Service experience isn’t about what is delivered. It’s about how. The outcome is important, but employees want convenience, speed, and simplicity. AI-driven service and support tech—like a virtual agent—improves the quality of the Employee Experience (EX), making employees happier and more productive.
If we think about it in a very simple way—we could say that when an employee gets the outcome they wanted, that’s good. And if they don’t get what they want, that’s bad. But we can’t measure the quality of the service experience on the outcome alone. It tells us nothing about:
We must put ourselves in the employee’s shoes and look deeper—at all the elements of the service experience, not just the outcome and the mechanics of the service delivery process. Why? Because experience matters. 94% of customers say that a positive experience would make them purchase again from a brand. Similarly, 80% of customers say they have switched brands after a poor customer experience.
In terms of service providers, employees don’t have the same choices in the workplace as they do in their consumer lives—but there’s still an impact. Where a poor Customer Experience (CX) drives customers to switch brands, a poor Employee Experience means employees are more likely to look beyond the walls of the organization to get what they need (e.g. shadow IT). And an employee’s perception of the overall corporate employee experience influences how they feel about their employer—and whether they should move on.
These days, there may be many distinct channels by which you can access services and get support but there are two main options: interact with a person (via phone, email, live chat, or walk-up) or interact with a digital system.
Do I want to speak to a person (and wait to do so)? Or do I want to order the service, log the issue, or find the solution myself, right now (and quickly move on)? People don’t always want one-to-one service. For minor issues and information needs, they want a quick, digital experience. In many consumer situations, it would now seem strange to speak to a person instead of simply clicking a few buttons in a retailer or utility provider’s mobile app.
Digital interaction is now a tried-and-tested solution to high demand for services and support—leaving service desk agents with more time to handle the calls that really need the human touch. This, in itself, enables a better employee experience because agents have more time, energy, and patience to do their best for each employee.
Getting what you need from a portal means navigating different areas:
Using a service portal isn’t difficult, but it’s not instant, and it’s a slightly different experience each time (depending on what you’re looking for). It’s often the quicker option versus human-powered channels, but it’s no longer the best possible service experience for routine service requests and support.
The new opportunity for IT is to roll all these digital interactions into a single, unified, natural language experience that covers all routine service and support scenarios.
AI-powered virtual agents will become the centrepiece and primary channel of the new employee service experience. A virtual agent brings together all the functions of a service portal plus a lot of what a human service desk agent can do—and wraps it all up in a conversational interface. Everything in one place, accessed using natural language. No navigation. No searching. No forms to complete. No training required.
To provide a truly unified employee experience, a virtual agent should provide access to service and support spanning all of your corporate service providers, not just IT. In this way, virtual assistants will become the new front-end for the whole enterprise service ecosystem. Whether you want to check progress on an IT ticket, an HR case, or a Facilities work order, you’ll be able to do it simply by asking “What’s the situation with my open tickets?” This is what the new Enterprise Service Management experience looks like.
Human agents handle calls on a one-to-one basis, or up to 3 live chat sessions at a time. An AI-powered virtual agent is endlessly scalable. It can handle hundreds or thousands of interactions at a time. It’s like having an army of agents that never sleep, never tire, never get angry, and never burn out. They also never think about leaving your organization.
The scalability of a virtual agent means there’s always zero waiting time for the customer, making it a more compelling option than waiting in a call queue or a live chat queue.
A virtual agent redefines the line between what is human work and what is machine work. This translates into a huge drop in calls to the service desk—allowing service desk agents to focus on novel problems and higher value tasks.
Think about how an AI-driven virtual agent would make life on your service desk better the next time there’s a major incident impacting many end users. No more call spikes. Just 100% focus on rapid resolution.
The beauty of a virtual agent is that you can start with basic ticket logging, information requests, and how-to capabilities and build from there. That means a bit of pulling and pushing of service management information and knowledge to help employees out—in much the same way as a human agent would do.
From there, you can quickly empower the virtual agent with more extensive, action-oriented capabilities—to actually get things done for the employee. For example, triggering a workflow to give an employee what they need—like access to a cloud app. This is where a virtual agent can cover the interaction and execution of an almost unlimited range of routine tasks that were previously done by people.
An AI-driven virtual agent isn’t just transformational for the employee experience. The type and volume of work that a virtual agent can handle fundamentally shifts what a service desk agent’s day looks like.
The strain is taken off your human agents. They finally have the bandwidth to eliminate the backlogs, put out the fires, and hunt down and resolve the infrastructure issues that are causing repeated problems.
This, in turn, frees up time to redesign and improve service experiences, optimize processes, and support projects that accelerate your organization’s digital agenda. A virtual agent is a key enabler in the quest to boost operational IT maturity and achieve the agility that is required in today’s fast-moving business environment.