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Once upon a time, chatbots were a popularized technology in every industry, changing the game of what was possible with support delivery. Then came advanced conversational artificial intelligence technology that transformed support expectations for companies and users with unprecedented and extraordinary support delivery. These conversational AI assistants have been referred to as the future of support and provide the necessary foundations users need to receive instant and helpful resolutions.
Both chatbots and conversational AI are virtual assistants to aid users' support requests. To put it simply, they differ as chatbots have a limited amount of responses to users' requests and conversational AI takes question-to-answer to a whole new level. More technically, chatbots generally function on a series of pre-written scripts formulated by-hand from support teams whereas conversational AI has a deeper understanding of the context of which it is being deployed and knows which knowledge bases and systems to pull information from.
There’s much to say on how conversational AI trumps your traditional chatbot feature, but let’s dive into the ‘why’. What makes chatbots an unsuccessful IT support outlet within a company?
Support chatbots surged in the market over a decade ago, growing in popularity with larger companies. Today many enterprises, big and small, use these chatbots for quick assistance available at any time. That classic little robot in the bottom corner: “How can I assist you?” However, it didn’t take long for businesses to realize that the technology or offerings from various providers was flawed, and users were suffering in the process. Your traditional chatbot is like a bad Tinder date–plenty of red flags but you entertain the idea because of good looks.
Burden to IT teams: creating and implementing scripts for chatbots is a hefty job that needs constant updating to remain abreast users needs
Lack of human connection: robotic speech is boring. Users want to feel like their concerns are being heard and addressed more personally.
Wormhole of answers: ever tried using a chatbot and got directed to an FAQ that has nothing to do with your request? Switch up your wording a bit and get hit with the “I’m sorry, I can’t help you with that”.
Support processes in companies are rapidly changing and the expectations of users are only growing higher. The days of requests taking hours, if not days, transferring, back and forth emailing, and whatever other frustrating user-support interactions are long gone.
When conversational AI is optimized, not only are users receiving responses that resolve their needs within seconds, but the entire company benefits. Instead of the technology being just another ‘set-up and done’ support outlet, it has the ability to completely reshape support delivery within enterprises.
They don’t call it ‘conversational’ for nothing, the AI assistant practices Natural Language Process (NLP) which will understand human emotion and conversational cues for more personalized and unique responses for each user.
With Machine Learning (ML) capabilities, even if a solution cannot be found for a request, the AI learns through each interaction with users to develop the best responses. That’s right, a support tool that continues to improve with time!
When employee productivity is high, the company becomes more profitable. With an effective and efficient AI assistant, employees see faster resolutions to internal problems and can therefore get back to work. Resources and time of IT teams are freed up.Talk about a win-win!
Let’s talk about money. Consider all the costs of traditional support methods:
In-house or outsourced call centers
Upscaled IT teams
“First generation” support chatbots
Overpromising managed service providers
Despite the high numbers associated with each, the truth is that traditional support methods are failing: MTTRs are climbing, service level agreements are not being met, and users are frustrated. Not only is conversational AI the turn-key solution, but support costs are also reduced in the process by up to 2/3rds.
You love the tech but don’t know where to start? Worry not, Cloud MSG makes implementation seamless. With a combination of conversational AI software expertise, U.S.-based live agents, and strategy development consulting, we implement the perfect helpdesk support solution for your company.
First we start by integrating with your ticketing systems such as ServiceNow or ZenDesk. We then ingest the history of that data into our conversational AI platform to understand common support requests, and estimate the percentage of tickets that can be auto-resolved with AI. Generally the auto-resolution rate starts between 50-63% from launch, and improves to over 70% within 6 months.
After analyzing your ticket data, our team will work closely with your IT department to connect the platform to your various provisioning, knowledge base, device management, and other software in your technology stack. This enables us to build highly integrated workflows that are all powered from the AI platform.
Let’s look at an example:
Your organization uses Microsoft 365 as a productivity suite
You get thousands of support requests yearly related to Microsoft software issues, licenses, or troubleshooting
The Cloud MSG team would connect your AI support assistant to both the Microsoft public knowledge-base and to your internal software provisioning tools
We can then build workflows which will entirely automate the resolution to any Microsoft software related question, and even provision licenses to an authorized user automatically within the chat
The final step is deploying the AI across the various communication channels users will use to interact with support, such as Microsoft Teams, Slack, Phone, Web Chat, and more. Users then interact in natural language with the conversational AI, which directs them through support workflows and provides meaningful resolutions to requests. Additionally, the AI platform uses organizational knowledge and ticket history to continuously learn and auto-resolve issues.
Companies already using the power of Cloud MSG’s helpdesk solution are seeing:
Automatic resolution of 70%+ user support requests.
Reduced Mean-Time-to-Resolution (MTTR) up to 90%.
Lower Internal IT Support Costs by 2/3rds
IT and Digital Transformation leaders looking to improve their user and customer experiences simply cannot ignore the massive cost savings and enhanced online support experience from Cloud’s AI-powered helpdesk. We’d love to show you how it’s possible to achieve the same results! Start by booking a demo with us today.