5 Steps to Getting Your ITSM Shift Left - Espressive · 5 Steps to Getting Your Shift Left Strategy...

5 Steps to Getting Your

ITSM Shift Left

Strategy Right

Table of Contents Deinition of Shift Left in ITSM ................................................................................. 2

Have Portals and Knowledge Bases Worked? ................................................... 3

Why Have Portals Performed So Poorly? ....................................................... 4

Will Chatbots Solve the Shift Left Problem? ................................................ 5

5 Steps to Getting Your Shift Left Strategy Right ................................... 6

Get Your ITSM Shift Left Strategy Right With These 5 Steps ...........12

Espressive Barista Delivers Exceptional Employee Experiences .....13

2 5 Steps to Getting Your ITSM Shift Left Strategy Right

Deinition of Shift Left in ITSM

“Shift left” in IT Service Management (ITSM) refers to moving the activity of

providing resolution support as close to the front line and the employee as

possible. The concept is simple. By moving resolution delivery to the front

line, less expensive resources are used, and support activity is simpliied. The desired result? Employees are happier as they get instant resolution,

and support costs are reduced.

The traditional way to help employees help themselves has been through

self-service portals. Rather than having employees send emails or call a

support desk, they are offered web-based support through a searchable

knowledge base. The hope has been that emails and phone calls would

slow down as employees realized they could quickly and easily ind answers to their questions.

35 Steps to Getting Your ITSM Shift Left Strategy Right

PORTAL ADOPTION GRAPH

Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec

INITIAL LAUNCH

NEW APP LAUNCH

RE-LAUNCH

25%

20%

15%

10%

5%

0%

Partial Adoption

KB Adoption

Linear (Partial Adoption)

Have Portals and Knowledge Bases Worked?

Data that we have gathered from analysts as well as our research

indicates that:

• Initial adoption starts over 20%, but it declines steadily with adoption

normalizing around 10-15% (consistent with indings from ITSM.tools)

• Adoption spikes are observed when IT markets a re-skin of the portal

or the addition of knowledge articles to support the launch of a new

application, but these spikes start lower than the initial launch and

decline over time

• The most disappointing statistic is that knowledge base searches

never break 3% of the overall ticket volume


Why Have Portals Performed So Poorly?

Portals are hard to ind and serve up a large number of technical knowledge base articles. Employees are then left to search for answers even though

the articles are dificult to understand, might be out of date, and might not contain the answers at all.

If employees can’t ind answers, they must open tickets and then interact with the help desk using phone or email (because employees don’t live on

the portal). So, this is basically training employees that the phone and email

work, which is counter to the message you want to send. All of that adds up

to a frustrating employee experience and often a complete waste of time.

In addition, portals need to be built using skills that IT generally does

not have in house – leading to a lengthy development cycle. No one

enterprise can truly build a consumer class app, because it would be

prohibitively expensive. So, the user experience ends up sub par.


Will Chatbots Solve the Shift Left Problem?

Chatbots try to improve on portals by asking questions to narrow down the

number of knowledge base articles served, but they are still knowledge base

articles which employees have already voted against.

While chatbots can open tickets on behalf of employees, that is the end of the

interaction with the chatbot. Ultimately, employees feel abandoned and on

their own in getting updates and resolution to what might have been a very

easy question to answer.

Chatbots also require the admin to create dialogues (or topics), which is

dificult and expensive. Plus Chatbots need to be trained on what is available in the service catalog, which is a manual process. With ServiceNow, for

example, a separate topic would need to be created for each catalog item.

That is resource intensive.


5 Steps to Getting Your Shift Left Strategy Right

If you want to develop an ITSM shift left strategy that will get the right results (i.e., happier employees and reduced costs),

you need to follow these ive steps:

Don’t use portals and

knowledge bases as

the foundation for

your ITSM shift left

strategy

Develop an

employee-focused

strategy, because

self-service won’t

work if employees

won’t adopt it

Don’t settle for a

chatbot when you

can have a virtual

support agent (VSA)

Get a running start

out of the box; don’t

try to build an AI

solution on your own

Find a solution that

was purpose-built to

meet the demands

of conversation-level

speed

STEP 1 STEP 2 STEP 3 STEP 4 STEP 5


Through 2020, 99% of artiicial

intelligence (AI) initiatives

in IT service management

(ITSM) will fail due to the lack

of an established knowledge

management (KM) foundation.”

– Gartner, Predicts 2018: IT Operations

December 4, 2017

For an ITSM shift left strategy to be successful, it must move service delivery

to the front line and enable employees to help themselves. That is a great

strategy that should save time and money while increasing employee

productivity and satisfaction. However, it will only work if employees are

engaged. Portals are costly and complex. They don’t reduce help desk call

volume because enterprises don’t have a solid knowledge base foundation.

Articles are technical and often out of date so employees often just give up.

Don’t continue to invest in technology that is getting 10 to 15%

employee adoption.

STEP 1

Don’t use portals and knowledge bases as the

foundation for your ITSM shift left strategy


For an ITSM shift left strategy to be successful, it must move

service delivery to the front line and enable employees to help

themselves. In their consumer lives, your employees are exposed

to artiicial intelligence (AI) every day and it is making their lives easier. Look at apps like Waze and Spotify. Their AI engines use data about them, their peers, and their surroundings to provide

exceptional consumer experiences. In stark contrast, getting

answers to even simple questions at work is still a challenge.

Don’t continue to invest in technology that is getting 10 to 15%

employee adoption. Bring AI into the workplace.

Develop an employee-focused strategy,

because self-service won’t work if

employees won’t adopt it

STEP 2


Unlike portals and chatbots that serve up knowledge base articles and treat

employees like transactions, a VSA should be able to provide personalized

and immediate answers to questions in the language of employees. And

unlike chatbots that require employees to use another tool to get help from

service desk agents, a virtual support agent delivers an immersive experience

by inviting an expert into the conversation and then staying with employees

through the lifecycle of requests.

An easy way to know whether you are looking at a chatbot or a VSA is

whether Slack is the main interface. Slack is a great collaboration tool that

is ine for basic interactions with a chatbot, but it will not yield the right outcome for employees when there is a more complex workflow like resetting

passwords or ordering laptops. Don’t settle for basic. Find a VSA that will

guide employees through complex processes and one that employees

will trust.

STEP 3

Don’t settle for a chatbot when you can

have a virtual support agent (VSA)


Why try to build something that requires signiicant time, highly specialized skills, and relies on portals that by themselves do not

deliver an experience that employees will adopt?

For a service to provide a consumer-like experience to your employees

it needs to incorporate machine learning, deep learning, and neuro

learning. And it needs to come out of the box with the ability to

recognize phrases and topics that are relevant to your employees.

If it doesn’t, you will need to have data scientists and linguists on

your team to make this happen for you.

If it comes with a toolkit for building dialog trees that require

experts and linguists to develop—run.

STEP 4

Get a running start out of the box; don’t

try to build an AI solution on your own


Some of the traditional ITSM vendors are trying to bolt-on AI to legacy

architectures. That won’t work because the introduction of AI into the

enterprise with chatbots and virtual support agents requires conversation-

level availability and speed which means services need to be built on elastic

and stateless architectures.

When an architecture can scale up and down on demand, customers get

the best performance and resiliency without scaling cost – even when the

service is used concurrently by thousands of employees.

Purpose-built matters when it comes to AI-based solutions.

STEP 5

Find a solution that was purpose-built

to meet the demands of conversation-

level speed


Get Your ITSM Shift Left Strategy Right With These 5 Steps

Summary

If you follow these ive steps in developing your ITSM shift left strategy, you will be able to get the right results—strong employee adoption and reduced service desk call volume. That means that your CIO can move budget from answering repetitive questions to strategic programs; can

further the AI initiative for the enterprise; can improve the perception of IT; and can signiicantly reduce MTTR.

The 5 steps to follow are:

Don’t use portals and

knowledge bases as

the foundation for

your ITSM shift left

strategy

Develop an

employee-focused

strategy, because

self-service won’t

work if employees

won’t adopt it

Don’t settle for a

chatbot when you

can have a virtual

support agent (VSA)

Get a running start

out of the box; don’t

try to build an AI

solution on your own

Find a solution that

was purpose-built to

meet the demands

of conversation-level

speed

STEP 1 STEP 2 STEP 3 STEP 4 STEP 5


Espressive Barista Delivers Exceptional Employee Experiences

Barista, our AI-based virtual support agent (VSA), provides employees with

immediate answers, proactively notiies them of outages or other important events, and continues to interact with them throughout the entire lifecycle of their

requests. Barista also helps guide employees through complex processes with

ease, such as new hire onboarding, password reset, vacation requests, and more.

Barista enables help desk agents to focus on what matters most by automatically

answering questions and resolving issues for employees. If Barista opens a

case, it is prioritized and routed to the right team with context. When outages

occur, Barista automates detection and notiication, and categorizes outage related tickets to a parent. Barista also simpliies catalog creation.

Barista also comes out of the box with an Employee Language Cloud that includes an extensive vocabulary tailored to the workplace so Barista can

speak the language of employees from day one.

Request a demo today to learn how Barista can help you shift left the

right way.

50%

40%

30%

20%

10%

10% 20% 30% 40% 50%

CHATBOT

PORTAL

EM

PL

OY

EE

AD

OP

TIO

N R

AT

E

REDUCTION IN CALL VOLUME

5 Steps to Getting Your ITSM Shift Left - Espressive · 5 Steps to Getting Your Shift Left Strategy...

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