ITSM or information technology service management is the management of IT services including all the processes and tasks that design, create, offer and support these services. The ticket is managed by the IT team where requests are sorted basis the priority and addressed accordingly. It could also be assigned as per the IT specialists’ skill level.
Dynamic AI agents (voice bots and chatbots) increase the IT service desk efficiency and business consumer engagement. It has been observed that over three times as many digital workers search for support on the internet than on an internal knowledge base.
Building a simple chatbot to handle the ITSM requests can tremendously reduce the call volumes, tickets raised and errors caused by lack of communication or remittance of tickets. Errors caused by IT malfunctions can be a very costly affair. Therefore, conversational AI can help erase those errors and speed up processes in all functions encouraging collaboration between departments and sharing of knowledge.
- Define and list your ITSM processes
A few of the core ITSM processes include:
- Knowledge Management
- IT Asset Management
- Service Request Management
- Incident Management
- Problem Management
- Change Management
There’s an even longer list of ITIL practices, but we won’t get into that. Start by listing the practices that make the most sense to you and are currently being followed. Adoption of new practices or parts of them is fine for the betterment of processes going forward. Your company grows from there, adapting along the way and learning as the business evolves. This will help you build a targeted chatbot.
- List and integrate ITSM tools and connect with a chatbot
ITSM tools are supposed to enable the teams to align with business objectives and take a strategic approach to organizational change, transformation and growth. Most times, employees complain about the tools being siloed and traditional, which makes the processes slow and sticky. This is where a chatbot is highly essential as it helps in greater collaboration amongst departments and can even connect to your legacy systems to provide a quick resolution to tickets. For that, you need to list all the systems being used and then look for a chatbot building studio that enables you to create a chatbot and use plug-and-play integrations with these systems.
- Define a list of FAQS for ITSM
There are some frequently asked questions in every domain, and ITSM is not oblivious to it. To make things faster, put down your frequently asked questions and let the chatbot handle them so that the workload on IT teams is drastically reduced. The chatbot once connected to your legacy systems, the ones that are difficult to navigate, will also learn from the information fed into them and eventually use its active learning feature to learn and answer more complex questions.
- Note your employee onboarding essentials and automate
By this we mean the chatbot can onboard new employees. Define the set of activities that are involved in onboarding a new employee, for example, asset allocation, digital account creation, asset updation and software installation, etc. All of this is time-consuming. Needless to mention that employees may cover all the activities in stages because they have other priorities and it’s daunting to keep checking with them. Let the chatbot follow up and cover the onboarding process so the IT teams are left to do critical tasks.
- List the employee-facing messaging apps for higher collaboration
Your organization must use a front-end application where all employees can connect and collaborate with each other. It could be slack, teams, zoom or any other tool. List these channels and connect your chatbot to the app. For example, slack has a bunch of integrations and tools that can connect to it for higher collaboration. Your chatbot will be able to provide updates from all these systems on slack and let employees know on a real-time basis about the processes and updates if any.
- Choose a low-code / no code bot studio
There are many conversational AI chatbot builders available out there. When looking for a platform, look for the following capabilities –
- Low code/ no-code builder
- Integrations with backend systems
- Integrations with social media apps
- Pre-built templates
- Support for building
A conversational AI builder will help you deploy chatbots faster. It will also help analyse and improve the performance of your chatbot by going through all interactions and looking for faults that can be improved. At Yellow.ai, our Bot Studio helps build a chatbot in under 10 clicks.
- Designing the conversation for the chatbot and adding a script
This is a critical step in the process. Here we decide the structure of the conversation. For example, greeting, query, fetching answers, asking for details and ending. Once the structure is set, then you can go to the next step and the script for every step. A conversation flow is a skeleton to your chatbot conversation, so it doesn’t change frequently as compared to the script. Think about a casual conversation with your friends. That can be the tone of the chatbot – trusting and friendly at the least. It needs to flow like a natural conversation without going on a monologue. Ensure you’ve accounted for all the edge cases of what a user might say and put down a script for it. In this manner, you can extend the chatbot to other functions as well.
- Add security with authorization and verification
Before the chatbot can start helping employees, it is essential to have a level of security. Your chatbot needs to authorize and verify your employees. Corporate security is one of the highest priorities of IT teams as businesses sit on a tremendous amount of data that is gold. The chatbot can easily and most importantly, accurately authorize and verify the user and help accordingly. Every segment of the employee base can also be granted access levels to the system depending on their profile and job responsibility.
- Use rich media like GIFs, emoji, videos, images, and voice recordings wherever necessary
With the help of images, GIFs and other supported formats, your chatbot conversation will be much faster, easy and more flowing. Additional visual and verbal cues can help drive decisions faster and allow employees to resolve any IT related issues on the go. The goal of your chatbot is to self-serve tasks and reduce the workload on IT teams so that they can focus on deep and critical work.
- Test your bot
After you build your chatbot on the low-code platform, it’s time to test it. Testing is important, as it eliminates any errors and glitches that may arise. You don’t want your users to go through a conversation with an erroneous chatbot. Test, re-test, make amends and maximise the chatbot’s potential. Download the checklist for building highly effective chatbots.
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Benefits of ITSM Chatbots:
- Streamlining project management approaches.
- Aligning IT teams with business priorities and measured through outcomes.
- Higher collaboration between departments.
- Sharing of knowledge and consistently improving.
- Improving coordination of requests and so the settlement of the same.
- Encouraging customer-focused self-service and better-interconnected processes.
- Responding to critical incidents and preventing future ones faster than ever.
- Decrease operational costs.
At Yellow.ai, we help our customers build their own sophisticated chatbot on our low-code/ no-code bot builder. Get a demo of the bot builder for your business. Talk to us.
For tips on building your own lead generation chatbot, read this blog post.
