I suspect some of you reading this have found yourselves in a similar situation to Peter. Let’s give Peter’s story a happy ending. Our main man is sitting in front of his computer with Teams open. Would it be too obvious to use this existing and well-known application to solve the problem? Peter makes a quick note of the issue in the IT Service portal.

“I need a new password for the VeryImportantReports program.”

He gets a response immediately. “No problem. Should I send the security code to your mobile number or e-mail address?” Underneath this question are two tick boxes—one for SMS and one for e-mail. Peter chooses SMS.

In a matter of seconds, Peter receives his code and types it into Teams. “Zero...eight...15”. He hits Enter.

Someone writes “Thanks, Peter. Here’s your temporary password for VeryImportantReports. Is there anything else I can help with?”

“No, thank you,” Peter writes back.

Fig. 1: A conversation with a Teams chatbot to reset a password. (Source: Cognigy)

But in reality, Peter didn’t need to write that as this 30-second conversation had been using Conversational AI. In other words, a chatbot that is integrated into Teams as an endpoint to resolve issues. In this instance, we were talking about changing a password and that was a fully automated process that didn’t involve a IT Service Desk agent. The whole process was, however, still documented as a ticket in the existing IT service management tool. If the issue had been more complicated, the bot would’ve opened a ticket and forwarded it to a service agent.

Behind the scenes of the example mentioned above is the Cognigy.AI solution, which—according to the manufacturer—is the leading enterprise conversational automation platform that automates conversations through the use of cognitive bots. Here I’ve focussed on the specific case of resolving an IT service ticket through Teams, but Cognigy.AI and its 30 ready-made endpoints can do so much more, both on the input side (from Alex to WhatsApp) and in terms of the platforms to be connected. The easy-to-use graphics display makes it possible for programmers and conversation designers to create authentic conversations in a snap.

Fig. 2: Cognigy.AI flow editor. (Source: Cognigy)

People were working from home before the pandemic struck, but Corona has pushed us to our limits in one way or another. Resetting a password is number one in the list of requests the IT Service Desk has received since Corona kicked off. This makes it even more important to use organically grown, existing infrastructures as, through process optimisation, you can ensure excellent service for staff and also an easing of the burden on hotlines with just a few simple steps.

In this blog, I introduced you to the Cognigy.AI solution. Cognigy Voice Gateway as an AI-based voice gateway solution can also be used as a virtual voice agent for automated phone calls. It accesses the same conversation flows as the bot solution so you only have to create the flows once and then use them for both test-to-speech and speech-to-text solutions.

Fig. 3: Voice Gateway is a perfect complement to the Cognigy.AI chatbot. (Source: Cognigy)

Feel free to contact me if you would like to learn more!