Barista: My Virtual Mentor
When starting a new job, it helps to meet that one person that will show you the ropes. Usually it is someone who has been with the company for a while and who is well-versed with the plethora of company policies and procedures. You can ask this person a wide spectrum of questions, such as:
- “Is there VPN?”
- “How do I order an ergo keyboard?”
- “How do I get a company t-shirt?”
- “How can I join my group’s channel on Slack?”
In addition, having a mentor or teammates you can “shoulder tap” for IT assistance can help you get productive quickly. However, since the start of COVID-19, the ability for employees to shoulder tap their neighbors for IT help no longer exists. In a post-COVID world, where most of us are working from home, that mentor now must be virtual.
The Onboarding Experience
Let’s face it, the first couple of weeks at a new company can be overwhelming. In addition to all the training and meetings, you must learn new procedures and customs. But it’s often not clear where to get answers. When you have a question about benefits, do you send an email to the HR alias or can you Slack the HR rep that you met during your orientation instead? Is it okay to call them?
Espressive Barista, our AI-based virtual support agent, takes the guesswork out of obtaining answers. While some organizations may have different chatbots or self-service portals for different departments, Barista is a one-stop shop for assistance across the enterprise. Imagine a virtual mentor that is available 24/7 who can help you select a monitor to order for your home office, tell you the company holidays, and get you the latest corporate PowerPoint template. Did you forget your Zoom login already? No problem: Barista can help you reset your password without having to disturb the helpdesk. Barista is a great resource to have, especially for new hires.
How can Barista answer all these questions? This is made possible through the Barista Employee Language Cloud (ELC), which enables Barista to understand the language of employees with a high degree of accuracy. The ELC comes with over 1.3B phrases understood, and the number grows daily through a crowd-sourced architecture.
Adapt to WFH
In pre-COVID days, you could ask a mentor for advice on how to dress at a tradeshow or where the next team offsite would take place. Today, employees are asking how to set up virtual happy hours and about work-from-home resources. When I used to work in the office, I would turn to my coworker next to me and ask, “Is Fran in the office today?” These days, I find myself asking Barista who is in our Water Cooler Zoom hangout and whether Fran is there.
Virtual support agents need to be able to keep up with the changing world around them. Barista uniquely provides the only conversational AI platform enabling subject matter experts (SME) to create, edit, or delete content without requiring any coding or assistance from an expert, so content can easily stay up to date.
First Impressions
Most ITSM teams focus on things like call deflection rates, accuracy, and overall ROI when they select a virtual support agent (VSA). HR teams are now becoming part of the equation when selecting a VSA because they realize that the employee onboarding experience is just as important a consideration. A good onboarding experience will impact employee satisfaction, productivity, and retention.
With Barista, your employees will get a virtual mentor that is available 24/7, able to answer their questions across the enterprise, and can be easily updated with relevant content. What first impression will your virtual mentor make?