Having a Level 1 chat with SAMI
- Summary:
- ServiceNow partner, Fruition Partners, is pitching to use an AI chatbot to free up service personnel to concentrate on the more taxing issues.
One of ServiceNow's global partner companies, Fruition Partners, has developed a chatbot service that is aimed at automating many of Level 1 service calls that form the majority of end user requests and service tickets. Everyone knows the type of services required – the forgotten password and the rest, that are easy to resolve but can use up much of available support staff time.
Building a chatbot was the brainchild of one of the company’s Technical Consultants, Mark Balloch and the result is SAMI – ServiceNow Automated Messaging Interface – which uses natural language interfaces and machine learning to interact with end users. It is designed to sit between the service desk and the end users – effectively a Level 1 automated support tool for all those obvious user calls. This frees up their company’s support analysts to work on more complex issues.
As Fruition Partners currently works with some 1,500 ServiceNOW customers and over 4000 projects – mainly IT-intensive implementations of ServiceNOW across 19 offices, the company has some perspective on the impact on available time such calls can have. Balloch says:
I wanted to push the boundaries of what ServiceNow and its new service portal could do. I have always had an interest in artificial intelligence. It quickly got noticed by my peers in the company and became an official product offering that mapped onto the growing user take up of service portals as their front ends. We feel that SAMI is a natural progression for presenting an alternative channel for those users.
He came up with the idea last year and has now reached the stage of being deployed in what the company refers to as an early adoption phase. This is a bit like beta testing with two customers that understand it may not yet be a finished product, but are nonetheless running it in a live environment rather than a sandbox.
The initial reactions, he said, have been good, and are moving beyond the start point of using SAMI to service information requests on IT issues to the provision of wider services such as HR issues such as how many days holiday are left to the inquirer.
Voice?
For now SAMI is text based, though Balloch is working on a voice-based version. He acknowledges that this could be something of a two-edged sword for some users, especially if the support processes being run this way require some kind of 'paper trail' to firmly establish what has happened and in what order it occurred. For now the 'written' user interface gives the automatic advantage of producing an audit trail of all the Level 1 service calls.
While there is no immediate timeline to move to a voice-based interface of the Alexa/Siri variety, Balloch is aware of the possibilities and the potential pitfalls, and is looking to try it out:
There are obvious issues surrounding security of open speech in an office, and the potential chaos of multiple voice contentions.
With the two current live testers, he indicated that there was a split between them on this subject. One, a services company, is not interested in using voice I/O with the system, while the other, a financial company, is minded to try it if and when it is available.
Working with ServiceNow also means that SAMI can pick out the work profiles of individual staff, allowing it to accommodate the different terms and taxonomies used in different countries. The classic example here is where a UK member of staff would write 'spanner' and an American would write 'wrench', both referencing the same tool.
SAMI can also work with the languages sets that ServiceNow offers, such as German, French and Spanish, as well as English. This means it should work well in a large part of the world. Balloch’s primary goal is to get SAMI into as many countries and applications areas as possible:
One of the concerns here is the ability of such systems to work with different accents and speeds of talking. We’re still investigating this.
There is competition in this area, such as Siri and Cortana, and some of it is already well-embedded. This suggests that SAMI will have to have something a bit special to attract the interest of ServiceNOW users. Balloch is hoping that its core AI system, which is based on Google’s Dialogflow, will help here. In addition, that is the same technology as lies behind Alexa, which should make a voice interface relatively easy to engineer.
As Fruition Partners is solely committed to the ServiceNow platform, the chances of SAMI coming available on any other service management environment are non-existent, though it can work with other services that are compatible with ServiceNow:
It has been specifically coded to work with ServiceNow so it is not platform agnostic. So we don’t have any plans to licence the technology out to other vendors.
Balloch does see an increasingly important place for SAMI in helping ServiceNow break out of the purely IT systems support domain in which it has grown. That company has the long-standing mantra that `everything is a service’ and is now pushing to move in on other areas of business, such as HR, where the same basic service management tools can be re-applied. Here, having a chatbot service available for many of the mundane queries from staff could be an important lever.
The first step is to finish the live testing process, and for this he is looking for at least one more company to step forward as test 'guinea-pig'. One consideration here is that his ideal will be to find a company that can stretch the system more in terms of user responses:
At the moment the majority of end user responses are of the 'yes/no' variety, in response to questions such as 'do you want me to reset your password?’. Putting my finger in the air I would guess we are between four and six months away from going live for all ServiceNow customers.
My take
Here is another example of how AI is likely to be far more successful in the working world, hitting a pretty specific and fairly mundane need. And to be fair, Level 1 service tickets can be about as mundane as it is possible to get.