Espressive Barista Reviews

Our primary use case is to assist our help desk.

First of all, we didn't have a way for our users to reach our help desk via chat. We were still receiving phone calls and emails full-time. Every year, we were renewing the phone licenses with Cisco for each of the analysts, as well as the queues and other related things. We wanted to move that towards chat but we also wanted to move it one step further.

With Barista, it allows us to move support to chat but it also allows us to provide an answer to the users before they even have to reach the help desk. This meant that we were killing two birds with one stone. We're able to get away from the phone calls and move to chat and we were able to support users without having to give our help desk a lot of work.

This product is really good out-of-the-box, without having to touch it. It is really good at recognizing application names or the specific phrasing of users.

With respect to its natural language processing capabilities, it recognizes things that you wouldn't think it would recognize. Even in cases where it doesn't, it's pretty easy to go in and make the adjustments that are needed. If the phrasing was a little bit wrong or maybe it mistook one word for another, you can make adjustments by adding weights.

The next time, it recognizes it a little bit better. I feel like the natural language component of it is constantly improving thanks to the work that Expressive is doing on their end.

This capability was important for us because going with a third-party vendor, we wanted something that was pretty much ready to go.

Every company is going to go in there and have to customize their content but we didn't want to start 100% from scratch. Out-of-the-box, what already came with Barista and from Espressive just fit our needs at the time.

Given Barista's out-of-the-box content for common industry applications, the value is pretty good right from day one. If your company is heavily reliant on Microsoft products, the things that are out-of-the-box in Barista are going to be very helpful already. You probably won't have to touch anything that's in regards to Outlook content, Teams, or other similar applications. It's been really good and they also do a good job of going back and conducting responsive research.

Using collective learning, Barista gets smarter over time. For common applications, they do a really good job of uploading things for different companies and making them the default for anybody that's new and coming on to the platform. It's a lot less fine-tuning at this point, and we can spend more time on the actual content.

Espressive as a whole does a good job of getting all of the different companies that are using the product together every once in a while, perhaps once a month or every couple of months, to discuss how we're using it. They also give us updates on what is up and coming. We present to each other and explain what we're doing, and it's a good forum to learn from each other and try to grow together. We all use it and want it to be successful. These meetings are also helpful because if I see something that I like then I can tell my rep about it.

Our metrics from last year show that almost 40,000 chats came in and Barista was able to deflect approximately 41% of those. By deflection, I mean those chats did not have to go to an agent. Whatever response Barista provided for those questions stopped at Barista. Obviously, there's a big cost saving when you don't have to escalate something to Level one and instead is resolved at Level zero. We have seen that for the past couple of years.

I think that in 2020, obviously with the pandemic hitting, over here at least, we all went and worked from home. During that time, people were more open to trying new things. Even then, Barista was still hitting 40% plus deflection and our volume of chats in general keeps going up as the years go on.

We use the ServiceNow platform and we have Barista integrated with it. We are very dependent on a parent company that manages ServiceNow. What I'm able to use it for is to manage the chat queue and some ticket creation in the management. It's probably not as in-depth as some other people using Barista.

The chat support that we offer is 24/7, although we have a limitation in that the people behind it, answering the chat, are not yet available on that schedule. Barista is available 24/7 and hopefully this year, we will enable live person support for those hours as well. In general, the increased availability has increased employee productivity and satisfaction. When somebody doesn't really know what to do, rather than just sitting there, they can ask Barista and hopefully get the correct response as to what they should do.

From an admin standpoint, the analytics and the metrics that you're able to pull from Barista are extremely helpful. It allows you to really dig in there and see exactly what people are asking and how they're asking it.

For example, I can go in and say, "Well, on this day or during this month we're getting X amount of questions about this application. We have to go in and update content for that specific application or that specific question." Using this feature, we can pinpoint where we need to make our updates or what content to add.

The accessibility of this solution is very good. We use the web browser desktop application, mobile phone application, and now, we're working on our Teams integration with it. Once the integration with Teams is complete, it will probably be a big leap for us.

This solution is able to deliver localized information in multiple languages and for a company as big as ours, we have people all over the world and there are tons of users everywhere. I don't know the exact number right now but I think Barista knows eight-plus different languages. English and Spanish are our most common ones and Czech is probably our third most common one. Not many solutions that are out there are going to provide Czech as a language. I think it's really important for our users to be able to ask questions in their own language and get a response back in that language as well.

I use the Barista Control Center to upload my own content and curate it. It gives me the ability to add new content from scratch or update older content. I can use it to perform testing; for example, if I feel that there is a specific sentence that isn't triggering a specific response then I can make changes to it.

In terms of ease of use, the Barista Control Center is of medium-level difficulty. They have other methods to curate your own content in addition to this. This is the one that the representatives use so I wanted to learn it. I'd say that it definitely takes time to get used to it. It took me between six and twelve months in my off-hours at work to learn it. For people learning it from day one, it's probably easier.

Although they've done some work on their metrics dashboard, there is some fine-tuning to do for people that just want to go in there at a glance and see their metrics. This doesn't affect me as much because I pull the metrics from them and upload them to my own Power BI dashboard. It would be nice if their out-of-the-box dashboard were improved.

I have been working with Espressive for almost four years. We were early adopters and began working with them when they were just getting started.

We haven't had any issues with stability. For instances where we have had a problem, it's on our end where an account didn't get renewed for the year or something like that. It's very rare that we've had a problem. To this point, we've had at least 99% uptime with it.

The technical support that we get from Espressive has been amazing. I'm surprised sometimes at how quickly I get support from them because as a third-party vendor, they have a lot of other customers.

I have a chat going with them on WhatsApp where I can just ask a question and there they are. It feels like any time of the day, they're available for me. I think we're very lucky that they're able to support us that way.

I would rate the technical support a nine out of ten.

We attempted to use a different solution before this one, for chat, but it didn't have the natural language understanding or any type of deflection built into it. This was a chat queue manager application.

As a cloud-based deployment, the initial setup is pretty straightforward. Like with every company, there are some security-related issues that need to be taken care of. That said, I don't remember any major issues when we deployed it.

It took approximately a quarter to complete our deployment. The length of time was needed because of the various issues that we had to deal with, such as security. I'm sure that for many places, the process could be a lot faster.

No maintenance on our end is required. If there is any done by Espressive on the back end, it's not noticeable to us.

I don't recall the actual cost but efficiency-wise, there was a significant improvement. We were able to move the help desk away from phone lines. Instead of taking one call at a time at a desk, which is normally a 10-minute call, with perhaps an eight-plus minute wait time, now the analysts are able to take multiple chats at the same time. It might be two to three chats, depending on the analyst. This minimizes the amount of time that a user sits in the waiting queue.

We went from 10, eight-plus minute queues to maybe slightly above three minutes right now of a wait time, depending on the time of day. I think that fact alone made it worth the cost. The users are able to get up and running a lot faster.

We began to realize a lot of the benefits by year two. We had it running for all of 2019 and by 2020, we were already seeing that trend where Barista was taking on a lot of the workload and deflecting a lot of the chats coming in. It was so much so that in 2020, we started experimenting with shutting off the phone for a day or two days a week, and letting Barista be the main point of contact for support. Eventually, that led us to do that full time, as of last year.

This solution has definitely helped us to decrease our mean time to resolution. It is especially obvious when you consider that we're seeing that almost half of the interactions coming in are being deflected.

I began with the company after the Espressive onboarding process began, so I was not involved in evaluating other similar products.

It is part of Espressive's idea to try and get our users and employees to be as efficient as possible. A lot of the success is going to be how much Barista can deflect questions that are coming in. It's definitely in their best interest for our deflection rate to go up and for things to work smoothly for the users.

Some of the people coming in are not used to talking to a virtual support agent like this. I still have people that are kind of confused about it but we do a good job of going to them and teaching them how to use it. I think so far, everyone's been pretty good with it.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.