Transforming your Slack channel into an AI-driven digital help desk for your employees
Why use Slack for internal IT Support
According to Enlyft, there are around 135,711 companies that currently use Slack as collaborative software.
Chances are, your business might be one of those 135,711 companies.
Though using Slack as a means of communication between members of the same team or different teams in a company leads to productive work culture, companies can leverage the instant messaging platform even more. How, you ask? By turning Slack into your business’ employee support hub. Here’s why.
1. Helps you get more out of your existing software
Be it Jira Cloud for getting notifications about issues as and when they get mentioned, or HubSpot for your sales and marketing efforts, or Freshservice for managing your IT services, you can add the slack version of the apps your business already uses in the channel of your choice from the Slack App Directory.
This makes it easier for your employees to use Slack’s version of IT service management Apps like Freshservice for
- Converting Slack Direct Message (DM) conversations to tickets in Freshservice
- Adding Slack conversation as ticket description for context
- Getting in touch with the Subject Matter Expert (SME) of an IT issue right away via Slack DMs.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
2. It’s super-flexible
With Slack, you can create separate channels for different teams or, you can create a shared channel for your organization and a third-party vendor to collaborate.
Channels are a great way of letting employees stay in the loop of things. Be it support agents getting notified in Slack about tickets raised via DM or a channel, or an agent reacting to an issue raised by a requestor in a channel to let them know about its status, Slack helps in streamlining IT processes.
Moreover, your company’s help desk agents will be able to guide an employee with their issue via Slack’s audio and video calls feature on-the-go. Pretty Neat, huh?
3. Prevents Silos among Teams
According to this infographic by the Queens University of Charlotte, 49% of Millennials (who are soon to comprise the majority of the workforce) support social tools for workplace collaboration.
In fact, about 40% of Millennials would even pay out of pocket for social collaboration tools to improve productivity. That’s how much they believe in the dream team of collaboration and technology.
Slack, through its plethora of real-time collaboration and document authoring tools like Google Drive, Dropbox, or Microsoft OneDrive makes the dream team of collaboration and technology all the more, real.
Through pinned messages and files, new joiners or people already in your team’s Slack channel will be able to review things such as:
- Product spec
- Tech spec
- Designs
This way, lots of onboarding meetings and a slew of forwarded email threads to root through for new employees can be avoided.
Team members will also be able to scan through all previous conversations, decisions, and the people involved in the channel. This kind of transparency ultimately leads to the reduction of help desk tickets raised by employees. Now that’s more like it.
4. Easier for triaging issues
Let’s say you have a Slack channel called #support for employees to report their IT issues.
Whenever an employee reports their issue in the #support channel, the employee or the help desk manager can call the attention of another member who might be an SME for that issue by including an @mention. The person mentioned will then be notified immediately.
As seen in the above example, the @mention comes in handy when the help desk manager wants to triage issues mentioned in the channel to the corresponding SME. The SME can then update the status of the issue in the channel itself with the help of emojis that’s easier to track for the employee who reported the issue as well as for the help desk manager.
What is Workativ Assistant for Slack
Think of Workativ Assistant like an icing on the cake to all that you can already do with Slack for managing IT services.
With Workativ Assistant, you can build a conversational bot that sounds humane and solves your employees’ issues with the power of AI and Automation in the snap of a finger (Enter Thanos’ world-killing snap: The Decimation).
Yeah, you heard it right. But Thanos’ snap can only turn half of the universe’s population to dust, while Workativ Assistant’s bot can turn ALL of your employees’ IT woes into dust in no time. Let’s see what makes Workativ Assistant’s bot so worthy of wielding the infinity gauntlet more than Thanos.
1. One-click Slack Integration
Deploying a Workativ Assistant bot in your preferred Slack workspace’s channel is as easy as pie.
Just click on the Add to slack button, grant the permissions required by Workativ Assistant to access your Slack workspace, add the bot to the channel of your choice, and you’re good to go.
2. Automates repetitive IT issues
According to INRY, password resets constitute an astonishing 20% to 50% of help desk calls. And like you’d already know, password resets aren’t that much of an issue to call another person for a solution when we ourselves can solve it.
By automating repetitive, mundane tasks like a password reset, unlocking an account, etc., the average cost-per-call to your internal help desk gets reduced drastically.
And Workativ Assistant makes it possible to create an automation in just a few clicks of a button for resetting a password. No coding knowledge required. Handy, right?
3. Serves automated resolutions via humane conversations
Yes, you can create automations like a breeze using Workativ Assistant. But what use are those automations when you don’t deliver the solution properly?
This is where Workativ Assistant’s intuitive Dialog Designer comes into play. With the Dialog Designer’s myriad of options, you can create conversations for any number of scenarios with a human touch more so that people who chat with the bot can’t tell the difference between chatting with a human and a bot. Again, no coding knowledge required.
4. App Integrations and Workativ Assistant Marketplace
Connect Workativ Assistant to your business’ apps and let Workativ Assistant do the rest of the work for you!
Be it sending an OTP via Twilio, creating a ticket via Freshservice, or sending a message to a Slack Channel, Workativ Assistant can do this and more for you once you connect it to the required app.
And you don’t even have to create Automations from scratch. Through the Workativ Assistant Marketplace, you can add ready-made automations for the required apps with just the click of a button.
5. Encourages Collaboration
Workativ Assistant allows multiple users to use the same workspace for building/making changes to a bot.
This instills a sense of team spirit and lets members of a team come up with better solutions for a particular scenario, together.
Whenever a member adds/changes something, all the users of the workspace get notified through Workativ Assistant’s notifications feature. Members can then improve upon the changes or add changes of their own that complement the changes made by another person in the same workspace.
6. Tracks employee satisfaction
Through Workativ Assistant’s feedback feature, you can get feedback from employees after the bot solves their problem.
Based on the feedback received, you can improve the conversations and corresponding automations to better suit your employees’ needs.
7. Trains itself to better understand your employees
Workativ Assistant’s Training Module enables the bot that you create to learn from its historical data of conversations with your employees and train itself to better detect an employees’ intention for initiating a conversation.
Slack + Workativ Assistant = The Perfect Concoction!
Now that you know why using Slack as an internal help desk can help transform your workplace support, why not combine it with Workativ Assistant to let your employees get the best out of your internal IT support?
Think about it. With Slack’s superior features and Workativ Assistant’s AI-powered automations, you can do so much more for your employees.
1. Supercharge Self-Service for your employees
By deploying a bot built using Workativ Assistant in the Slack channel for reporting IT issues, your employees can solve their problems themselves from the comfort of the channel. They can do so by using simple Slash commands.
Workativ Assistant uses only two slash commands — /restart for starting a new conversation with the bot and /exit to make the bot exit the channel. Easy, right?
2. 24×7 Availability*
Help desk agents can’t be available 24×7 to help out employees with their issues. After all, they’re human too. They need ample rest just like the rest of us.
To “help” your help desk agents, you can build a Workativ Assistant bot that offers IT support for repetitive tasks like a password reset, unlocking an account, etc., (as discussed earlier) in your workplace support Slack channel as well as train itself to resolve problems based on solutions previously offered for similar problems by a help desk agent.
This allows employees to solve their problems quickly as and when they arise without the hassles of long waiting queues.
3. Call Deflection
Enabling employees to resolve their IT issues themselves via Workativ Assistant’s bot in your workplace support Slack channel prevents the bottleneck of a single help desk agent handling a huge number of calls.
Providing Self-serve to employees via Workativ Assistant’s bot also thwarts the need for help desk agents to provide in-person support.
4. All-Encompassing
Adding the Slack version of your business’ apps from the Slack App Directory every time can be a bit frustrating.
With Workativ Assistant, you can connect your business’ apps with the Assistant and automate tasks for those apps instead of adding them from the Slack App Directory. This makes it easier on your IT Admins as well as your employees.
Be it creating a ticket in Zendesk or sending an email via Outlook, your employees can use the Workativ Assistant bot to take care of it.
5. Productive and Satisfied Employees
Enabling your employees to solve their IT issues themselves in a Slack channel via Workativ Assistant leads them to solve their issues then and there itself and continue with their work.
For employees, this eliminates the frustration that comes with the labyrinthine way of getting an IT issue resolved like the innumerous emails, redirects to different SMEs, etc.,
Employee self-service also lets help desk agents focus on resolving the more pressing IT issues at hand.
6. Higher Return On Investment (ROI)
With Workativ Assistant’s bot deployed in a Slack channel, you can get rid of the overheads that come with repetitive tickets and truly see your help desk costs take a dive.
In the long run, this will yield a higher ROI for your business.
- 24×7 availability of a bot depends on the organization’s discretion.
Editorial Note-
To know more about Workativ Assistant, visit https://workativ.com/
This article was first published in the Workativ Blog on January 20, 2020
