Benefits Value of ITSM PRO - Virtual Agent ITSM

[Ankit K]

Why do I need ITSM PRO?  What are the benefits!!

Embracing new technology and innovating is a simple truth for every enterprise. Things change over time and although there is no one path to innovation the more tools you have at your disposal the better the chance of being successful.

Being an astrophile let me start of with a space analogy. Everyone wants to get to Proxima Centauri b our closest interstellar sister planet which might be habitable BUT with the current space travel technology that may not be feasible. Doesn't mean we will stop our quest of finding life beyond earth. With what exists today we build towards going to Mars while we keep our innovation lights switched on to go interstellar one day.

ITSM PRO package is the Starship of ITSM. Off-course just by stating an analogy is not enough. There are some well written articles which provide a great overview of the ITSM PRO package. In the article ITSM to ITSM PRO Evolution Why What we talked about how and why ITSM PRO came into being as well as what is included within ITSM PRO SKU.

This blog purely focuses on ITSM PRO value, benefits for Virtual Agent I am going to keep it brief, concise and to the point. The ITSM Virtual agent serves not only the end users but but also IT fulfillers with itil roles.

	The Problem Every day you have agents who are overwhelmed with calls and these can be be about issues as simple as as password reset or setup of vpn or complex issue like performance with computers. Everytime a conversation happens we have to explain the same issue not once but several times and to several people at times and that is just not a great experience.
	Now even as a employee if there are other ways for creating tickets for the issue using the ServiceNow list and forms there are plenty of steps that happen before a ticket is created. For example you go to the instance navigator and search for the module. You may have saved that as a favorite but that is just adding to the clutter of things you need to access quickly.Finally you open up the form, fill in the details, hit submit and then you wait.
	The the wait for a simple issue such as you being locked out of an account could take a long time to get resolved. Maybe you want to check the status of your other tickets to see if you have gotten any traction on those and for that you have to repeat the same steps over again.

All of that goes away with ITSM virtual agent. ITSM Virtual Agent liberates your technicians from the mundane tasks and also enables the end user to be more self served while getting a quick efficient and consistent service. In a nutshell ITSM PRO Virtual Agent helps you support and scale your IT organization by enabling a virtual agent chatbot to perform the complicated, more common IT requests and incidents effortlessly. 

	Value Benefits Reduce Costs , Improve Resolution Time, Reduce Inaccuracies The average cycle for a P3/P4 incident right from first call to solution propose and closure for most IT departments is about 2-3 days. Maybe more and this could issues as simple as setup instructions or email issues. With automation of these simple tasks being handled by Virtual agent these could be solved within minutes increasing MTTR 1000X
	Improve call handling times, Increase Productivity, Reduce Staff Stress. Now with an automated chatbot sharing the load of handling issues the biggest value you get because of this is reduction in staff stress. They can now focus on more productive complex issues, consolidate and share knowledge thereby improving quality of service immensely.
	Deflect calls, Enable 24*7 support, Familiar Human like Interface When your rate of incident/issues increase overtime and current manpower is not able to handle the volume, you need additional resources . But NOW with your tickets being handled by virtual agent its going to lead into Incident deflection. Hence saving any additional costs needed year over year for engaging more resources. One of he biggest struggles is agent availability 24*7 or on holidays. With Virtual Agent you don't have to worry about that anymore.  With NLU models enabled the end users can interact using natural language and the virtual agent understands and responds like a human being.

How?

ServiceNow has over 40 predefined ITSM Virtual Agent chatbot conversations, which cover common IT interaction including ITSM Fulfiller, ITSM Self-Service,Setup and Small topics.

What powers the the experience of using a chatbot is when it uses Natural Language Understanding (NLU), which makes the chatbot very convenient and useful. If the user has an IT issue, you can converse with the chatbot the virtual agent knows the equipment issued and then resolves issues in seconds without human intervention. So NLU help improves response time and service experience tremendously.

Note:  It’ not necessary to activate NLU to deploy the VA chatbot especially in the first phase of implementation but yes once activated you can definitely experience  natural conversation feel of a virtual agent.

Additional Value Customers Get

• A simple consistent unified chat experience across domains.
• if you prefer you can setup separate chatbots for different departments like IT and HR. You can have VA enabled on those portals and they can have their own branding, so it flexible that ways.
• We have third party integrations, for example if you are using Slack as your conversation tool or MS teams. You can deploy VA on those chat clients as well. In addition to that we also have integration with Wastapp and FB workplace.
• An end to end  seamless VA - Live agent experience all in the same platform with relevant KPI metrics and reporting available to you in our PA dashboards.
• Dynamic Translation available in Live agent as well as Localization in the Virtual agent chatbot supporting about 16 languages including French German Spanish and Portuguese as of Quebec release.
• Ability for users to chat with a virtual agent through a ServiceNow mobile application.
• Enable voice search and accessibility.

GETTING ON THE VIRTUAL AGENT BANDWAGON SOONER THAN LATER is going to get you tremendous gains as you transition into a complete digital transformation of IT. 

Part 2 (Benefits Value of ITSM PRO - Predictive Intelligence , Performance Analytics)