Bot-based IT Troubleshooting Benjamin Braun advised by Jonas - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Chair of Network Architectures and Services Department of Informatics Technical University of Munich

Bot-based IT Troubleshooting

Benjamin Braun

advised by Jonas Jelten, Simon Bauer Friday 11th January, 2019 Chair of Network Architectures and Services Department of Informatics Technical University of Munich

Chair of Network Architectures and Services Department of Informatics Technical University of Munich

Agenda Value of Chatbots Current Use Cases Difficulties and Problems in IT Conclusion Bibliography

• B. Braun — Bot-based IT Troubleshooting

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Value of Chatbots

• Ongoing issue: Improvement of customer service
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Value of Chatbots

• Ongoing issue: Improvement of customer service
• Chatbots:
• Dialog system for human-computer-interaction
• Emulation of human behavior in a conversation
• Providing both chatter and serious help with tasks and questions
• Heavy development over last decades
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Value of Chatbots

Advantages of chatbots over conventional customer services

• More personal and interactive than a FAQ
• Workload shift from customer to program
• Possibility to ask for additional data from the user
• Immediate responses
• Permanent availability
• Access to complete knowledge base
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Value of Chatbots

Benefits in costs

• Setup + maintenance costs
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Value of Chatbots

Benefits in costs

• Setup + maintenance costs
• vs. salaries for customer service team
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Value of Chatbots

Benefits in costs

• Setup + maintenance costs
• vs. salaries for customer service team
• Important: Chatbots not capable enough yet to replace humans completely.
• 50% - 90% of queries are processable, percentage increasing [8]
• B. Braun — Bot-based IT Troubleshooting

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Value of Chatbots

Benefits in costs

• Setup + maintenance costs
• vs. salaries for customer service team
• Important: Chatbots not capable enough yet to replace humans completely.
• 50% - 90% of queries are processable, percentage increasing [8]
• Reduction in workload for service agents towards only skill-challenging requests

⇒ More fulfilling experience for staff ⇒ More motivated, happier staff ⇒ More satisfied customers

• B. Braun — Bot-based IT Troubleshooting

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Value of Chatbots

Benefits in costs

• Setup + maintenance costs
• vs. salaries for customer service team
• Important: Chatbots not capable enough yet to replace humans completely.
• 50% - 90% of queries are processable, percentage increasing [8]
• Reduction in workload for service agents towards only skill-challenging requests

⇒ More fulfilling experience for staff ⇒ More motivated, happier staff ⇒ More satisfied customers

⇒ Long term investment, but already cutting costs by at least 55% since deployment [8]

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Current Use Cases

History and development

• First chatbot: ELIZA by Joseph Weizenbaum (1966) [7]
• Designed to fool people, not to solve tasks
• Trend for research of following decades: Trying to pass Turing test [1]
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Current Use Cases

Personal assistants

• Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, Cortana, Bixby, ...
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Current Use Cases

Personal assistants

• Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, Cortana, Bixby, ...
• Many capabilities related to their integration, acting as voice commanding tool
• Providing current information and looking up facts
• Interacting with phone functions
• Accessing media libraries
• Controlling smart homes
• ... [6]
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Current Use Cases

Personal assistants

• Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, Cortana, Bixby, ...
• Many capabilities related to their integration, acting as voice commanding tool
• Providing current information and looking up facts
• Interacting with phone functions
• Accessing media libraries
• Controlling smart homes
• ... [6]
• Gaining more and more power (e.g. Google Duplex [5])
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Current Use Cases

Shopping assistants/Troubleshooting bots

• Used by a number of companies (DAX and MDAX: 12 out of 80) [4]
• Variety of fields
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Current Use Cases

Shopping assistants/Troubleshooting bots

• Used by a number of companies (DAX and MDAX: 12 out of 80) [4]
• Variety of fields
• Often very specialized, e.g.:
• Adidas: sport course booking
• BMW: broadcasting for tournaments
• Persil: spot removal
• VW: second-hand car search
• Zalando: personal shopping consultant
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Current Use Cases

Shopping assistants/Troubleshooting bots capabilities

• Capabilities in general:
• Often presenting as visible chat partner (avatar)
• Understanding and outputting natural language
• Including smalltalk and chatter
• Storing details about user
• Access to database for answering questions and proactively showing additional content
• Referring to supplementary services if necessary
• Troubleshooting capability included in some:
• Checking "symptoms" with search-tree until problem is identified
• Proposing solution or referring to specialized help
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Current Use Cases

Examples

• IKEA’s Chatbot "Anna":
• Online for over 10 years until retirement in 2016
• Should guide customers around the website and answer questions
• Frustrating users with inability to fulfill tasks
• Tried too hard to be natural and human-like, diverted too far from actual purpose [2]

Figure 1: Avatar of "Anna" 1

1Source: http://www.andrecastro.info/a/works.html

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Current Use Cases

Examples

• "SuperAgent":
• Browser extension, not bound to a specific company
• Leverages publicly available e-commerce data
• Processing product information, user Q&A and user reviews for data and opinion mining [3]
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Current Use Cases

Examples

Figure 2: SuperAgent in use on Amazon.com2

2Source: Cui et al. [3]

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Difficulties and Problems in IT

Utilization in IT

• Barely any chatbots in IT companies
• Found examples: "Assisted Search" from Dell, "Tinka" from T-Mobile
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Difficulties and Problems in IT

Special difficulties in customer service

• Extensive problem causes and symptoms

⇒ Setup of databases and search trees difficult

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Difficulties and Problems in IT

Special difficulties in customer service

• Extensive problem causes and symptoms

⇒ Setup of databases and search trees difficult

• Broad variation in user knowledge and technical know-how

⇒ Chatbot needs to identify level of technical understand and adapt accordingly

• B. Braun — Bot-based IT Troubleshooting

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Difficulties and Problems in IT

Special difficulties in customer service

• Extensive problem causes and symptoms

⇒ Setup of databases and search trees difficult

• Broad variation in user knowledge and technical know-how

⇒ Chatbot needs to identify level of technical understand and adapt accordingly

• Vague problem descriptions or wrong self-diagnosis

⇒ Advanced language processing and independent, out-of-the-box thinking necessary

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Conclusion

• Distinctive advantages of chatbots in customer services
• Strongly growing capabilities of dialog systems and artificial intelligence
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Conclusion

• Distinctive advantages of chatbots in customer services
• Strongly growing capabilities of dialog systems and artificial intelligence
• Utilization of this technology in more and more domains
• IT sector facing additional difficulties
• Benefits still applicable
• Greater intelligence and adaptability necessary for excellent IT troubleshooting chatbots
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Bibliography

[1]

• L. Bradesko and D. Mladenic.

A survey of chatbot systems through a loebner prize competition, 2012. [2] P . Brandtzaeg and A. Følstad. Chatbots: changing user needs and motivations., 2018. [3]

• L. Cui, S. Huang, F. Wei, C. Tan, C. Duan, and M. Zhou.

Superagent: a customer service chatbot for e-commerce websites, 2017. [4]

• J. M. Kawohl and S. Haß.

Customer service 4.0 - wie gut sind chatbots? https://www.heise.de/downloads/18/2/5/4/1/3/4/2/Studie_chatbots.pdf. [5]

• Y. Leviathan.

Google duplex: An ai system for accomplishing real-world tasks over the phone. https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/05/duplex-ai-system-for-natural-conversation.html. [6]

• T. Martin and D. Priest.

The complete list of alexa commands so far. https://www.cnet.com/how-to/amazon-echo-the-complete-list-of-alexa-commands/. [7]

• M. L. McNeal and D. Newyear.

Introducing chatbots in libraries, 2013. [8]

• I. Steele.

It’s all about the $$$ - how much money can chatbots actually save you? https://www.comm100.com/blog/how-much-can-chatbots-actually-save-you.html.

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