Espressive Offers COVID-19 Rapid Assistance Program to Relieve Pressure From IT Help Desks While They Support New Work From Home Mandates

SANTA CLARA, Calif., April 1, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- IT help desks are getting hit hard with work from home mandates resulting from COVID-19, with call volumes rising dramatically and service level agreement (SLA) breaches becoming the new norm. In response, Espressive, a pioneer in artificial intelligence (AI) for enterprise service management (ESM), today released a free 90-day Rapid Assistance Program to quickly help enterprise organizations automate, track, and respond to the onslaught of employee questions about working from home. With this program, help desk agents will be able to focus on critical issues versus answering repetitive questions and employees will be able to reach full productivity quickly.

"When I founded Espressive nearly four years ago, it was in a very different time from today," said Pat Calhoun, CEO of Espressive. "But it is interesting to see how our core founding principles hold true whether the world is operating under normal circumstances or whether there is a global crisis as a backdrop. At a time when employees are forced to work from home, self-service needs to become the new imperative for IT to survive. If we can help organizations navigate through these uncertain times with strength, the Rapid Assistance Program will have succeeded."

WHAT:
The main goal of the COVID-19 Rapid Assistance Program is to significantly reduce calls going to an enterprise organization's help desk within days. In addition, it will help employees gain full productivity more quickly, while helping ease some of the stress resulting from the current pandemic.

The program includes access to:

• Espressive Barista – Barista is an AI-based virtual support agent that brings the ease of consumer virtual assistants such as Amazon Alexa into the workplace. With Barista, employees are able to get immediate, personalized answers to their questions through an omni-channel approach. And if Barista doesn't know an answer, Barista will open a ticket on the employee's behalf.
• Barista Case Management  – Case Management is a modern and powerful ticketing solution to enable IT help desks to automate, track, and respond to employees' IT questions, including the onslaught of questions due to work from home mandates resulting from COVID-19.
• Barista's FAQ Management Tool – The FAQ Management tool is intuitive and easy to use to train Barista with responses that are specific to each organization. It was designed to be used by any subject matter expert no matter their technical skill level. Responses can be made specific to job role, location, and more, which is critically important for this program since policies related to the pandemic are generally very specific to city, state/province, and country. With policies changing, sometimes on a daily basis, the FAQ Management Tool enables organizations to add, edit, or delete content in minutes. Organizations can also link to knowledge articles that may have already been created.
• Employee Language Cloud – The Barista Employee Language Cloud (ELC) ensures that Barista comes pre-trained, understanding over 750M employee phrases. The ELC also includes researched responses around thousands of IT topics (e.g., Office 365, Zoom, Slack). This ensures Barista maximizes call deflection with little effort, while the help desk can focus on training Barista with responses that are specific to their organization.

WHY:

• Many organizations with work from home mandates due to Coronavirus are experiencing extremely high call volumes to their IT help desks, resulting in more than two hour wait times. With so much unknown surrounding the pandemic, and with so much changing daily, it is critical for organizations to get their workforces to full productivity and keep them there.
• The Espressive team has deep roots in the IT community and sees this as our opportunity to give back to the teams and enterprise organizations that have enriched our lives.

WHEN:

• This program will be available at no charge from April 1 through July 31, 2020. The 90-day program will help enterprise organizations through the transition of enabling employees to work from home.

HOW:

• Espressive's omni-channel approach enables employees to access Barista in several ways, which is critical to drive adoption. Barista is available as a native app across Android, iOS, Microsoft Windows, and MacOS as well as through a browser. In addition, Barista can intercept emails sent to an organization's help desk as well as integrate to either Slack or Microsoft teams, so employers can meet employees where they are already working.
• With the Barista Employee Language Cloud's pretrained language model and researched responses for thousands of IT topics (e.g., Office 365, Zoom, Slack, VPN access), enterprise organizations can get up and running in a matter of days.

To learn about Espressive's free Rapid Assistance Program and more, visit the COVID-19 resources page.

About Espressive
Espressive, the pioneer in artificial intelligence (AI) for enterprise service management and a 2019 Gartner Cool Vendor, redefines how employees get help by delivering exceptional employee experiences. Barista, the company's virtual support agent (VSA), brings the ease of consumer virtual assistants, such as Amazon Alexa and Google Home, into the workplace. Barista automates resolution of employee questions, issues, and requests with personalized experiences that result in employee adoption of 80 to 85% and reduced help desk call volume of 40 to 60%. Espressive is backed by Insight Partners, General Catalyst and Wing Venture Capital, and is headquartered in Santa Clara, California. Visit www.espressive.com for more information.

Media Contact
Jocelynn Stidham
Bhava Communications for Espressive
703-863-1277
[email protected]

SOURCE Espressive

Related Links

http://www.espressive.com