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August 16, 2023

10 minutes read

Conversational AI Chat vs. Traditional Chatbot for ITSM

By

Andrew Graf

Did you know that 76 percent of chatbot users report frustration with their current chatbot?

With that kind of number, it’s not surprising that many companies are hesitant to invest in chatbots as part of an IT Service Management (ITSM) strategy. However, that same study from TeamDynamix and CIO.com found that when conversational AI chatbots are used, more than 61 percent of users could effectively resolve their issues without having to put in a ticket or contact support – that’s vs. only a 35 percent resolution rate when traditional chat is used.

So, what is the difference between conversational AI chatbots and traditional chatbots?

The Problem with Traditional Chatbots

Simply put, traditional chatbots aren’t inherently smart. They lack the “brain” or natural language processing (NLP) that conversational AI chatbots have.

Instead of understanding a person’s intent when a question is asked – a traditional chatbot is programmed to follow a very linear path and any deviation from that path (usually due to the inputs from an end-user or customer) can cause that chatbot to fail. And when a chatbot fails it’s often a frustrating experience and adds to the ticket volume of your IT service desk.

According to that same market study, few companies are satisfied with their current chatbots. The study found that traditional chatbots have a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of negative eight—far from a ringing endorsement—and 65 percent of those surveyed said their solution is not widely adopted by their customers. The addition of conversational AI, however, makes a huge difference— using a conversational AI chatbot increased the adoption rate of the overall chat solution from 16 percent to 50 percent.

It’s unsurprising then that 75 percent of respondents said they planned to migrate to a new chatbot software in the next 12-24 months.

The Benefits of Using Conversational AI Chatbots

When you combine automation, self-service and conversational AI – you can have a positive impact on IT resource drain and improve the experience of your customers and end-users.

Conversational AI chatbots are intelligent software applications that can simulate human conversations and perform tasks such as answering questions, providing information and performing transactions.

Conversational AI leverages natural language processing and understands intent. While they do need to be trained, with conversational AI you can facilitate more complex conversations and resolve issues through actions vs. the traditional chatbot’s question/answer limited dialog path.

Because conversational AI chatbots understand intent, they are much more effective when it comes to assisting customers and end-users. For example, when using traditional chat if you say “My password broke” it would likely respond with something like “I’m sorry, I don’t understand that. Please type your issue again,” and continue down that path with a final response that might give you links to 3-5 FAQ articles that it thinks might help resolve the issue – leaving it to the customer to further seek out a solution to the password problem.

When you have conversational AI, if you were to say “My password is broken” it can inform your intent and knows that what you mean is your password isn’t working and needs to be reset. The response from the chatbot is then something like, “I can see you’re having issues with your password. I’ve sent a reset password link to the email on file.”

On the backend, the chatbot can pull the email address needed from the system where it’s stored and automatically send a password reset email – resolving the issue within the conversation in seconds versus sending the customer links and having them do the work to request the link.

By integrating conversational AI chatbots into your ITSM processes, you can achieve several benefits, including:

  1. Faster Incident Resolution: Chatbots can quickly identify the root cause of incidents and provide users with a resolution or workaround, reducing the time and effort required to resolve incidents.
  2. Improved User Experience: Chatbots can provide users with a natural language interface to interact with IT systems, reducing the need for users to understand complex IT jargon.
  3. Reduced IT Workload: Chatbots can perform routine tasks such as password resets, software installations and system checks, freeing up IT staff to focus on more complex tasks.
  4. 24/7 Availability: Chatbots can be available 24/7, providing users with access to IT support at any time, reducing the impact of incidents on business operations.
  5. Data Collection and Analysis: Chatbots can collect data on incident trends and patterns, enabling IT organizations to identify areas for improvement and make data-driven decisions.

By adopting conversational AI chatbots as part of your ITSM strategy, you can significantly improve self-service adoption, customer satisfaction and problem-resolution time – all while cutting costs and reducing the drain on overburdened IT resources.

3 Critical Chatbot Capabilities

When looking to implement a new conversational AI chatbot, you’ll want to make sure it has these three critical capabilities to set your business or organization up for success:

  1. Can self-learn and is easily trainable.
  2. Can automate the fulfillment of requests direct from chat.
  3. Can programmatically ingest data from documents, PDFs, forms or other information sources.

While any conversational AI chatbot requires training to be successful, the tool you choose should come pre-set to answer the most common IT questions.

“Any conversational AI platform should have a clear understanding of what 80% of requests to the bot will be,” Andrew Graf, chief product officer at TeamDynamix, said. “Thankfully, that’s easy to do because we have tens of millions of service request data points that help refine what’s being asked of an organization, so the platform can come ready to go out of the box. And, over time, it will improve through self-learning.”

Curious about TeamDynamix Conversational AI? Learn more at https://www.teamdynamix.com/conversational-ai-chatbot/

Andrew Graf

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