Overview

pEspressive is the pioneer in AI for employee self-service, redefining how employees get help by delivering exceptional employee experiences./p p We were founded on the belief that getting help at work shouldn’t be so hard. While others have focused on solving the problems faced by help desk agents, Espressive shifted the focus to the employee – because you can’t have self-service if your employees are not engaged. However, this doesn’t mean the help desk is left behind. When you improve the employee experience through automation, you reduce redundant help desk work, enabling agents to focus on more strategic projects./p

Supernova Award Category

Future of Work: Employee Experience

The Problem

pAlthough IT departments have invested significant money in ITSM tools, because employees are not using them, help desk agents are still inundated with high help desk call volume and repetitive questions. This translates to a low MTTR and an inability to focus on strategic initiatives./p p /p pFirst generation solutions from ITSM incumbents, third-party providers and startups are expensive propositions that require time consuming custom development on platforms or toolkits by hard-to-find AI experts. Other solutions simply implement searchbot technology, which requires a solid knowledge base foundation that most organizations do not have./p p /p pEspressive Barista seems to have hit a sweet spot in the market, with alluring statistics such as employee adoption rates of 85% compared to the industry average of just 10%. By designing a solution that employees want to use, the firm has also managed to tackle one of the industry’s other core challenges—doing more with less—with stats that have seen help desk call volumes plummet by up to 60%. When that happens, help desk agents are able to focus on strategic projects versus answering repetitive questions./p

The Solution

pNo tool, no matter how good, can be successful if employees won’t use it. Barista solves this by bringing the ease of consumer virtual assistants, such as Alexa and Google Home, into the workplace, delivering a personalized user experience that maximizes employee adoption—which in turn reduces help desk call volume and resolution times. Barista automates the resolution of employee questions, issues, and requests by providing employees with immediate answers, proactively notifying them of outages or other important events, and continuing to interact with them throughout the entire lifecycle of their requests. Barista also delivers visual workflows to guide employees through complex service requests with ease, such as new hire onboarding, password reset, ordering new equipment, vacation requests, and more. Barista is also the first virtual agent to include approver workflows ensuring that enterprise customers maintain compliance while automating processes./p

The results

pBarista has been able to automate resolution of employee questions with AI, driving down help desk call volume, and doing it as a consumer-like app that has garnered high employee adoption. In addition, it’s not just about IT. Other departments such as HR, Facilities, and Payroll are adopting Barista, so employees have just one place to go for all of their questions. And experience-based workflows enable the automation of things like password resets, vacation requests, or software provisioning with integrated approvals that ensure enterprises maintain compliance./p

Metrics

pWhile typical employee adoption of self-service portals averages less than 10-15%, Barista achieves employee adoption rates of 80-85%. The result is that help desk call deflection rates, which are typically less than 1% today, will go up to 40-60%. Deployment is fast and easy, taking as little as a few weeks./p pFor example, according to Christopher Flynn, VP of Employee Enablement at Okta said, “When we decided to leverage artificial intelligence in our ITSM initiative, we expected a long and expensive deployment. With Espressive, we were about to go live in just three weeks, and in the following six weeks we automatically addressed 40 percent of our help desk requests submitted via Espressive – ultimately increasing team efficiency, and freeing us up to focus on strategic initiatives.”/p pIn addition to being deployed quickly, Barista does not require customers to hire expensive and hard to find AI experts or to build and maintain KBs going forward. This was echoed by Kumud Kalia, CIO CTO at Cylance who said, “As the leading AI security company, we are well placed to judge the various approaches for deploying AI in ITSM,” and “The Espressive team understands how to apply AI to make it easy for employees to get help, which in turn will drive ITSM adoption. In our evaluation, we made sure the Espressive solution was quick to deploy, would learn from experience to get smarter, and would not require expensive AI resources.”/p

The Technology

pAble to understand over 500 million phrases and 4,000 topics out of the box and growing, the Barista Employee Language Cloud (ELC) uses leading AI technologies to understand what employees are saying in workplace language, provide a personalized response, and uses machine learning to identify the correct expert when a question can’t be answered. The ELC uses a model that enables customers to benefit from the learning of every other customer, while protecting proprietary data./p

Disruptive Factor

pKnowledge base (KBs) articles have been the standard tool for employee self-service for over 10 years, yet employees have rejected them and find it easier to call or email the help desk than to use their ITSM tools (i.e., portals and KBs). Searchbots tried to solve this by doing a better search of KBs using interfaces like Slack or MS teams, but they still have the same problems, which is employees are presented with a list of KB articles, which they have to read through and then self-diagnose the problem. Plus, if employees don’t ask their questions using the right keywords, the right article will not be presented, even if one exists./p pBarista fundamentally changes the paradigm by automating the resolution of employee questions, issues, and requests with exceptional experiences that employees will actually adopt. Barista uses AI to understand context about the employee to provide a single, personalized answer. Uniquely able to understand over 500 million phrases on more than 4000 topics, Barista understands employee questions, regardless of how they ask it. If the enterprise has KB articles they want to leverage, Barista can map them back to the Employee Language Cloud to provide only a single article that answers the question. If an answer is not known, rather than force the employee to create a service ticket, Barista brings the right expert in to the conversation. Barista then stays in the conversation to learn the answer, eliminating the need to write KBs./p

Shining Moment

pWe designed the Employee Language Cloud to understand 500M+ questions and growing, resulting in the fastest deployment with the highest accuracy and employee adoption. We’re proud of every customer who has selected us to automate resolution of employee questions with AI. Most recently we were selected by SAIC to be part of their IT Modernization Initiative for customers as well as their inhouse virtual support agent. We also achieved the highest AWS Partner Network certification./p