How a bot became the face of onboarding at AppDynamics
AppDynoBot takes work off agents’ plates by handling account access and application provisioning tasks for new hires — without involving an agent.
The Problem
AppDynamics: A fast-growing organization that counts on personalized IT help
AppDynamics — now part of Cisco — is continuing to grow quickly. The company is not only the leader in the application performance management space, but it’s also the fastest growing vendor in the space.
This fast growth means Russ Harris, VP of Operations at AppDynamics, and his IT team need to continue expanding their global, white-glove IT service quickly while keeping costs in check. The growing cost of support services for 2,300 employees became difficult to justify, however Harris knew he needed to provide high-quality and personalized IT support — despite the challenges.
To scale IT support without increasing IT support resources significantly, Harris’ team evaluated various AI solutions, but none focused on achieving automated IT issue resolution like Moveworks.
The Solution
Introducing AppDynoBot: The new face of IT
In March 2019, Moveworks, in the form of AppDynoBot, was rolled out to all AppDynamics employees worldwide. Employees took to the bot quickly, and at the start, mostly focused on using AppDynoBot to find IT tickets. But employees quickly learned they could type a request in plain English and get results instantly, without needing to go through the steps to file a ticket, thanks to a combination of Moveworks’ natural language understanding (NLU) and conversational AI.
In addition to responding to employees via direct messages, AppDynoBot also monitors AppDynamics’ IT group channel in Slack. This channel is a forum where employees can get fast IT help thanks to its many participants. When AppDynoBot sees a request it can help with, it responds immediately in the group channel and starts a direct message conversation with the employee to resolve the issue. This ability to crowdsource support is particularly helpful for the new hires starting every week.
Moveworks is absolutely essential. New employees have to be productive in their first week, which requires fast onboarding and real-time support. That’s what AppDynobot gives us.
The Result
Fast automated onboarding thanks to AppDynoBot
With instant, high-quality help accessible anytime by typing a message in Slack, AppDynoBot lives up to the white-glove standards set by the AppDynamics help desk agents. But — AppDynoBot is doing a lot more than just resolving issues. It’s enhancing employees’ productivity with instant information and proactive help. Onboarding new hires is a key task for the IT team that, in the past, demanded many hours of the team’s time. AppDynoBot takes this work off agents’ plates by handling the account access and application provisioning tasks for new hires — without involving an agent.
Harris sums it up: “The bot brings big improvements in quality of life both for employees and for the help desk team. AppDynoBot is automatically resolving over 30% of employee issues, instantly, and we’ve been able to hold IT headcount flat while freeing up my team to work on bigger value-add work.”
Key Integrations
