How to improve IT support with service bots

A practical case: integration with Microsoft Teams

How we can make Microsoft Teams an effective self-service channel for IT support by implementing AI-enabled service bots.

In a world dominated by smart working and increasingly fluid and hybrid types of collaboration , the management of digital spaces requires a focus on the individual user who needs to be able to rely on continuous and timely remote assistance, achieved through simple and immediate contact modes. 

Many companies are responding to this need by implementing new online support channels online, including web-based applications, social, digital assistants, chatbots, and automations. However, these innovations generate complexity that impacts IT: 39 percent of support staff surveyed by Ivanti research complain that they have too many logins to manage, 47 percent too many notifications and 42 percent use multiple tools or platforms.

So how does one balance the need to simplify how users are contacted with providing timely, quality support from increasingly overburdened IT teams?

In reality, the solution is not as modern and revolutionary as it may seem because the basis of Service Desk success is based on a simple concept: you need to know your user (or rather their journey) and create a strategy to support them using knowledge management. It is not about reinventing the wheel, but instead harnessing the power of what you already have. 

Understanding customer needs

With new digital platforms, people's interaction through the use of through the use of chathas intensified. Thousands of organizations, large and small, including 93 of the Fortune 100 companies according to a 2020 Microsoft release, have begun using Teams as their teamwork hub.

It is a widely used channel and the easiest thing for the user would be to be able to get immediate feedback to solve problems they are experiencing with the technology through this tool , which is already being used for work purposes, without the need to log into other platforms and/or enter new logins.

Microsoft Teams could become an effective self-service channel if integrated with AI functionalities to the IT Service Management platform: it could reduce first level tickets with guided responses thanks to an interactive knowledge flow and be able to offer visibility on the history of service requests.

How AI can come to our aid

With AI-enabled virtual agents serving Teams and integrated with the ITSM platformit is possible to provide users with answers and knowledgein a conversational format without the need for the physical presence on the other side of an operator: 

• natural language processing (NLP) engines can analyze input that comes from users, identify their intent , and query a database to provide a relevant response or trigger an automated process. NLP algorithms, in fact, have been trained on linguistic interactions between humans and computers and are able to help AI interfaces better understand human language so they can converse with people more effectively and accurately.
• Machine learning with robotic process automation (RPA) , in combination with NLP and contextualization, allows technology to learn and improve through experience: this ensures that each user gets the right answers every time and prevents them from repeating steps.

With Service Bots technology, then, it is possible to collect information from users and automatically guide them using media-based knowledge procedures and even take actions on their behalf such as creating a ticket or requesting and/or obtaining information about tickets that have already been opened.

A practical case: the integration between Microsoft Teams and the ITSM platform

At WEGG, as expert consultants in ITIL best-practices for IT service management, we support our clients in defining and structuring Incident Management processes so that virtual support agents can be quickly deployed to provide answers and act on behalf of those requesting assistance. 

Let's look specifically at how we integrated Microsoft Teams, , the channel most used by our client company's users, to our partner Easyvista's ITSM platform for providing self-service support. 

Here is an example of a use case where we applied it: the creation, consultation and updating of open tickets, all done autonomously by the end user.

The advantage of bidirectional integration between Microsoft Teams and the ITSM platform allows to user-side data to be read and written , but also for updates to be received in the event of back-end evolutions in ticket managementOne can, in fact:

• retrieve data from the tool and display it as a result of requests made through Teams: the user could, in fact, request information about a particular ticket (by entering the number) or view the list of tickets in his or her name