The document discusses the past, present, and future of chat as an IT support channel. It notes that while chat is currently underutilized, its use is growing due to consumerization trends. The benefits of chat include better meeting user needs, improved service experiences, and lower costs. The document provides tips for successful chat implementation and notes that chatbots will further evolve chat support by handling repetitive issues. It emphasizes that chat success relies more on people than technology.

1. Past, Present, & Future of
10 THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW
Stephen Mann
Principal Analyst & Content Director
Donald Hasson
Director of ITSM Product Management

2. Stephen Mann
Principal Analyst & Content Director
stephen@ITSM.tool
@stephenmann
@ITSM_tools
https://itsm.tools
Donald Hasson
Director of ITSM Product Management
dhasson@bomgar.com
@DonaldHasson
@Bomgar
https://www.bomgar.com
Your Speakers

3. ○ The state of chat in 2017
○ The growing popularity of chat (and why)
○ The benefits of chat
○ How to succeed with chat, via 15 success tips
○ The future of chat
○ Key takeaways and Q&A
Coverage

4. The origins
of chat

5. The state of
chat in 2017
In North America, the HDI 2016 Technical Support
Practices & Salaries report has chat offered by 38% of
support centers
In the UK, the Service Desk Institute (SDI) 2015
Service Desk Benchmarking Report has chat adoption
at just 21%
Thus, chat is a minority IT support access and
communication channel, in terms of availability
○
○
○

6. Chat is currently
an underutilized ITsupport channel

7. CONSUMERIZATION’S GROWING EFFECT ON CHAT
Consumerization of IT:
“The use of personaldevices, apps and cloudservices in theworkplace”

8. Consumerization is ultimately bringing
employee personal-life experiences of
service, support, and the overall customer
experience into the workplace; raising
expectations of the corporate IT organization
including the offered access and
communication channels.

9. Chat use, in a
B2C context, is
growing rapidly
○ Telephone at 47% is still the preferred channel, but
chat is eating into its dominance
○ Email is also in decline - falling from 48% to 40%
○ Live chat has nearly doubled in popularity since
2013, growing from 18% to 32%
Source: Zendesk, “The Multi Channel Customer Care Report” (2017)

10. The Benefits of
○ Better meeting employees’ preferred support needs
○ Providing/receiving a superior service experience
○ Quicker resolution
○ A lower cost IT support channel
○ Greater consistency of service and support
○ Improved performance management and improvement
○ A platform for knowledge capture and reuse

11. Employeeexperience bychannel

12. Modern consumers expect choice of channel and
chat offers the best end-user experience of all
remote IT support channels
What B2C customers expect:
“A friendly representative is most
likely to be expected (66%) when
contacting customer service. Followed
by a choice of channels (63%), the
quickest possible resolution (57%)...
Source: Zendesk, “The Multi Channel Customer Care Report” (2017)

13. CHAT SUCCESS IS MORE ABOUT PEOPLE
THAN IT IS TECHNOLOGY
1. Think of chat from the end-user point of view
2. Learn from the “people” mistakes of self-service
3. Chat, in this form, needs to be even more “human”
4. Chat needs great people
5. Chat needs to be easy to access to be highly adopted

14. ○ Don’t view chat sessions in isolation
○ Chat call handling needs to be seamless
○ Benefit from chat-enhancement capabilities to
improve the experience
○ Leverage some existing telephone best practices
○ Build in suitable feedback loops and
management mechanisms
Chat capability
needs to be a well
oiled machine

15. 1. Keep up the organizational change management
2. Apply sufficient marketing effort
3. Ensure that chat is optimized from the get-go
4. Chat needs to be successfully offered across multiple
delivery channels
5. Leave hooks for future readiness
A “build it and they
will come” approach rarely
works, chat included

16. $ $
IT’s investment in chat should be made knowing
that the same capabilities will be used, or
replicated, across other lines of business

17. The future of chat
The use of chatbots offers a number of
benefits to IT support:
○ Additional, lower-cost, “team members” that never
sleep - thus providing 24x7 support
○ End users receive the availability and immediacy of
response they now expect (thanks to
consumerization)
○ IT support agents are unshackled from repeat
issues to undertake more complex and interesting
work

18. THINK OF CHATBOTS AS AN EVOLUTION OF
BOTH SELF-SERVICE AND CHAT

19. SDI research states that only 12% of organizations
have received the anticipated ROI from self-service
Avoid such a fate with chat, and thus chatbots, by:
1. Building the chat capability around the end-user, not the technology
2. Making chat easy to access and use
3. Reimagining and leveraging existing IT support best practices
4. Building in suitable feedback loops and management mechanisms
5. Employing organizational change management techniques from
the outset
6. Applying suitable marketing effort

20. CHATBOTS WILL REQUIRE A SIGNIFICANT
INVESTMENT IN GETTING KNOWLEDGE
MANAGEMENT RIGHT
○ Limited participation
○ Inability to find knowledge
○ Insufficient knowledge articles
○ Low quality (unhelpful) articles
○ Knowledge outdated
Common issues with KM 5 Tips for Knowledge Management
1. Focus on people and how they work
2. Don’t do “half job” with OCM
3. Focus on knowledge use and reuse
4. Don’t treat KM as an add-on activity
5. Don’t try to reinvent the wheel

21. KEY TAKEAWAYS
The 10 things you need to know
1. Chat is currently an underutilized IT
support channel
2. Consumerization is raising expectations
of channels
3. Chat use, in a B2C context, is growing
rapidly
4. Consumers expect choice, chat offers
the best end-user experience
5. Chat success is more about people than
it is technology
6. The chat capability needs to be a
well-oiled machine
7. A “build it and they will come”
approach rarely works
8. IT’s investment in chat should plan for
other lines of business
9. Think of chatbots as an evolution of
both self-service and chat
10. Chatbots will require a significant
investment in getting KM right

22. Chat as astandalone solution!

23. ○ Support more customers and end users
○ Improve productivity
○ Provide effective support
○ Accessibility
So how can
chat improve your
business?

24. So how canchat improve yourbusiness?

25. FIRST CLASS SUPPORT WITH BOMGAR CHAT
○ Click-To-Chat
○ Skills based routing
○ Remote control and screen share
○ Collaborate and escalate
○ Integrations
○ Logging
○ Real-time translations (coming soon!)

26. Thank you!
Stephen Mann
Principal Analyst & Content Director
stephen@ITSM.tool
@stephenmann
@ITSM_tools
https://itsm.tools
Donald Hasson
Director of ITSM Product Management
dhasson@bomgar.com
@DonaldHasson
@Bomgar
https://www.bomgar.com