The client is a multinational financial services organization, headquartered in the United States. They operate a global procurement helpdesk for answering queries and issues raised by vendors across various markets globally. This procurement helpdesk was operated manually and was a large cost factor for the client from the perspective of support services.
Infosys focused on automating the procurement helpdesk with the help of bots deployed using Infosys Nia Chatbot Platform – a homegrown Infosys intellectual property. Phase 1 of the project has been successfully implemented, resulting in effective automation of the procurement helpdesk.
Key Challenges
- Handling vendor queries through the procurement helpdesk accounted for a large part of the support costs of the client and cost efficiency was something they were looking at
- The existing process was a multistep, time-intensive exercise with multiple touchpoints where the vendors communicated with the customer service executives using email, phone, and fax. The customer support agents, in turn, referred to data sources and ITSM tools for raising tickets or responding back to users
- The procurement helpdesk was handling over 30K queries annually and catering to markets globally
- The client was looking for a solution which enables them to redeploy existing staff to handle complex processes and at the same time, provides a frictionless end user experience with self-service capabilities and reduced manual intervention
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The Solution
The Infosys Approach
Infosys team did a thorough analysis of the data and process and analyzed that 40% of the queries that came to the procurement helpdesk were corresponding to request for information and process awareness, while 60% of the queries actually required manual assistance and ticket creation on ServiceNow — the ITSM product used by the client
Infosys identified the following components of the chatbot platform for the use cases: Intent-Entity modelling,FAQ Extractor, and Analytics Dashboard. Also, automated extraction of data from emails were done for creating a database of utterances
During implementation the bots developed on the platform were integrated with the ServiceNow ITSM product and internal client data stores. Three bots were deployed catering to over 2000 users through a web channelconfigured with 700+ FAQs and a good number of intents
Best Practices, Learning and Experience
Considerable and detailed analysis of the processes adopted by the customers for identifying use cases for chatbots that would have highest impact in terms of efficiency and customer experience
Implementation of Infosys Nia Chatbot in a client environment with paramount importance on data security
Importance of thorough analysis of business processes for identifying the most effective use cases and areas of implementing chatbot to get the best results in terms of usability and user experience
Benefits
Infosys Nia implementation helped achieve effort savings & productivity improvement
The average response time for resolution of vendor queries got reduced from a scale of 1-2 days to a matter of few seconds while the first contact time is less than a second
Within three months of implementation, 8000+ queries have been handled by the bot, which accounts to about 85% of the total requests raised since the implementation of Infosys Nia Chatbot
The bots have been integrated with ServiceNow ITSM as well as many of the internal systems of the client and also incorporates Single Sign-On access for internal users. From the analytics data provided through the dashboard, a month-on-month improvement in the percentage of successful hits (understanding user intent) has been noted
The bots are presently being used by both suppliers/vendors and customer service representatives. The customer experience has been greatly enhanced and it has resulted in considerable cost and effort savings, leading to productivity improvement
