Can Conversational AI Improve IT Service Management?

It’s a fact that a growing number of companies are investing in self-service as a strategy to help overburdened IT service desks. 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.