Like many enterprises, this global manufacturing company needed to quickly ramp up its IT service desk capabilities when employees were required to start working from home due to the COVID-19 crisis.
The shift to remote working posed numerous challenges, with thousands of employees immediately impacted at the start of the outbreak. The company turned to DXC Technology to help maintain worker productivity and provide the equipment and support for employees working from home. DXC helped the company reduce the added burden to the global service desk by quickly implementing an out-of-the-box chatbot solution.
Capturing best practices
DXC and the company were able to extend what they learned from their experiences to minimise the impact on workers and sustain business continuity. DXC proposed that the company capture the best practices and establish corporate-wide governance for dealing with COVID-19 issues. This included standing up a crisis management team led by DXC that was comprised of leaders from various regions and business units.
With the global crisis management team in place, the company was able to stay ahead of numerous challenges that arose. Joint “war rooms” were established to allow the company and DXC to collaborate on strategy and solutions. In the early days, one of the most vexing challenges for big companies was how to deal with the huge increase in calls to the IT service desk when so many employees were working from home.
As part of a long-term workplace services engagement, DXC provides the company with robust on-site services that include walk-in support centres. However, those onsite services were rendered largely useless once most employees started working remotely.
At that point, the company’s global service desk operated by DXC experienced a 23 percent increase in calls. DXC acted immediately by adding agent capacity, but the team quickly realised that some sort of out-of-the-box solution was required.
DXC’s service delivery leader, serving as a key member of the company crisis management team, came up with a common-sense solution: Deploy a chatbot to help handle the extra incoming service calls. A low-cost out-of-the-box solution was available for immediate deployment. After being set up to provide self-service solutions to common questions via a conversational user interface, the chatbot went into production, having taken just 30 hours from ideation to implementation.
The initial chatbot solution provided service desk callers with automated solutions to the three most common IT issues. For example, a caller wanting to reset a password was able to go through the process with the chatbot rather than talking to a service desk agent. The set of automated solutions to common IT issues was soon expanded to five.
Value delivered
Immediate results
The deployment of the chatbot produced immediate results. On the first day, the company saw a 12 percent decrease in calls requiring interaction with service desk agents. DXC focused on call deflection, a technique for rerouting incoming calls to an alternate digital channel.
The monthly chatbot deflection rate at the company’s global service desk increased from 12 percent in March 2020 to 22 percent in April 2020. By the summer, the deflection rate held steady at 28 percent.
Employees are now able to get fast resolutions to common IT issues. User experience surveys taken after the chatbot was deployed showed a significant increase in general user satisfaction. In addition, service desk agents have been freed up to deal with more complex problems.
Empowered employees
In enterprises, part of contending with the new normal involves ensuring employee safety and maintaining business continuity. As the world’s largest workplace services provider, DXC enabled the firm to empower its employees by providing a personalised, intelligent and secure workplace for productivity and collaboration.