15-Minute Demo: How To Automate Employee Self-Help On Slack

Did you know you can use Slack to automate employee self-help? Slack is a great channel for employees to get the answers and assistance they need, but if not done right, you might end up hiring even more help desk agents just to monitor public channels. Benjamin Wesson, VP of Product Management at Espressive, shows you how to use Slack to streamline employee self-help—not add more work—in a 15-minute video, part of our demo series.

With Slack, there are two main ways your employees can communicate:

1. Through direct messages, or
2. In public channels

Espressive Barista, our AI-based virtual support agent, automates both. Barista integrates seamlessly with Slack as a native application, automating all employee requests and enabling help desk agents to stop monitoring public channels with confidence.

Read below to see how Barista supports the two ways your employees communicate in Slack.

Barista Supports Direct Messages

Once you deploy Barista for Slack, employees can start asking Barista questions via a direct message. Barista supports threads in Slack, so when Barista responds to a question from an employee, it will appear as a reply in a thread dedicated to that question. If an employee has a new question, they only need to ask Barista and a new thread will be automatically created. This way, all employee conversations with Barista can be easily pinned or referenced if needed.

The ability to enable direct, private message is particularly important for departments that manage highly sensitive content (e.g., HR, Payroll), where employees should not ask questions in a public forum. Slack’s direct messaging capabilities ensures that every service team can embrace Barista through Slack without compromising their mission.

Barista Monitors Public Channels With Precautions

You can also deploy Barista to monitor public channels, such as an IT Help Desk Channel. In these channels, Barista can be configured to only respond to an employee conversation when referenced by name (I.e., “@Barista”). This invites Barista into a conversation and all employees who have access to the channel can benefit from the answers Barista provides.

However, there will be times when an employee asks a question where the answer might have sensitive information such as, “What are my 401(k) contributions?” Through natural language processing, Barista can understand which conversations are potentially sensitive and ask the employee if they want to move that conversation to a direct message.

In this fifteen-minute video, Benjamin demonstrates these features and more so you can see how Barista automates employee self-help in Slack. To see Barista in action, click here to view the video.

Interested in getting a demo personalized specifically for your organization? Click here and we will make that happen.