Turn Off the Phones

It’s a phrase you hear often in today’s digital age: “Turn off your phone—it’s better for your brain!” “You’ll see more of the world!” “62% of your service desk tickets will be deflected by your chatbot!”

Wait—what was that last one?

While the effects of actually turning off your phone have been debated elsewhere, when it comes to using a chatbot to deflect Tier 1 tickets that monopolize your service desk, turning off the phones might just be the answer.

The Adoption Problem  

When you implement a chatbot, you have to make sure you get high adoption, or it will never deflect Tier 1 tickets. We have spoken with a couple of organizations that implemented a chatbot from a vendor who promised 100% adoption because it was front ended by Slack, and Slack gets high adoption. It felt like a no-brainer.

But the organizations found out that wasn’t the case. Old habits die hard and employees who are used to picking up the phone to get an answer from IT will continue doing just that. And if they try the chatbot on Slack, but the experience isn’t consumer-like, they won’t come back.

So How Do You Get High Adoption?

To get high employee adoption, you need to have several things:

• A chatbot with advanced NLP that results in a high degree of accuracy to meet your employee’s expectations;
• A consumer-like experience that delights employees;
• Omni-channel access so employees can reach the chatbot a number of ways, including Slack, email, and your existing self-service portal; and
• The courage to turn off the phones and intercept emails so that the chatbot can do its job!

Why is it so important to turn off the phones and intercept emails to the service desk? Employees have been calling and emailing the service desk to ask questions for years. Fewer than 1% of service desk calls are being deflected by existing self-help tools (i.e., portals). This means that nearly 100% of tickets still require human interaction. That’s a lot of time and resources being tied up answering the same questions, over and over.

In order to reap the benefits your chatbot has to offer, employee adoption is a must. In order to get employees to adopt, you need to prove to them that your chatbot can answer their questions accurately and faster than calling the service desk. Check out this blog to learn what happened when two Espressive customers decided to do just that.