Over the past few years, remote working has become more and more widespread, increasing sharply since the beginning of the health crisis. Along with the many advantages this presents for employees and businesses, a number of new challenges have also emerged. How can you improve efficiency and teamwork when your employees are isolated? How can you ensure that your employees have mastered their working tools? How can you relieve IT departments of their increased workload?
This article will explain how a chatbot solution can help IT departments meet these new challenges, and also take a look at Zen, the first chatbot dedicated to Microsoft 365 created by Ai3 in collaboration with dydu. Ai3 is a consulting company and innovative solutions integrator, specialising in Microsoft solutions. It recently became part of the Talan group.
Chatbots, an essential tool for IT Departments
Over the past few years, more and more large and medium-sized companies have implemented internal chatbots, primarily to relieve pressure on the departments that receive the most requests, such as the Human Resources, IT or legal departments.
Among dydu’s 160 bots in production, almost 30 are IT/helpdesk chatbots that manage several hundred to several thousand dialogues per month, depending on the client company’s size. IT bots are far more than a passing trend – there are real benefits for both the end users and businesses that implement them.
- An Improved Customer Experience
Password management, software or application support, equipment orders, account management… Chatbots can handle all the simple questions relating to IT and office applications and pass any more complex requests over to the support teams.
Conversational robots provide instant answers, 24/7, on any channel – intranet, desktops, mobile apps, messaging platforms… They can act as an IT department’s single point of contact for questions and are fast and accessible. The answers are all created and approved by the IT department, so they are reliable and consistent, and can also redirect to existing content such as documents, intranet pages or external links, and provide step-by-steps, tutorial videos and explanatory images directly in the chatbox or in the associated sidebar.
IT chatbots are particularly useful because IT requests are often urgent and need to be resolved so that employees can get back to work. This tool not only provides immediate answers, but also 24/7 assistance, which is a real asset, particularly for employees working staggered hours. Virtual assistants help users complete simple tasks by themselves, through existing company documentation – tutorials, troubleshooting guides, step-by-step instructions, etc.
- Optimised Operations
Implementing an IT chatbot significantly reduces the number of incoming tickets and improves the request management process. IT chatbots reply to all the simple and frequent requests, thereby reducing the number of support requests and enabling IT managers to focus on their primary mission – to improve the company’s IT system, thereby improving work efficiency.
By encouraging employees to be more autonomous, the IT department’s productivity is increased and costs relating to support are reduced. Chatbots are particularly effective during IT migrations, which usually generate a lot of questions. They can also provide general information in advance by displaying version upgrades, potential interruptions or future benefits.
Zen, the first chatbot dedicated to Microsoft 365
As a support for Microsoft solutions, Ai3 decided to create a chatbot to answer questions about the use of applications in the Microsoft 365 suite – Excel, Outlook, Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint, Skype, Yammer, Kaizala, etc. Ai3 used dydu’s technology to deploy Zen.
- A Comprehensive and Scalable Knowledge Base
Knowledge articles: Zen covers all the usual themes, such as messaging, collaborative work and office tools. The knowledge base includes more than 600 knowledge articles that are regularly updated by SoYouz, Ai3’s digital transformation consulting agency.
Matching groups: The bot also includes matching groups, that group together several ways of saying the same thing (for example, Excel: worksheet, spreadsheet, XLS, Microsoft Excel, etc.). Matching groups facilitate the bot’s understanding of a question. The knowledge articles and matching groups are based on more than fifteen tools from the Office 365 suite.
The social base: In addition to IT knowledge, the bot has a social base, meaning it recognises forms of address and ways of speaking that make the dialogue smooth and natural. This applies to all dydu bots.
All our company clients share the same knowledge base, meaning that their chatbots are always up to date, without any actions required on the client’s part. Dialogues are monitored, and when a knowledge article is added, it is added for all clients. It is however possible to personalise about ten specific knowledge articles (IT support contacts details for example).
All knowledge articles are in both French and English. It’s easy to switch from one language to another with a button in the chatbox.
- A Turnkey Solution
Chatbots are very easy to set up – companies are provided with a code to deploy the chatbot on the channel of their choice (webpage, intranet, support site, etc.). All the client has to do is personalise ten or so knowledge articles and integrate the code on their chosen channel(s).
- Advanced Features
Chatbots answer questions in a text format, but they can also provide rich content, such as links, images, GIFs, step-by-steps or videos in the chatbox or sidebar for better readability. They can also ask other questions on the same subject to provide further information. If the bot misunderstands a request, it calculates the probability of the question and suggests reworded alternatives.
Want to know more about the Zen chatbot? Feel free to reach our team !
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