What Can an Employee Language Cloud Do for You?

If you’re considering an AI solution for ITSM, there are a wide range of choices:

• Build your own app. Toolkits out there, such as IBM Watson, are great when you are looking to build something truly unique, such as self-driving cars. Given ITSM is a known science, building your own is probably not the most cost-effective solution.
• Train your own chatbot. ITSM vendors, such as ServiceNow, provide you with a chatbot framework that you can build on top of – but you need to add AI experts and linguists to your project. Further, since every employee interaction is a workflow, you may need additional admins/developers to keep your chatbot current.
• Simplify knowledge base search. Searchbot vendors, such as MoveWorks, allow you to use your existing KB content and make it easier for your employees to find the information they are looking for. The key challenge with this approach is that most help desk agents have little time to create KBs. In fact, according to Gartner (Predicts 2018: IT Operations, 12/4/17), “Through 2020, 99% of artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives in IT service management (ITSM) will fail due to the lack of an established knowledge management (KM) foundation.”

That’s why we took a different approach with Barista. Barista, our AI-based virtual support agent, is not dependent on knowledge base articles. Our belief is that a great solution learns as your team does what they do all day long – provide employee assistance by resolving tickets. That sounds great, but for this to work, Barista needs to understand what employees are asking to begin with – so how does that work? With the Espressive Employee Language Cloud.

The Employee Language Cloud

Barista comes out of the box with an Employee Language Cloud that includes an extensive vocabulary tailored to the workplace. So, Barista speaks the language of employees, rather than employees needing to speak the language of Barista . . . because there is no such thing!

“Barista, how do I install a printer?” “Something is wrong with my paycheck.” “My chair only has three legs.”

There are tens of thousands of workplace topics understood by Barista on day one. And because every question can be asked in thousands of ways, Barista is capable of understanding over 15 million workplace phrases without any customer input.

The Employee Language Cloud incorporates leading AI technologies like natural language processing (NLP), machine learning (ML), and deep neural learning to ensure that when your employees ask a question, Barista will understand and provide the right answer. When Barista does not have an answer and needs to involve an expert from the help desk, Barista will precisely route the question to the expert who will know the answer, virtually eliminating misrouted tickets.

Another cool benefit of the Employee Language Cloud is that it expands over time from the questions that are being asked across our install base. If a customer has opted in, new phrase structures, topics, or synonyms we have never seen are added into the Employee Language Cloud so that every one of our customers can benefit from questions being asked everywhere Barista is deployed. It is important to note that answers to questions are never shared, because we view those as proprietary.

Equally as important, the company where the question is being asked benefits in another way. Barista learns on the fly from every employee interaction, so the next time an employee asks the same question – in any variation – Barista knows the answer. We specifically designed this learning process to allow your help desk experts to own the content, and not require the assistance of AI experts or ITSM admins (who have way too much to do already).

Getting Back to Where We Started

Here is the answer to the question: What can an Employee Language Cloud do for you?

• It enables you to deploy in weeks versus months or years
• It means your employees don’t have to learn a new language
• It enables employees to get immediate answers, deflecting calls to the help desk and lowering your MTTR
• It focuses your help desk on answering relevant questions versus re-routing them
• And, perhaps most important, it means that you don’t have to hire developers, AI experts, linguists, or dedicated knowledge base managers

Barista brings the ease of consumer virtual assistants, such as Alexa and Google Home, into the workplace, delivering a personalized user experience that maximizes employee adoption and reduces help desk call volume. Barista provides employees with immediate answers, proactively notifies them of outages or other important events, and continues to interact with them throughout the entire lifecycle of their requests. Barista also helps guide employees through complex processes with ease, such as new hire onboarding, password resets, vacation requests, and more.

We would love to show you Barista in action. Just request a demo here.