Conversational platforms are revolutionizing enterprise work environment by enhancing day to day internal communication across business functions as well as external customers. Organizations are leveraging AI for customer support to reduce expenses and improve business efficiency, with plans to expand the scope of AI applications to other areas such as IT Service Management (ITSM) and IT support. By enabling real-time interactions, conversational platforms are also transforming technical support strategies by using chatbots and virtual assistants as IT support agents.
Globally, more than 50% of businesses are expected to deploy a chatbot solution by 2025
Conversational platforms benefit IT support agents by performing several transactional tasks
IT support, especially for software, consumer electronics, and gadgets is prone to large number of questions and complaints. For handling these queries 24/7 and reducing the burden on human agents, conversational platforms i.e. virtual assistants and chatbots are deployed to act as IT support agents. These virtual assistants are designed to address even complicated customer queries and complaints in addition to frequently asked support questions.
Customer frustration over traditional communication channels are also driving the need for conversational platforms for IT support. Lengthy waiting times and slower resolution even for simple queries are few factors leading towards customer frustration. Conversational platforms are built to handle service requests and routine incidents providing customers with consistent realtime solutions, enabling better customer engagement through personalized experience and faster turnaround time.
Every single technical or IT issue requires the user to raise a ticket by filling forms and then wait for the response from the support team. In an increasingly tech-savvy environment, enterprises cannot expect IT users to fill up the lengthy ticket forms and wait too long for the response. Conversational platforms offer 24/7 availability, which quickens the ticket resolution by sending the issue to the right agent. This also improves the overall resolution rate and rapidly restores business continuity.
Conversational platforms are becoming a key component of IT support
Conversational platforms are designed to proactively resolve all sorts of customer issues any time of the day, anticipating the needs of customers, thereby enhancing customer interaction. By providing real-time IT support even to the impatient customers, conversational platforms can aid in reducing customer attrition rates and enhancing satisfaction rates.
With enterprises increasingly shifting toward IT self-service, chatbots, and intelligent virtual assistants are also becoming strategically important to guide users to respective solutions with end-user expectations for faster and more convenient IT support.
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Customers, nowadays, prefer using IT self-service support compared to other support channels including emails and phone. Conversational platforms can quickly guide customers to the knowledge base, improving performance and resolving queries more effectively.
Conversational IT self-service offers a more seamless experience to customers by reducing the perceived effort, anticipating demand and learning from past interactions. Other than end-users, Conversational platforms also learn from their interactions with IT support agents and management.
Use cases for Conversational platforms in IT support
With additional learnings from internal IT support agents, conversational platforms can help in the areas of knowledge management, sentimental analysis, predictive maintenance, asset management, proactive change management, and demand planning. From a management perspective, conversational platforms are useful for workload optimization, strategic decision making, and predicting contract violations.
Benefits of conversational platforms in IT support
Chatbots are the future of IT support
Advancements in technologies including AI, ML, NLP, and others are making everyday jobs more efficient, simple, and easy. Chatbots can quickly and effectively handle routine employee issues, boosting the overall IT productivity and efficiency. By addressing IT support issues at unmatched speed, chatbots allow human support staff to focus on other critical business issues. AI-enabled chatbots are engineered to handle the high volume of IT issues and instantly respond to an array of customer inquiries. ML and AI are enabling chatbots in IT support to continuously evolve by learning from past encounters to help organizations in scaling up their customer service. One of the main applications of chatbots is to segregate and sort unimportant tickets created during IT support issues from being sent to IT human agents, thereby ensuring consistency in terms of response time and staff efficiency.
Customer feedback is one of the most important parameters for an organization to find faults and issues in their products or services. Chatbots for IT support are bringing together real-time customer feedback enabling companies to eliminate the communication gap between the repair staff and the ticket registration department. By reviewing the transcripts of customer interactions with the chatbots, meaningful insights of the users’ preferences and problems can be better understood, leading to higher quality of products and services. For instance, if a group of customers report the same issue that “connecting Bluetooth devices from their television creates a problem,” it points to specific technical issues within a line of products. Such customer feedback is often considered an important asset for businesses to offer reliable support to customers and exceed their expectations.
IT support provided by chatbot
Collaboration with the live support agent
KLoBot offers a no-code chatbot builder platform, developed with AI-based conversational UI, to streamline business processes, automate routine tasks, and simplify internal & external business communications. These chatbots are helping businesses to offer 24/7 support to their customers using text, email, mobile app, website, or phone. IT support teams are not typically equipped to develop software applications, requiring software vendors to provide them with solutions.
KLoBot’s no-code platform is rightly positioned to such use-cases to securely create and deploy bots using Drag+Drop Bot Builder UI.
Typically, IT users opting for self-service support prefer to solve issues on their own, rather than contacting IT support agents. However, IT organizations are facing challenges in effectively managing the execution and utilization of IT self-service. KLoBot understands such challenges of IT support teams, helping them develop AI-enabled chatbots, which assist end-users in knowledge repository search, FAQs, QnA, and much more. The platform also eliminates the need of buying expensive hosting resources, hardware, or software, enables IT organizations to create their own skill-based chatbot with capabilities of NLP as well as ML, within few hours. Leveraging the KLoBot’s Live Agent Handoff skill, chatbots can smoothly transfer complicated requests or issues to the live IT support agent. This seamless handoff between the chatbot and human agent enables enterprises to offer superior end-user experiences as well as a deep understanding of related IT issues of customers.
For executing the IT support operations effectively, chatbots should identify and analyze complex situations based on their expertise and pass the queries to live IT support agent. The live IT support agent by focusing more on the high touch interactions builds the customer’s trust and ensures the ticket resolution.
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Need for conversational platforms for IT support was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.