The AI virtual service agent enables the college to provide faster IT service and a better user experience by helping users resolve their issues more expediently.
A primary goal for using the conversational AI virtual service agent was to reduce the existing workload on the understaffed IT department by deflecting incoming service requests.
The virtual service agent automatically interfaces with necessary software programs, including Active Directory and Moodle, to execute tasks, moving beyond just answering basic questions.
Industry: Higher Education
Connected Systems: Active Directory, Moodle and more
In the wake of the Great Resignation that happened during the pandemic, employee retention continues to be a major challenge within higher education. To attract and retain staff in this new world of work, colleges and universities must become places where people want to work by providing an exceptional employee experience.
Campus service and support, including IT help-desk support, plays a key role in shaping the employee experience—and Clackamas Community College in Oregon is now adding a conversational AI chatbot to enhance its delivery of IT service by helping employees resolve their IT issues faster.
“We saw the potential for conversational AI to improve how quickly we could respond to our users and get their issues resolved,” says Applications Architect William Tonkin.
Clackamas Community College has three campuses and serves a student body of more than 25,000. The college’s IT department provides support across all three locations. “Most of our service requests come from faculty and staff,” Tonkin says.
Aside from resolving users’ issues more expediently, another goal in using conversational AI was to reduce the workload on IT staff by deflecting some of the service requests that normally came in. “Like most IT departments, we’re understaffed for the amount of work we have to do,” Tonkin notes. “Any assistance we can get is really appreciated.”
Clackamas has been using TeamDynamix for IT Service Management (ITSM) and Project Portfolio Management (PPM) since 2019. “We’re really impressed with the platform and its flexibility,” he says.
So when the college wanted to integrate an AI chatbot into its IT service portal, using the TeamDynamix chatbot seemed like a natural choice.
The TeamDynamix platform includes integration and automation capabilities as part of the conversational AI chatbot functionality, allowing system administrators to easily create integrations between applications and processes that can be executed through the chatbot. Building intents and utterances within the TeamDynamix chatbot uses drag-and-drop flow building and does not require any coding or scripting. Having the full suite of products work together brings a lot of value to the college, Tonkin explained.
“We were very impressed with TeamDynamix’s ability to interface with any software,” he says. “Since the chatbot works similarly to the automation and integration functionality in the service management platform, there was no need for us to learn a new system. Our team from day one was able to jump in and start building and testing conversations.”
Clackamas has been highly strategic in how it has implemented the TeamDynamix chatbot. The college assembled a dedicated group of people for live testing. This group included service technicians and administrators for each of the 12 ticketing applications the college has created within TeamDynamix.
“We started building basic conversations for answering users’ questions and referring them to knowledge base articles,” Tonkin says.
One way that Tonkin anticipates the chatbot will improve customer service right away is by handling staff and student requests for name changes. “We probably get at least half a dozen requests like this a week,” he says.
What seems like a simple request actually takes several minutes for a technician to fulfill manually, because there are multiple places where this change needs to be made. Because requests of this nature weren’t a high priority for the IT service team, it used to take two or three days for name change requests to be resolved.
Now, students and staff can use the AI chatbot on the college’s IT service portal to request a name change. The bot will interface with Active Directory, Moodle and other necessary software programs to execute this task automatically, fulfilling the user’s request in a matter of seconds instead of a few days.
“That’s a big difference to the user,” Tonkin notes.
“We were very impressed with TeamDynamix’s ability to interface with any software…Our team, from day one, was able to jump in and start building and testing conversations.”
Handling name change requests is just one of the many ways the TeamDynamix chatbot will streamline IT service for Clackamas Community College. Students and staff will also be able to use the bot to request a password reset, initiate an onboarding request for a new employee, ask IT-related questions and more.
If the bot can’t resolve a user’s issue, it will create a service ticket for the user automatically, with the relevant fields prepopulated—and then routes the ticket to the appropriate team member for a response.
Learning how to configure and use the TeamDynamix chatbot has been “a pretty easy process,” Tonkin says, and he’s excited about its potential to provide a better experience for students and employees while also reducing the burden on IT staff.
He concludes: “We have been very impressed with the product.”
