential.
The cost-effective and quick way to leverage Generative AI and transform how businesses serve their customers or users is to get AI-powered virtual agents similar to what Workativ brings to the enterprise or SMB business leaders.
Today, employees want quick support resolutions, 24*7 availability, ease of access, and work-from-home support. On the other hand, companies want to enable hybrid workplaces using automation and self-service while reducing pandemic costs so as to optimize revenue.
Workativ AI-powered virtual agents with the power of conversational AI and Generative AI can easily help businesses meet expectations of autonomous problem-solving through a self-serve capability, which traditional IT helpdesks are otherwise lacking to deliver.
A Virtual Agent can help you achieve that efficiency by offering a scalable, affordable solution to automate conversations and tasks. You only need to chat with a Virtual Agent and resolve your issues within seconds.
Let’s just focus on helpdesk automation.
In a traditional setting, manual intervention is key to helping resolve IT support requests.
Say you are unable to access your account somehow, or you want a new mouse. You talk to an IT support agent and get it resolved. With an increasing number of customers and workforce working in a hybrid workplace model, despite being super-efficient, companies find it difficult to scale to meet the demand of incoming IT support requests.
Therefore, IT Help Desk Automation is a suitable solution as it helps automate a series of IT-related functions for a particular scenario and streamline processes. It offers efficiency, scale, and time to value with automated workflows.
Consider an AI-powered Virtual Agent as a digital worker working as an IT Help Desk agent. Employees can communicate with the Virtual Agent and resolve their issues or requests in seconds without human interference or live agents.
By combining IT workflows and chatbot, you create the perfect recipe for IT Support that is autonomous, efficient, and, most importantly, deliver outcome faster.
Using this automation model, virtual agents can now handle routine or repetitive issues reported to the IT Help Desk, but without the need to call your live agents.
The above fact is partially true, considering how users use AI-powered virtual agents for each and every IT support issue. Most virtual agents come with siloed portals in ITSM platforms, webpages, or companies’ intranet systems, which need occasional logins and outs, making it difficult for users to raise IT support requests and forcing them to return to emailing to the service or help desks.
The convenient way to allow users to leverage AI-powered virtual agents for help desk support requests is to bring them to where they always work.
Their familiar communication and collaboration channels are Microsoft Teams or Slack. They know how to send messages, react, and work. A conversational AI technology gives the same essence to the AI-powered virtual agents and lets them sync seamlessly with MS Teams or Slack to improve adoption and enhance users’ activity when it comes to raising a question to the conversational AI-powered virtual agent and getting an answer instantly.
Workativ's conversational AI platform allows business leaders to seamlessly build their AI-powered virtual agents or chatbots and integrate with conversational platforms to facilitate real-time problem-solving autonomously.
In addition to the extensibility of conversational AI, Workativ also makes it easy for businesses to harness the power of Generative AI or large language models through Knowledge AI integration into the chatbot and helps them gain incredible search functions to improve knowledge discovery and work at speed.
Large language models that underpin Generative AI capabilities can ramp up the efficiency of conversational AI chatbots, meaning when they are layered on top of AI-powered virtual agents, users can supercharge their abilities to find information and reduce MTTR in getting information and continue to work.
Conversational AI and Generative AI-powered virtual agents can accelerate service desk or help desk responses in the following ways:
To simplify the IT support process, companies categorize employee or customer queries into various levels of support. Based on the complexity and priority, the agents are assigned levels according to their expertise in the domain. Traditionally, the agents with beginner to intermediate levels of expertise are kept at the first line, whereas the highly skilled experts are kept at the second line.
In the L1 support, a Virtual Agent can be deployed to help automate 80% of support issues autonomously. Let’s look at an example of how this can be implemented.
A user opens the virtual agent chatbot in Slack or Teams and types unlock account as the issue. Trivial issues like this do not require human attention. In such a scenario, an IT Virtual Agent can perform the steps required to unlock the account with the help of some details shared by the user on the chat.
Furthermore, the reported issue is beyond the capabilities of an IT Virtual Agent. In that case, it is escalated to the Second Line of support, where Live Agents resolve the issue with their level of expertise.
In such a robust structure, the reported issues are better managed to enhance the efficiency of the IT support team. Each level is systematically managed as the workload is divided, and it is easier to track the issues for reporting.
Here are a few examples of why businesses must augment IT Agents with Virtual Agents for Front Line Support.
Companies struggle to provide unified support with hybrid workplaces while increasing IT requests or complaints. But increasing your IT staff to meet the demand is not always easy or efficient. Interacting with the customers or employees, generating tickets, processing them, and finally resolving the issues takes a lot of effort, time, and consistency.
On the contrary, a Virtual Agent understands the reported issue in a chat, asks for some details from the user, and resolves it within seconds. It can easily scale with minimum effort and usually covers 90% of issues with simple, one-time training. In summary, it’s easy to scale.
Spending hours resolving mundane issues takes away the attention and time required to be invested in more complex issues. There is also the issue of skills degradation and job attrition as humans repeatedly get bored doing the same thing.
In that case, Virtual Agents are well-resourced to address issues and solve them in seconds. This allows the live agents (humans) to focus on the critical issues only.
With the pandemic pushing companies to adopt a hybrid workplace model and moving employees to locations working from different time zones, supporting them becomes an operational challenge. Companies are now looking at the 24/7 support model.
Virtual Agents are a quick and easy way to address the demands. Spinning out a virtual agent is easier and more cost-effective than running 24/7 helpdesk operations.
Agents must follow a time-consuming process for routine service requests, sometimes requiring further approvals or ticket escalation to a second-level group. It could involve a bit of back and forth and time-consuming.
With Virtual Agent, your process can be mapped, and workflows can be automated so your employees can chat with the virtual agent, share some details where required, and get their requests processed autonomously.
Traditionally, live agents are expected to respond to all types of issues, even during the peak times when the ticket flow is way too high. The process of answering a query, understanding the issue from employees, and then deciding its complexity and priority is tiresome.
A virtual agent chatbot, on the other hand, can prioritize the queries based on user inputs within seconds. You set conditional scenarios in a Virtual Agent Chatbot and enable it to decide if an issue is supposed to be resolved or escalated to a higher level. Nevertheless, ticket classification and dispatch are automated.
Let’s go through some key Virtual Agent Chatbot use cases.
Your account has been locked unexpectedly and you want to get it unlocked quickly!
In this case, an AI-powered IT support virtual agent from workativ can understand the request, gathers only a few details like email address from the employee(to validate authenticity) to process the request and unlocks the account for the individual in seconds!
Virtual agent from workativ can be integrated with tools like OKTA, Microsoft Azure AD, Auth0, LastPass and more to execute workflow required to unlock accounts smoothly
Password Reset is the most common request in the IT helpdesk. A Virtual Agent can work like magic for requests like these, as resolving these issues involves no in-person chatting, going through help documentation or any other tiresome activities.
The user can simply type in Reset Password into their Slack or Teams (where the virtual agent is active). The Bot understands and asks the user for some details like email address. Then, it either sends a password reset link to the user’s email address or asks the user to key-in the new password and resets it.
Virtual agent from workativ, you can integrate with popular IAM apps like Idaptive, Microsoft Azure AD, FusionAuth, Auth0 and more to simplify the password reset process and make it a better experience for the user.
An IT Virtual Agent can help with user provisioning services like adding users to groups, de-provisioning users, assigning roles, and more.
when a user sends a provisioning request like adding them or a particular user to the company’s email list, the virtual agent understands the request and asks for details like email address and the role to be assigned. That's all it takes a Virtual agent to perform user-provisioning. Quick and easy.
Virtual agent from workativ integrates with multiple third-party tools like LastPass, OneLogin and OKTA to provide organized user-provisioning or de-provisioning services to the users. You can deploy your virtual agent on Slack or Microsoft Teams which acts as the conversation hub between the user and the chatbot.
A Virtual Agent can allow or revoke a user’s access to a particular app based on the requirement. Virtual Agent can do it independently or by raising the request to the second level support. Anyways, it doesn’t take long in either of the cases.
It is quick as when a user requests for access to a particular portal or resource, the virtual agent chabot addresses the request by confirming it with the user’s email address and proceeds with providing access to the required resource or portal.
Virtual agent from workativ integrates with third-party tools like OKTA which function as access management to any third-party tools when integrated with them, such as Office 365, JIRA and more.
Your laptop is not working, or you need a new monitor from your IT team?
You chat with the virtual agent to raise a new asset request. The chatbot will understand your request and ask for details like your email address and raise the request to the field dispatch team for issuing you the asset you need.
Email related issues are very common nowadays. If your email address appears to be invalid, or you cannot send an email out of the blue one day.
Simply, type the issue in Slack, Teams and select the relevant options related to your query (if available). The virtual agent will address the issue by asking for some details and will either resolve it instantly or will raise the request to the management for approval.
With automated workflows, troubleshooting is made easy as a Virtual Agent can simply check for your details and resolve the issue with the integrated third-party tool easily.
Generally, it depends on the type of use cases or sessions you want for AI-powered virtual agents for the help desk.
Service desk management software or ITSM platforms imply high costs for IT virtual agents. It is a built-in feature within your ITSM platform. However, it is not available until you pay a fee. From that perspective, the capacity of an ITSM-built virtual agent may be limited within the ITSM environment.
However, opting for a conversational AI platform or a Generative AI virtual agent is more independent and vendor-agnostic. It means you need not invest in another new set of tech stacks to fit the service desk management requirements. Third-party conversational AI or GenAI-powered IT agents like Workativ offer deep integrations within your existing tech stack.
Workativ has a multiple subscription structure. You can choose specific to your business needs and build one for your employees.
Overall, the costs of developing and implementing an IT agent using in-house teams or preferring the ITSM option are way higher than conversational AI platforms.
Another challenge is in-house or virtual agents from ITSM vendors may take time to deploy, which also incurs high costs for chatbot development and deployment.
But Workativ is a no-code platform, requiring no deep tech help to build and launch. You can enjoy a shorter period for the go-live event and start leveraging conversational AI and Generative AI benefits.
It is a human-to-machine interaction or vice versa. So, employees or users are deeply concerned about privacy being violated.
As they ask questions, some information goes into the chat interface. Information may include personally identifiable information, bank account details, company data, etc.
Data leakage can result in cybersecurity threats or ransomware concerns, requiring vendors to have robust security controls to comply with regulatory needs.
Workativ offers E2E encryption, multi-factor authentication, SSL encryption, malware, and spam protection to provide total security to privacy and help build a safe environment for users to maintain regulatory compliance.
Since you have reached the end of the blog, you probably know what an AI-powered Virtual Agent Chatbot can do by now.
As companies are forced to hybrid workplace models, the quality of support they provide to their customers or employees is critical in differentiating itself from competitors. If you wonder how Virtual Agents are profitable to any company, here are some points from the blog to recall:
Now, it’s evident that businesses that want to transform their employee experience and modernize workplace support can use a virtual agent that helps them scale, automate, and reduce costs. As the final verdict, virtual agents are essential to your IT Help desks
Workativ Assistant is a SaaS-based no-code platform that combines conversational AI workflow automation to help companies build an efficient virtual agent with RPA capabilities to resolve repetitive workplace issues and service requests
A virtual agent uses AI and a more powerful subset of AI, like Generative AI, to automate workflows for IT support issues. With the help of virtual agents for service desks, employees can get consistent support and efficiently address a higher volume of tickets.
The advantages of upgrading to a virtual agent-powered IT helpdesk are that it can help manage many tickets, improve response time, and allow more time to handle critical issues.
With traditional service desks, employees experience longer wait times. However, an AI-powered virtual agent for service desks can learn and evolve with time, offering customized support for unique challenges. This ability enables service desks to stay ahead of time and empowers them to solve problems autonomously.