In my role as Head of Enterprise End-User Experience & Services at Broadcom, I work closely with our CIO Andy Nallappan and the Broadcom IT team to deliver a great employee experience. We set ourselves a very high bar for issue resolution times, and we’re always trying to move the needle on service accessibility.
Over the last year, a big part of our IT service delivery strategy has been 1.Bot, which is the name we’ve given to our Google Hangouts chatbot powered by the Moveworks AI platform. This month we held a celebration to mark the first year of 1.Bot resolving issues for us, so it feels like a good time to share some thoughts about how our first year of AI-powered IT support has gone.
1.Bot handles a growing share of issues
In our first week with the bot, we were excited to see it resolve about 8% of our employees’ IT support issues. After an implementation taking just a few weeks, it was great to see value straight out of the gate. Today 1.Bot is consistently resolving 38-40% of issues every week. It’s getting so effective that pretty soon we plan to turn off our telephone-based support for L1 issues. The most impressive part about this is that our journey to 40% happened without hiring any additional staff. We don’t have any admins for Moveworks, no coders, nobody writing workflows of conversation scripts, no machine learning experts. We just keep an eye on the new features that frequently become available in the bot so we can make sure our employees hear about those and start using them right away.
The journey
Our journey actually started about three years ago when we began looking for an AI platform that could take over as the first line of IT support for employees. It was a frustrating search. Almost every solution we looked at required us to write scripts, build dialogs, or train machine learning models. So it was a breath of fresh air when we found Moveworks. They understood that the value of an AI chatbot is all about the learning. It’s all about how it learns to understand what employees are asking for, and solve their problems automatically. Learning is different from teaching or training. We didn’t want to have a system we had to teach or train — we wanted something that could continually learn, all on its own.
Learning to chat with employees
When you handle IT support, the sheer variety of questions you get is huge — almost infinite. As an IT team, we can't anticipate all the things employees will ask about, or how they will ask for it. Additionally, our IT environment is constantly changing — new apps or services can be introduced at any time. For this reason, having Moveworks handle the natural language understanding is essential. The Moveworks service learns constantly from its conversations with employees and from the contents of IT tickets. This is true machine learning. My team doesn't have to teach the bot anything.
Anticipating what employees want
So what have we focused on to make the bot more effective? Well, another key benefit of having Moveworks underpinning our IT support process is that Moveworks provides us with a very clear roadmap of changes that we can make to unlock more autonomous resolution. Sometimes this means writing new knowledge articles, or enabling a new app to be provisioned through Okta, or building more automation in something like Workato. Or course, we used to do all this before, but oftentimes this work would sit idle — Moveworks brings all of this to life by making it accessible through a bot. The employee doesn’t have to know what the new automation or article is called, or even know it exists — they just talk to the bot and it finds the right answer or triggers the automation immediately.
This easy accessibility is a big accelerator during onboarding. Given the size of our organization and the acquisitions we do, we sometimes need to bring thousands of employees into the company in a single day, without increasing the size of our IT team, and 1.Bot lets us do this. On the back end, we'd built the automation in Okta and Workday to enable this, but imagine directing a new-hire — or a thousand of them — to a bunch of complicated onboarding tools. Now this problem is gone. We just say, "Go to 1.Bot!", and they get everything they need: the bot answers their questions, gets them the applications they need, and sets them up on the right email lists, and so on. It's real one-stop shopping for new employees, and they love it.
Delivering what employees want
Moveworks is constantly releasing new skills for the platform. As an early adopter of Moveworks we like to have early access to these new skills and to participate in evolving the capabilities of the platform. This is a big deal for us, because Moveworks is building out skills based on machine learning they do across many organizations. If our IT team had to develop 1.Bot’s new skills ourselves, we'd first have to anticipate every new use case our employees would need help with, then predict how they were going to ask for it, and then attempt to design conversation flows, integrations, and business logic. We're an IT support team, not a linguistics team or AI team.
1.Bot’s year in review
We have big goals and expectations for the next 12 months, but here’s a quick summary of what we’ve achieved in year one:
- 38% of IT tickets resolved automatically
- 6,000 tickets per month resolved
- 72,785 tickets triaged to the right assignment group
- Over 10,000 employee information lookups (roles, contact details, and so on)
- Over 19,000 ticket status checks
If I could highlight the top five impacts Moveworks has had on our IT service delivery, they would be
- Better employee experience. Issues get resolved in seconds, regardless of the employee’s time zone.
- Painless onboarding. During big acquisitions, we’ve brought on thousands of people in a day with minimal disruption.
- Virtually zero admin cost. All we really need to do is stay on top of new features, and Moveworks even helps us promote the bot’s new capabilities.
- Gets smarter on its own. We don’t have to teach the bot, it learns constantly.
- Gives us a roadmap. 1.Bot hears what employees are asking for. If the solution they’re looking for is missing, we know right away and can add it.
Overall, it’s been an amazing journey. For a long time, the reality of AI has failed to live up to the hype. But in our first year with Moveworks we have proven that AI is finally able to transform the way we deliver IT support. Not just incrementally, but radically. We are excited to see what happens in year two.
Interested in learning more?
To learn more about how our customers are using Moveworks, take a look at our case studies:
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