How to improve IT services with a chatbot

How great would it be to have a chatbot in your digital workspace to help you with all your IT service requests? With chatbots, people from the IT department can focus on improving the digital workspace and spend less time on answering routine questions about IT. In this blog you’ll find out what chatbots are, how chatbots improve your IT-services and why you should integrate a chatbot.

What are chatbots?

A chatbot is a tool that helps people by asking automated questions and sharing information. Chatbots work with the interpretation of words, so they can give a (pre-set) answer to the person who is asking the question. These chatbots have multiple purposes. Businesses use chatbots for their IT services and customer support, but it can also be used for marketing or sales purposes.

As Jared Atchison published on Forbes, you must ensure that you collect personal information of the person and their preferences to ensure that the chatbot can assist with the person’s problem. By collecting this data you can give a personalised experience and you are aware of their needs, which will give someone the feeling that the organisation knows what they need and can help them.

Two types of chatbots: Rule-based and Artificial Intelligence chatbots

There are different types of chatbots. The two most common types are Rule-based chatbots and A.I. (Articifial Intelligence) chatbots.

Rule-based chatbots

The Rule-based chatbots give predefined answers and responses to specific questions. You can see their process as a predefined ‘decision tree’ that works on if this/than that established rules. This means they are easy to control, but cannot learn on their own or answer questions outside of the established rules. This kind of chatbot is only suitable for simple questions and do not respond well to nonspecific questions. This makes it a suitable chatbot for simple and common IT questions, which can be anticipated by the IT department.

A.I. chatbots

The A.I. chatbots are smarter than Rule-based chatbots, though they take more work to get optimally up and running beforehand. They can (learn to) understand questions and can be trained to understand the context of messages and give more accurate responses. Furthermore, they can search through a lot of data to give recommendations, fill out forms, integrate CRM systems and most importantly, they can give the employee extra service as compared to the Rule-based chatbot. Within this chatbot employees can ask questions about applications, hardware and technical problems. A.I. chatbots can also give more information, for example to suggest a blog with more information about the problem or to send the employee to a Support Portal to read more, without someone having to predefine these answers beforehand.

3 ways chatbots improve your IT services

Now that we know what chatbots are and which types of chatbots are most common, we’ll explain three ways a chatbot can improve your IT-service.

1. Instant support for employees 

By providing the employees with a chatbot where they can instantly ask their questions and receive answers, you can improve your digital employee experience. Easy questions are answered within seconds, so employees don’t lose time waiting for a reply to their email or being on hold while calling the IT-service department. You can support your employees with a chatbot that will send articles that match the questions of the employees.

This way you reduce the amount of service tickets, preventing employees from feeling guilty for sending lots of emails to the IT-service desk and allowing them to focus on their work.

2. Answer questions 24/7

With a chatbot you are able to answer questions from employees outside of office hours. This is especially helpful for remote workers and for people that work from multiple locations or even different countries in different time zones. It is important that they have access to support 24/7.

By providing a chatbot, employees are helped to identify and solve the most common issues. And the good thing is, this is available outside of office hours as the chatbot never sleeps. For example, with HTML you can integrate a support chat like Zendesk Chat or Intercom that will help especially remote workers to support them with IT services without going through a long process.

3. Increased productivity saves time and money

With a chatbot you save cost on employees, because you don’t need to hire more people for IT-services. By using chatbots, employees can focus on other work and have more capacity and are therefore more productive and able to do more. This will save the IT-service desk lots of emails about changing passwords, how to integrate applications and more. Furthermore, this frees up time for the IT department to focus on other tasks, such as innovation projects, than benefit the organisation even more.

Why integrate a chatbot?

By integrating a chatbot you can reduce the time that people wait for IT-support, enabling them to focus on their work. A chatbot can easily and quickly give the employee live communication to help find what they need.

When an employee has questions about their digital workspace, like Workspace 365, they can ask the chatbot questions about applications, APIs, features within the digital workspace and more. Chatbots are constantly developing and you can make your chatbot just the way you want it to be. This way, you can use it for only IT-services, but you can also extend it to Marketing and Sales purposes.

You may also find interesting:

• Top 10 digital transformation trends 2021
• What does the Customer Success Team do?
• 8 Digital Workspace trends for 2021
• Biggest Digital Transformation Challenges