Delivering Seamless and Peerless Service Using Enterprise Chatbots
These days, the use of enterprise chatbots to drive service levels and to deliver the best possible IT experience for your users has become a best practice in and of itself. Unfortunately, many IT professionals have been late to the game when it comes to effectively and efficiently using enterprise chatbots to their full potential. When used effectively, chatbots can improve the speed, productivity, and efficiency of ITSM by improving on your ability to deliver accurate, automated service that is both predictive and proactive. Ultimately, this will help you free up your employees for deployment in service of other higher ITSM needs, and in roles that align your team with the organization as a whole through enterprise service management efforts and the like. The employment of machine learning principles to drive the automation of IT using artificial intelligence, like chatbots, is no longer merely a trend in many industries. Instead, it has become a best practice, as well as a critical indicator of an organization’s digital maturity. Streamlining your service delivery while driving your effectiveness through the use of chatbots requires their successful implementation and management, however. So on that note, here are some chatbot best practices for you to keep in mind in the coming months:Chatbot Best Practices
Like with most things, and especially most things ITSM, the devil is always in the details. It is all well and good to understand that you should be taking advantage of AI, machine learning, and automation to drive your success as a team and across your organization through ITSM. It is quite another to know what exactly to do when planning, implementing, launching, and managing an automation initiative. A complete guide for chatbot management exceeds the scope of this article, but we will illustrate how to create value in terms of identifying chatbot best practices through the planning, implementation, and operations phases of chatbot utilization.- Planning
- When planning the implementation of chatbots, you must first come up with one or more use cases for them. To do this, you need to identify evident problems that you would like to solve through the implementation of chatbots, as well as your desired outcomes. Then, once you know what results you are looking for, you will need to map out how you will use the chatbots and with whom, making sure to attain buy-in with those who will be directly affected as well as upper management through effective communication of the initiative, its intended outcomes, and its importance. It’s also advantageous for you to identify performance metrics at this stage, if only in a rough sense.
- Implementation
- The effective building and training up of chatbots is, in reality, worth an entire article of its own. While dialogue and language processing are the base level capacities of any chatbot, being able to hold a conversation with someone, or in this case, something, and ascertain a helpful response has become the new gold standard. Hitting these targets will drive user satisfaction with your bots, and will likely also drive engagement with them as a result. It should go without saying that thorough testing of chatbots is a baseline requirement for a successful implementation, regardless of the use case.
- Operations
- Testing, monitoring, and improving your chatbots is another chatbot best practice that likely needs no justification. This is where the key metrics you identified in the first phase truly get refined and put into action. Chatbots, any AI really, require monitoring and continual training to keep them operating as effectively and efficiently as possible. While the goal of employing AI is to take pressure off of your team, the reality is that someone must monitor the program to ensure that it is functioning optimally, both during its rollout and throughout its employment.
Enterprise Chatbots Are Very Much Worth the Effort
The clunky AI that was first employed by help desks in the early part of the century is rapidly fading from memory. In their place, contemporary chatbots can be a tremendous help to your team, to your ITSM efforts, and to your organization as a whole. But for them to operate at their full potential, they must be planned for, implemented, and managed by employing chatbot best practices. With successful implementation, you can rise to the challenge of delivering seamless and proactive service at the same level, or better, as you were before.
