Adoption: Where Hope Is Not A Strategy

A flurry of startups have tried to address low adoption of intranets and service portals with the use of chatbots to automate employee self-help. These startups are integrating chatbots into collaboration tools such as Slack and Teams since these are tools employees are already using. While employees get to interact with a chatbot, to them it feels like a repackaged front end to the intranet and service portal experience. Ask a question and get multiple articles to review at their leisure. If a ticket is created, employees are sent to the portal to manage their pending requests, and then interact with the help desk via email to resolve their issues. This highly fragmented experience is not one that will deflect phone and email from the help desk.

Because they are integrated into collaboration tools, some of these startups are bold enough to claim 100% adoption. Let’s be fair — claiming 100% adoption just because employees use a tool for one purpose does not mean 100% of your employees will be submitting IT (or non-IT) tickets using the chatbot. Driving a different behavior requires a much more thoughtful and focused approach.

Okay, so how do you maximize adoption? Meet employee expectations. In their personal lives,
your employees have adopted mobile apps such as Spotify and Uber because they are accessible, intuitive, and engaging. Employees expect consumer-like experiences at work too — and Espressive has delivered!

But at the same time, we recognize that employees have been using email and calling the help desk to ask for help for years. Old habits are hard to break, and if you want to do that it will require a coordinated and dedicated strategy.  As we all know, hope is not a strategy.

We believe the only way to change established behavior is through a comprehensive omni-channel capability. Omni-channel means Barista, our AI-based virtual support agent, can be accessed via a number of different interfaces including email, phone, service portal widget, collaboration tools (e.g., Slack, Teams), web, and native apps. In fact, we built native apps for all mobile and desktop platforms because we heard from our customers it is easier for employees to access than remembering a URL. Imagine automatically redirecting your existing help desk email address to Barista, who automates resolution of issues via email and opens tickets when it cannot — you would be able to deflect the majority of those questions before they reach your help desk agents.

You can choose to go with chatbot solutions that put a new face in front of intranets and service portals — but while your hopes will be high, you can’t fool your employees into adoption. They want consumer-like self-help. And they want to access it from every device through a variety of access points. We believe that your employees need an exceptional experience to adopt a self-help tool. Barista delivers that.

In our book, adoption isn’t a result of hope. It’s a result of exceptional employee experiences that make it frictionless to get help.