Improving service requests with the help of a Chatbot

A municipality approached us with an inefficiency: even though they had a self-service portal for submitting service requests, their service desk still had to process up to 5,000 service requests manually. Shortly thereafter, we introduced our client to their new virtual assistant. The implemented chatbot leads to improved communication between the ICT service desk and the employees.

4 weeks

Use case: Processing 5.000 service requests per month

Before starting their automation journey, our client noticed that their ICT service desk was completely overwhelmed with on average 5.000 service requests per month. Our client is a municipality that requires employees to send a service ticket in order to process the request. Sending a ticket can be done through the self-service portal. However, the majority of these tickets are submitted through email or phone because most employees have no knowledge of where to find this portal. Another inefficiency of this self-service portal is that often the wrong forms are filled in. As a result of these inefficiencies, most tickets are still processed manually by the service desk employees.

Processing these tickets manually is not only inefficient but also time-consuming. The majority of the service requests cannot be validated instantly, with a long resolution time as result. However, these requests are repetitive, rule-based, and have the opportunity to be resolved by predefined answers, which means that Conversational Automation can be the perfect solution.

APPLIED TECHNOLOGIES

Months to ROI

800

Hours saved annually

35%

Of effort automated

50%

Error reduction

Our solution: Introducing the virtual assistant

Ciphix was challenged to build a chatbot, using Conversational Automation, RPA and Machine Learning. We started developing and shortly thereafter, we introduced our client to their new virtual assistant. Their new (digital) colleague is able to answer knowledge-based questions and to redirect users to the self-service portal. In some cases, the robot instantly processes self-service requests within back-end systems. The solution is designed to perform the following tasks:

Receive chat message as input from employees
Recognise the content of the message
Respond to employee with the requested information
Asks human to evaluate the robot’s performance

The best thing about their new virtual assistant is that it’s self-learning: it increases its performance and accuracy through the use and feedback of its human colleagues. Now that the virtual assistant handles all service requests, over 800 hours are saved annually. Thanks to their new digital colleague, employees at the service desk have time to focus on more rewarding tasks. Additionally, the chatbot increases the user satisfaction, since it reduces the resolution time of a service request.

We have successfully implemented a chatbot at our client’s service desk. As a result, knowledge-based questions are automatically answered and the self-service portal is correctly used. Human employees are no longer bound to manually processing service requests and can focus on more value-adding activities instead!