Conversational AI Bots Can Be "Hired" to Join Enterprise IT Help Desk Teams

ORLANDO, Fla., Oct. 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, Kore Inc. announced its Smart Bot for IT help desk, another out-of-the-box AI-powered bot built to help enterprises quickly capitalize on the cost savings, efficiency and service experience potential of conversational computing. This marks the company's fifth launch of tailor-made Smart Bots for enterprise industry segments and workforce functions in just the past two months. Kore's Smart Bot product family now includes customer-facing bots for retail banking, commerce, sales, service and IT help desk.

The leaders of an enterprise's IT help desk function face a challenging balancing act of cutting costs and driving efficiencies while simultaneously delivering better, faster and more convenient service. Factor in the increasingly diverse and complex computing environments of today's enterprise as well as high staff turnover, and it's no surprise that most organizations struggle to bring this vision to life for their employees.

The Kore Smart Bot for IT help desk acts as a proactive, 24x7 assistant for employees and help desk staff, working to complete tasks on their behalf in a fraction of the time, through an easy-to-use, conversational UI.

• For employees - The intelligent assistant can reset a network or hardware password, find answers to questions that traditionally sit in a complex Knowledge Base, and place orders for new or replacement devices and more – letting them quickly self-service minor issues without unnecessary phone calls or waiting. About 20% of IT help desk calls are still related to password resets, an inefficiency that can cost businesses between $15 to $20 per call.
• For help desk staff - The AI-powered bot can perform more than 25 ITSM-related tasks, such as enabling system access for a user, creating a new incident, pulling personalized incident or change request reports, making or approving asset requests, taking device actions like suspending or wiping a mobile device, gathering outage information and much more – easing the burden of time-consuming, routine work.

The Smart Bot for IT help desk is designed and pre-built to instantly perform the most common, cumbersome and costly tasks for this functional area. Like the other Kore Smart Bots, it's also built on Kore's end-to-end Bots Platform as a Service (PaaS), which allows the companies to easily extend and customize the functionality for their own requirements and workflows.

"After almost a year of working with enterprise customers across industries, the help desk area surfaced as one of the easiest and highest ROI initial use cases for AI bots," said Raj Koneru, Founder & CEO of Kore Inc. "Despite major system investments and efforts to drive self-service, employees still often turn to their help desk with the simplest of requests. IT departments also face major inefficiencies and security challenges in areas like asset management, so the justification for bots became an easy one. The IT help desk is a low-risk, high upside approach for enterprises to get started into the era of conversational computing."

The Kore Smart Bot for IT Help Desk

All employees and help desk staff can converse with the Smart Bot as quickly as they can type or speak a message. They can communicate with the bot via the sanctioned tools they use daily – company portals, SMS/text, email, enterprise communication and collaboration tools and consumer messaging apps. Built on Kore's Bots Platform, features also include:

• Pre-tested integration with ServiceNow, plus simple API-based integration to other ITSM systems
• Kore's Loebner Award-winning NLP engine and machine learning, which makes it an intelligent, 24x7 personal assistant
• A full record of customer conversation history and contextual data, which can transfer across channels
• Enterprise-grade security and analytics so IT teams can protect employee information and get visibility into bot usage and value
• A customizable look, feel, and personality to allow a team's culture to come to life
• The ability to continually extend the bots functionality using the Kore Bots Platform

Employees: Employees and managers can engage with the Smart Bot to quickly resolve issues or find answers, including but not limited to:

• Create or submit a new tech issue
• Request, approve or reject a new or replacement device
• Reset passwords such as VPN, network, Active Directory, tokens, IP phones and other hardware
• Get quick answers to IT-related questions from the Knowledge Base, whether the answers reside in FAQ, article or Wiki format
• Find out the status of a specific system, such as, "Is WebEx down right now?"
• Request access to specific systems or resources

IT help desk staff: Staff can use the bot to perform everyday ITSM tasks, including but not limited to:

• Create or modify/update incidents, problems and change requests
• Request ad-hoc or scheduled incident and change request reports filtered by criticality, type and SLA
• Get the details of an asset such as serial number, model and device statistics
• Take action on a device such as to suspend, wipe or disable devices
• Check the current inventory stock of a given item
• Receive alerts exactly when there is a new outage

Kore partners with enterprise customers from conception to deployment for a rollout that reduces complexity, and eliminates the potential for failure. A 60-day implementation plan allows for proper time and support to scope and define what an individual retailer needs, optimize NLP, conduct testing and deploy the Smart Bot, making speed to market unmatched versus other solutions.

Kore is showcasing its Smart Bot for IT Help Desk at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Orlando this week. Additional info is available at kore.com/smart-bots/it-help-desk.

About Kore

Kore Inc., created to help people work and engage digitally in a simpler and more conversational way, is a pioneer in shaping how intelligent bots interact with the modern via a conversational dialogue. Kore's enterprise grade Bots Platform is the only end-to-end cloud or on-prem PaaS for designing, building, testing and hosting smart, speech-enabled bots for use in any channel, including text and e-mail, in a website or mobile app, and on popular messaging and collaboration platforms such as Facebook, Skype, Slack and Kore's own Messaging app. Kore also leverages its Platform to offer enterprises and consumers a store of more than 130 ready-made bots, and a family of out-of-the-box solution bots called the Kore Smart Bots™, including the Smart Bot for banking. These out-of-the-box solutions equip industry leaders to meet the dual challenges of ever-increasing customer expectations and non-integrated legacy IT and systems head on. With a pre-built set of tasks and a rapid implementation, organizations can get to market and recognize ROI faster than traditional models.

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SOURCE Kore Inc.