The chat integration with Barista is great. We have it integrated with ServiceNow. The chat feature allows a user who is using Barista from their mobile device, to get right to the chat integration. Barista recognizes out-of-the-box phrases that people commonly use in support questions. I would say that the HR inquiries are much easier as most people are typing in the same thing. For example, "I'm looking up benefits," "I'm looking up compensation," etc. . Those are really out-of-the-box and are ready to go. IT is a little bit more complicated. Everybody has different scenarios. "My wifi is down," or "they won't type it in that way." Therefore, it does a great job with certain inquiries that are out-of-the-box, however, it definitely requires some human interaction. Barista is great when it comes to natural language processing and conversational AI. It does a great job with that. I use it almost every day. I can't remember anything anymore, I use Barista as my crutch. Most recently, I typed in "what email address do I use to sign into Teams" and I was shocked that it gave me the right answer. The only reason why I was shocked was that it was a very complicated question and it gave me the correct answer right off the bat. The reason why I was shocked is you would think that it would see my email and immediately start saying, "Hey, I noticed you're having trouble accessing your email." That was not the case. It literally said, "When accessing Teams, use your full email address." I was like, "Oh, wow." Even after two years, the tool continues to surprise me. The solution delivers localized information in multiple languages. We're currently using that feature now. We have French, German and obviously English. The company has an English-first policy, however, they do make exceptions to certain requests based on the country. It's really based on the country we're doing work with. However, normally we speak English first across the board. Those two countries were exceptions and we were able to convert a lot of what they put into Barista into their local language. Given Barista's out-of-the-box content for common industrial applications, the company has continued to grow over the last three years that I've been with my company. We hire around 40 people every two weeks, and will be growing more in the future. I haven't had to hire another IT person to handle the influx of new hires thanks to Barista. The same phone calls that would've come to the service desk, now are being triaged via Barista. Now my service desk team doesn't have to expand. That's the value, no matter how large the company grows, HR and IT do not have to hire more service desk people to field self-service type of questions. For IT, we can maintain our growth without having to hire more people. I've split my service desk team in half and we've been able to take fewer phone calls now more than ever, as a lot of inquiries go through Barista. Its ability to recognize phrases has gotten smarter over time. This most recent integration has been great. I was expecting it not to answer certain questions as they were very complicated, yet it did. We do use ServiceNow for IT service management. Barista’s out-of-the-box integration with ServiceNow enabled us to leverage our workflow variables and service requests. It's been phenomenal. This is one of the few tools that live up to the sales reps' hype when it comes to integrating with ServiceNow. We've had a complete integration with ServiceNow since day one. We integrated our ServiceNow chat with Barista, and it took an hour to get it set up. That just speaks to the integration compatibility with ServiceNow. Using Barista, the percentage of support requests that we have been able to resolve without human support personnel involved started at 60% right off the bat, which we were shocked about. We were hoping for 40% and we got 50%. And now we're hovering around 80% and growing, about 1% every month with the goal being to get to over 90%. At that point we would possibly just turn off the service desk phone altogether, and then converting my service desk agents to chat agents only would be feasible. Barista has reduced service desk costs in our organization. I haven't had to hire more personnel. My service desk team is in Manila, so I don't know off the top of my head what their hourly rates are. I'd hate to estimate or even say something that's not 100% accurate. However, we have had cost reductions. The deployment of Barista increased the availability of support for our employees. We don’t currently measure the experience that our customers receive via Barista. We're working on a Qualtrics project to integrate Qualtrics surveys. From there, we will start measuring people's interactions. However, since we've been seeing 80% deflection rates coming from Barista for almost a year now, it's safe to say that 80% of our employees are having a good experience using this tool, which is saving every employee countless hours in lost productivity.
