What advice do you have for others considering Espressive?

I would rate Espressive Barista eight out of ten. We utilized Espressive's employee adoption program, which proved to be one of the most valuable services for our implementation. They provided us with a comprehensive package of content, collateral, and messaging, along with strategies for engaging our employees and generating rewards. This comprehensive approach effectively raised awareness about our initiative, its purpose, and the benefits it offered. Espressive's service was truly exceptional, and I wish every software development and delivery company had access to such a valuable resource. There is some maintenance involved, but it's more about the content than any upgrades or implementations. We have one and a half people allocated to maintaining Barista, so 75 percent of their time is dedicated to this task. Their work primarily focuses on content, but they also collaborate with the Espressive team to implement new features and evaluate potential functionalities for rollout. So, there is definitely a regular maintenance component to this aspect. Employee adoption is a significant undertaking. It requires careful consideration of how we currently provide service and how we envision Barista providing service in the future. This transformation may necessitate a cultural shift and new ways of doing things, which can be challenging to implement. It is crucial to clearly define our service goals and how we intend to maintain them, and then assess the impact of this change on those goals. Secondly, every tool, software, and application requires ongoing care and maintenance. This is especially true for Slack, which serves as our primary point of contact and support channel. We must dedicate sufficient personnel, time, and resources to ensure that Slack remains a thriving and evolving tool. There is no such thing as a "set it and forget it" approach in this regard.

I rate Expressive Barista eight out of 10.

We are focused on making sure that the user experience is good, so that Barista is not asking questions that are cumbersome or asking our users to bring in information. That can be challenging because we have existing processes that are more cumbersome for employees. We're working with Espressive to redefine that experience for our users, and to rework some of our major workflows so that the users don't have to bring a lot of information. Rather, we want to automate more things in the back end and make sure that the user doesn't get frustrated and leave an interaction. Overall, I give the solution a 10 out of 10. I really appreciate the product and the Espressive team.

I give Espressive Barista a ten out of ten. I recommend that every big company that operates 24/7 and in multiple regions and time zones should get Espressive Barista to fulfill their requests and optimize their user support. I recommend Espressive Barista. Maintenance for the solution is required.

When it comes to recognizing phrases, out-of-the-box, that people commonly use in support questions, it does very well. There have been moments, especially in the beginning, where it hasn't directed people to the proper answer, but we've found a quick solution working with the Espressive support team because they're super-responsive. I'm very hands-on with the solution and am looking at what was answered properly and what wasn't on a daily basis. If something wasn't directed to the correct answer, I send Espressive an email and my contact there has them update the wording so that it directs people to the right place. They're very quick to respond to that. With the collective learning that Barista does across its customer base, we have definitely seen its ability to recognize phrases has gotten better over time. They do that work on their end and also we chip in by asking for those verbiage updates so that things go to the right place. Overall, the process has been so smooth with Barista. Everything went very well and according to plan. We just worked the project with their team and it was seamless. It's been great thus far.

The solution requires constant maintenance. They send us information every week and we review it. It takes us about 15 minutes to review and send information back, half an hour to an hour if we're really going in depth on it. We probably spend two to three hours a week in each department on enhancements and reviewing if we're going to do any further integrations and talking about other future use cases or things that we want to improve. That also includes the team meetings we have every week. My advice is to make sure that everybody's on board with the bot. Really think about what you're hoping to get out of it. It's not meant for advanced support. It's meant for intro level. You have ServiceNow and your front desk and your frontline. This is basically a 24-hour option for a front desk resolver, so that's the expectation and you should think in those terms. If you have knowledge content available, look at what people are looking up the most and use your past information. Use your stats and user ticket content and go through to see where your trends are and build those out first. Don't expect people to come back to it if you don't have it well-built. Make sure you have reasonable expectations, and that you have someone available to be able to help do the build and think about the way that people talk. Finding the trigger phrases is what really makes a successful bot, so you need someone who understands how people communicate to lead this project. I would rate this solution as a six out of ten. It's good. It has a long way to go, but I think that will come with time as they integrate with more programs.

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.

A lot of people look at the price and immediately are deterred, however, instead of looking at this as a cost, look at this as a cost-saving. Then look at the company’s growth vision and the amount of employees that you would require over the next three years to maintain that. That will cover the cost of this product. I'd rate the solution a ten out of ten.

We run the business in English, so we haven't had a requirement to have it serve content in different languages. Barista has just released some capabilities where you can start building out some of your own custom integrations around driving automation. We are now starting to work on that. We have a handful of automations around account lock and password resets, and things like that, but we're now starting to look at tasks related to procurement. There aren't very many things that this product needs improvement on. Automation has been the one that I've been the most bullish on, and I've pushed the company and the customer success team that works with us on this. I ask them how we can continue to make automation a bigger part of our platform because that's where the long-term value proposition's going to be. Having a database of questions, and answers, and being able to provide people with the content is great, but I think we're moving beyond that and into this space where people are going to just want the problem to be solved right then and there. They don't want to have to go reading an article and then figure it out. They would prefer just to have something be done for them. I think we're to that place now where you should be able to do that. The top 10 most commonly asked questions in every organization have many questions in common. With being able to automate those top 10, all of a sudden you get deflection rates that are 50% to 60%. That's where that market and where the tech stack is going, and I think Espressive is moving in that direction. I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.