SupWiz

Chatbot: Scale up Support Quickly and Effortlessly

Within two weeks we had the first version of the chatbot up and running, and that was quite surprising for us that it could be done in such a short time.

- Claus Duedal Pedersen, Head of User Support at Danish Health Authorities.

From calls to automated chats

To handle the increasing amount of inquiries from citizens, sundhed.dk implemented SupWiz Chatbot - moving away the requests from calls to chat. From May 2021 to December 2021 the number of inquiries by phone was reduced by 42%, while the chatbot took over 52% of all inquiries - also taking a considerable load of agents.

After introducing the SupWiz Chatbot, Sundhed.dk received thousands of chats, and today it handles the majority of incoming inquiries - not just corona-related questions but also more general health-related ones. Always making sure to help the Danish citizens with availability and faster replies.

After introducing the SupWiz Chatbot, Sundhed.dk received thousands of chats, and today it handles the majority of incoming inquiries - not just corona-related questions but also more general health-related ones. Always making sure to help the Danish citizens with availability and faster replies.

Exemplary use-case at top conference

In front of hundreds of service experts, Head of User Support, Claus Duedal Pedersen, and Operations Coordinator, Louise Thomsen, from sundhed.dk presented their digital journey during the corona crisis together with SupWiz CEO, Stephen Alstrup.

Sundhed.dk’s use case was selected as an outstanding example of achieving quality and agility in support. It was chosen as the keynote presentation in one of Denmark’s largest customer service events within the private sector, but also in conferences for the public sector and health, both domestically and internationally.

Read more about one of the events and the presentation here.

Meet the SupWiz team at stand 500 at SITS, The Service Desk & IT Support Show, on 10-11 May 2023 at ExCeL London. 

You can now register for your free ticket here. 

by SupWiz

Biomni and Illuminet launch partnership to transform IT Service Management

Trusted Software Provider Biomni and expert Consultancy Illuminet have today announced an exciting new partnership which is set to transform IT infrastructure and provide enhanced service management for its clients.

This Partnership means larger enterprises can take advantage of a totally holistic approach including consulting and product solutions. Drawing on Biomni’s Tenjin Expert Digital Assistant, Illuminet Automate can now offer multi-discipline solutions. Using crowdsourced company knowledge, this ‘first responder’ can provide a reliable knowledge base for customer queries, and coupled with backend process automation, can achieve seamless integrations to CRM, Sales, and Support systems. Through a reciprocal partnership, Biomni clients requiring broader ITSM, and process improvement consulting can leverage Illuminet’s suite of services, to build a highly automated and enhanced service desk.

Founded in 1999 to enable online procurement of IT goods for SPs and Enterprise, Biomni has gone from strength to strength having worked on more than 1,000 deployments in more than 100 countries with 20% year on year organic growth. Previous customers include AXA, Cognizant, LTI and T-Systems. Their flagship product, Tenjin, empowers Digital Workers with on-demand access to all the knowledge, service, and processes they need to get work done. Most recently, Biomni has incorporated GPT capabilities to further enhance Tenjin.

Working with private and public sector clients, Illuminet provides a wide array of services to drive positive change for including intelligent automation, data, and AI, delivered via unique Spin Cycle Methodologies for fast and repeatable deployment. Illuminet has worked with over 100 customers globally and has delivered projects across 60+ countries.

Commenting on the partnership, Angus Gregory, CEO of Biomni, said “We are thrilled to be building this reciprocal partnership with Illuminet. Having known members of the Illuminet team for more than 20 years, this partnership consolidates our relationships and brings our expert services to both our networks at a time when effective IT solutions and consultancy are mission-critical.” 

Greg Wood, CEO of Illuminet, echoed the effectiveness of the partnership: “In more than 13 years of business, over half a million users have benefited from our services. With more businesses than ever before looking into generative AI, automation, and virtual assistant technology, we are delighted that we can now include Biomni as one of our partners to further increase benefits to our clients”. 

To launch their new partnership, Illuminet will be joining Biomni at SITS (The Service Desk and IT Support Show) on the 10th - 11th May 2023 where they will be demonstrating the latest capabilities of the Tenjin product.

Meet the Biomni team at stand 383 at SITS, The Service Desk & IT Support Show, on 10-11 May 2023 at ExCeL London. 

You can now register for your free ticket here. 

by Biomni

Speaker Q&A: Siddharth G

Excited to speak at SITS is Siddharth G, ITSM evangelist at ManageEngine, the IT management division of Zoho Corporation. He specializes in driving marketing and customer education programs for ManageEngine’s ITSM platform, ServiceDesk Plus.

1. What’s the single biggest challenge in your work?

As an evangelist for ManageEngine's ITSM group of products, I break down the latest IT service delivery challenges facing IT teams, share pragmatic best practices, and help improve product adoption among customers.

The single biggest challenge in my work is picking up on and identifying service management trends well ahead of the curve, then sharing them with a broad, diverse audience. This audience includes IT and enterprise service practitioners as well as internal stakeholders like ManageEngine product managers and engineers. The two-fold challenge here is to synthesize these trends into cohesive, actionable strategies that help future-proof our products and, by extension, our customers' ITSM operations.

2. What tips would you give Service Desk & IT Support Professionals looking to drive their IT services forward?

Today's digitally disrupted world demands the best of service experiences. End-user expectations, stemming from their consumer transactions, gravitate toward frictionless access to essential services. In this context, IT teams should revisit traditional ITSM practices and remove barriers to productivity and flawless experiences.

To this end, service desk and support professionals should:

• Identify new-age technologies that could help deliver rich employee experiences and incorporate them into traditional ITSM workflows.

• Build an autonomous service engine that helps shift left the bulk of common service requests.

• Distribute critical knowledge articles on demand through AI-powered chatbots and reinforce this repository with a culture of peer-to-peer knowledge sharing.

3. What are the key points you’ll be covering in your seminar session at this year’s SITS?

There is a pressing need to incorporate consumer tech playbooks into traditional ITSM practices and deliver new-age employee experiences while still being able to rationalize IT spend. Premised on this need, the seminar will touch upon a new dimension of perceptive ITSM and will shed light on a seven-step framework that will aid IT leaders in aligning their roadmaps with this new dimension.

This includes a dissection of principles such as data science, machine learning, and decentralized knowledge sharing—and how they all fit in with ITSM workflows. The seminar, through these elements, will help chart the future of IT service management and actionable ways to help IT teams attain that future.

4. What is one common misconception about the industry you would like to change?

The common misconception and an oft-used stereotype of IT support is that IT teams are solely concerned with managing a pit stop and processing IT tickets. This viewpoint, unfortunately, is also shared by many CXOs who fail to see the potential value of leveraging IT to address the challenges of today's state of work.

With workforces becoming hybrid, workplaces turning digital, and workloads spiking beyond pre-2020 levels, IT as a practice can transform into a single, connective tissue that helps mitigate contemporary challenges of work. From orchestrating enterprise-wide workflows and self-healing of endpoints to measuring and improving the digital employee experience, IT is the definitive competitive differentiator of this decade.

5. What are you most looking forward to at SITS 2023?

I am excited to attend SITS 2023 since this is my first time at the event, both as an attendee and as a speaker. I have heard first-hand accounts from my ManageEngine colleagues about the enthusiasm of the audience and the dynamism among the speaker pool. I look forward to engaging with the attendees, analysts, and industry peers and enriching my perspectives on the ITSM front.

Siddharth’s session titled ‘Charting the future of ITSM with lessons from new-age Consumer Tech: Data Science | ML | Decentralized knowledge sharing’ will be held at SITS, The Service Desk & IT Support Show, on 10-11 May 2023 at ExCeL London.

The presentation is at 10–10:45am, May 10 in Theatre 3.

 You can now register for your free ticket here. 

by Audrey Plastiras-Phillips

Enterprise Service Management - How to improve alliance amongst departments

The digital transformation for many businesses were accelerated during the COVID pandemic, with support teams struggling to manage the new communication methods for resolving service requests and support issues.

As an organisation ask yourself the following questions.

are you having trouble with resources being caught up on manual tasks?

are your service agents being spent responding to repetitive requests?

are your service agents being consumed responding to interdepartmental requests?

are service requests being lost?

do you wish you could find a way to simply improve your service delivery, without adding to your workload.

Traditionally many organisations have focused their service management on cooperation instead of collaborations. In most situations, there is a hope that departments will cooperate with service requests, provide the correct information, and close the case quickly. In most cases employees do not even know who to turn to with their issues, it is un-clear where to go if you need help with requests often lost down a rabbit hole of email or chat messages.

Collaboration not just cooperation 

Business and management scholars have paid much attention to the importance of both formal and informal mechanisms to support inter-organisational collaboration. Studies have found that collaboration can increase achievement and productivity. Many large companies adopt collaboration platforms to allow employees, customers, and partners to intelligently connect, interact and solve problems.

This is where Enterprise Service Management (ESM) plays a significant role – ESM is a way to orchestrate all your organisation's service requests and notifications under one roof. Collaborating to support departments such as IT, Facilities HR and many more.

So, what is Enterprise Service Management really! –  

Enterprise service management provides collaboration tools and workflows that focus on encouraging collective intelligence and staff collaboration at the organisational level. These include features such as information sharing, shared portals, expert recommendations, and real time collaboration.

The main objective of ESM is to improve customer experience by providing a service that is easily accessible and delivers desired outcomes efficiently. Continual iterative feedback and reporting, keeps the service fresh and adaptable to changes in the service environment.

The effectiveness of a collaborative effort through ESM is driven by three critical factors.

Communication

Content Management

Workflow

Communication

A fit-for-purpose ESM solution ensures issues and requests do not slip through the net and are correctly and efficiently processed in accordance with agreed service levels. Bottlenecks and lost emails have become outdated. ESM provides a platform for setting organisational standards, service models, look & feel and common ways of working. There is no longer the question of “where do I go to get help.”

Work can be shared easily between teams and departments, with all communications conducted centrally and saved for auditing and accountability.

Content Management  

By promoting self-help, employees can find solutions via a centralised portal and bots. Reducing phone calls, emails, chats, and walk-ups to the equivalent service desks. Freeing teams to focus on valuable tasks to continually improve their service delivery.

Workflow 

With a flexible ESM process and workflow designer, new services can be released. retired and managed as per the customers' requirements. All the expertise is managed under one roof, so service and technical knowledge is not siloed or potentially lost. Removing manual effort and rework through optimised processes, workflow, automation, and alerting. Fuelled through the adoption of Self-Service, Self-Help, and Bots.

Who are the clear winners? 

Customers / End-Users

One stop shop! One simple central location for the people that matter. They know where to make requests, stay up to date, find answers, report issues, and leave feedback!

Executives & Decision Makers 

Through improved transparency and decision-making management can now attain a greater understanding of what has been achieved and what has not. Where is the value being generated or lost and how to communicate that with all stakeholders and make decisions to maximise or improve.

Service Support Agents 

Teams can collaborate and communicate within one central solution to provide a consistent and reliable service. Fast recorded communication helps deliver timely solutions to the customers they are supporting. The suite Self-Service & automation tools free-up mundane tasks for these teams to reinvest value time into tasks to improve on the service and tackle complex issues.

By Peter Broadhead

Meet the House-on-the-Hill Software team at stand 371 at SITS, The Service Desk & IT Support Show, on 10-11 May 2023 at ExCeL London. 

You can now register for your free ticket here. 

by Peter Broadhead

5 Reasons to use ITAM & SAM Tools to Transform your CMDB

Creating and managing a CMDB can be fraught with challenges, with difficulties acquiring data, ambiguous results and gaps in visibility being common. Not to mention a degree of subjectivity as to what the CMDB concept is actually for….
But, there are already tools out there that can be easily leveraged, not just to solve Achilles’ heel of ITSM solutions, but transform the way that you ‘see’ and manage your infrastructure, everywhere.

Here are the top 5 benefits of leveraging ITAM & SAM tools to populate your CMDB:

1. Completeness
Unlike Service Desk solutions, ITAM and SAM tool’s primary function is to provide 100% visibility of your IT infrastructure. This is critical to control the costs and risks around software licensing, across all platforms and environments, and regardless of whether devices reside on your network or out in the field. Therefore, exporting data from your ITAM / SAM tool to populate Configuration Items can offer a far more robust solution than simply relying on an ITSM inventory alone.

2. Detail
ITAM and SAM tools like Certero, aren’t designed for a singular purpose. So, when discovering and inventorying your infrastructure, Certero finds everything with an IP address; all hardware, network devices and software, and it retrieves all the information available on those assets. This means that when Certero data is used to populate CI’s, only a very small subset of what’s available is used; the rest of the depth and detail is there in Certero as and when you require it.
At a business level, this means that you don’t have to be able to foresee the reasons why you’d need the information in order to attain it – the answers are just there for you when required.

3. Security and Software Recognition
A key component of Software Asset Management is automating the process of identifying what discovered software really is, in terms of versions, editions and commercially licensed products. This intelligence is also critical to being able to identify software across your estate with known security vulnerabilities.

4. A Single Source of the Truth
Populating your CMDB with information from an ITAM / SAM solution, means that it is already a consolidated and cleansed data source. This eliminates the age-old problem of having to understand and resolve information from multiple sources giving you multiple, conflicting versions of the truth.

5. The Best Tools for the Job
Simply, ITSM tools aren’t the best ITAM / SAM solutions out there and ITAM and SAM tools aren’t ITSM solutions. Therefore, understanding the best direction for intelligence to travel between the two solves the CMDB challenge without having to compromise on your ability to secure or manage your software licensing risks and costs.
Plus, with the scope of solutions like Certero to manage assets from desktop to datacenter, mobile to SaaS and cloud, you can dramatically reduce the number of disparate toolsets needed to manage your IT assets everywhere.

If you’d like to see how a Certero ITAM /SAM integration with your Service Management CMDB would work, Contact Certero today or alternatively follow us for more news and updates.

By Scott Massey

Meet the Certero team at stand 270 at SITS, The Service Desk & IT Support Show, on 10-11 May 2023 at ExCeL London. 

You can now register for your free ticket here. 

by Scott Massey

Does my company need a Conversational AI chatbot?

Today, only 13% of employees are happy to work exclusively in the office: the remainder prefer to work either partly or fully remotely. However, while the morale and productivity benefits of a flexible work environment are beyond doubt, the technical and operational considerations continue to present major challenges, especially the employee IT support experience. When a fifth of employees claim tech issues and resolution times are the biggest challenges in their digital workplace experience, something is clearly wrong. While IT shares the employees’ view and wants to provide effective support, they often end up hindered by the volume of support tickets or lack of context needed to resolve problems quickly. This is where virtual support agents (VSAs) come into play: IT Helpdesk teams are increasingly adopting them so that employees can get what they need whenever they need it.

A virtual support agent (also known as IVA – Intelligent Virtual Agent) is a conversational bot that uses artificial intelligence and natural language processing to understand user intent and context to prevent employees from creating support tickets. While chatbots use rule-based algorithms to answer questions, VSAs integrate with the existing systems so as to fulfill tasks for employees. But how do you know if your company needs a Virtual Support Agent?

As a start, you should consider the below five metrics:

1. Monthly ticket volume

Most companies track this metric as it can be easily generated through the company’s IT Helpdesk tool. Over the last two years, monthly tickets created by employees have increased by 35% on average.

2. Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR)

Even a simple employee support request such as email password reset or group mail access might take hours to resolve because it requires human involvement. By implementing a virtual support agent, repetitive requests shouldn’t take more than 10 seconds.

3. Cost Per Ticket

On average, the cost per ticket is $29 compared to $26 two years ago. Adopting a virtual support agent can help you bring down this significantly and reduce operating costs.

4. Employee Headcount

If your organization is growing rapidly in terms of employee headcount, then you probably need to implement a virtual support agent to bring down your organization’s operational expenses and increase profitability.

5. Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS)

The eNPS is a metric used to measure internal customer satisfaction. Employee IT onboarding and IT Helpdesk support play a vital role in employee satisfaction. Recent surveys show that high eNPS increases employee productivity and loyalty in the company. Adopting a virtual support agent can lead to higher employee retention and a great workplace culture.

Of course, there are other metrics that you may need to consider prior to implementing a virtual support agent, related to your employee digital experience goals, your budget and the size of your company.

By Marilena Nikou, Gaspar AI 

Meet the Gaspar AI  team at stand 484 at SITS, The Service Desk & IT Support Show, on 10-11 May 2023 at ExCeL London. 

You can now register for your free ticket here. 

by Marilena Nikou, Gaspar AI