Achieve powers rapid IT support with chatbot in Slack

Throughout the years I’ve been lucky to talk to CIOs and IT teams from several industries. The financial services industry has always fascinated me, not just because it’s the lifeblood of an economy, but because from an operational standpoint, it sees an increasing level of complexity and innovation. 

I’ve spoken to CIOs and IT leaders at commercial banks, lenders, investment banks and insurance firms. What’s clear is that in building customer service functions of these companies, handling the fast pace of hiring new employees while maintaining a secure and compliant environment often puts IT managers in a bind. 

Mark Tonnesen is a respected CIO and leads all IT at Achieve. It’s been great working with him and his awesome team such as Marty Colby and Nick Mendez as the company has grown to become one of North America’s leading financial services providers, helping US retail customers negotiate more than $10 billion in total consumer debt. 

Achieve is growing fast, so onboarding new hires is a top area of focus of the IT organization there. For Mark and Achieve, getting onboarding right is doubly important because their employees need to handle financial transactions in a secure desktop environment, and that’s a totally new working environment for most. Many new hires arrive expecting the user-friendly interfaces they've come to expect from today's mobile apps. For workers like this, pointing them to a complicated IT portal can stop them dead in their tracks: You want me to file what type of ticket? Where was that IT form again? Having great IT support systems directly impacts positive customer experience. Imagine being on the phone with a customer service agent when talking about a financial transaction and being put on hold because the agent is having an issue with their computer… a fire drill of behavior happening in the background to reach someone in IT support. 

Luckily, the era of conversational interfaces has arrived, available in enterprise messaging and powered by companies like Moveworks. We got to explore the impact AI can have on great IT support and customer impact in our latest Moveworks case study. You’ll get to see how the IT team at Achieve rolled out Alfred, a Moveworks powered chatbot in Slack that employees — like the customer service team — just message when they need help.

Employees simply describe their request in a Slack message to the Alfred bot, and Moveworks uses advanced natural language understanding (NLU) and conversational AI to understand the issue and deliver a resolution. Some of Alfred’s key capabilities that are winning over employees include instant password resets, adding people to mailing lists (DLs), getting access to software, getting answers to common questions, looking up coworkers’ contact details, and filing IT tickets directly from a Slack message.

To find out more, download the case study.