Espressive Barista Reviews

Espressive Barista is used as the main intake point for our internal IT support. We currently offer Espressive Barista through various channels for users to access IT support, with Slack being our primary channel.

Espressive Barista has been extremely helpful in handling common questions that are widely known and can be readily found online, such as Microsoft-related questions and how-to questions. This has allowed us to avoid creating knowledge articles and solutions for things that can easily be Googled. This is particularly beneficial for questions about specific tasks in applications like Outlook or Microsoft Word, where creating knowledge articles would be unnecessary. Espressive Barista's access to public domain knowledge ensures that this readily available information is accessible to our users without any additional effort from our end. One challenge we've faced is adapting to the internal nomenclature used within our organization. Over time, we've been able to incorporate this terminology into our responses, allowing IT to effectively address the needs and questions of our internal customers, ensuring they receive prompt and accurate answers.

It is important from an inclusivity standpoint that Barista provides localized information in multiple languages, even though we are primarily a US-centric company. We are a global organization with a significant presence in the Philippines, Portugal, and England. Therefore, assuming that everyone can easily understand English terms and nomenclature would be exclusionary. I believe it is crucial to continue expanding our language offerings to accommodate the diverse ways people work and communicate, rather than forcing them to adapt to a standardized global English format.

The implementation of Barista has resulted in a significant reduction in our workload by nearly 35 percent. Its ability to answer common questions directly through a public Slack channel has been particularly beneficial. As questions are posted, Barista promptly provides responses, eliminating the need for my technicians to manually address each query. This shared knowledge remains accessible, preventing its loss within individual threads. Barista's out-of-the-box applications have proven to be immensely valuable.

We have observed a definite increase in resolution, also known as deflection, within Barista over time. This increase has been substantial. The twofold benefit of this deflection increase includes out-of-the-box growth and modification. Expressive side content has been curated and modified, allowing us to provide answers to a wider range of applications than we previously could. This has significantly reduced the need for us to curate public knowledge or address common issues or questions that can be easily found through Google searches. We also no longer need to spend time crafting responses to frequently asked questions, particularly those related to Adobe products. Barista provides readily available canned responses, which has been immensely helpful. The main challenge we have encountered is educating users on Barista's intended purpose. In some instances, its effectiveness has been almost too successful. Our Slack channel, initially designed solely for IT support, is now receiving HR, production, and product-related questions. Users have come to view Barista as a comprehensive solution for all their queries, extending beyond IT support. While this is a positive development, it also presents a challenge. We sometimes need to redirect users to the appropriate channels or resources to address their specific concerns. This redirection, while necessary, doesn't always resolve their issues directly.

We were able to resolve 28 percent of support requests without human intervention. In essence, no tickets were created for these interactions, which were handled directly by Barista. This data covers interactions from January to October 2023, encompassing the first three quarters of the year. Based on the total interactions within Barista, 13 percent of issues were resolved through automation. Again, no tickets were created for these interactions, and the problems were resolved using our automated intents, which can handle tasks like account unlocking.

Barista has significantly reduced our service desk costs. By deflecting 28 percent of service desk tickets, Barista has effectively fulfilled over a quarter of my staffing needs. This means that I have been able to maintain my current team of four people, whereas, without this deflection, I would have needed to hire an additional person. Barista's automation has also improved productivity by 13 percent, which has helped to get our employees back to work quickly and efficiently. Account lockout has been a major problem for our IT department, but Barista has taken care of this issue as well. By automatically unlocking accounts, Barista has saved us a lot of time and effort. Additionally, there is no value in having a human check a box to unlock an account – Barista can do this much more efficiently. I am always in favor of automating tasks that do not require human intervention, and Barista has been a valuable asset in this regard.

Barista has significantly reduced our average resolution time, particularly by addressing 28 percent of deflections, resulting in a 13 percent overall reduction. This has been achieved through automation, which has transformed minutes-long tasks into mere seconds. As a result, our average resolution time has plummeted. Previously, our general incidents could take up to three days to resolve, but now we've successfully reduced that timeframe to less than a day. This remarkable improvement is attributed to a combination of Barista, Freshservice, our ITSM platform, and various workflow enhancements. The user-friendly interface and simplified operations of Freshservice, coupled with its seamless integration with Barista, have been instrumental in achieving this drastic reduction in our average resolution time.

With the help of Barista, we have enhanced our ability to support our employees around the clock. While our human team is not available by phone or in person 24/7, we maintain a global presence through Slack, SharePoint, and a dedicated app. This allows us to provide support around the clock without requiring our team to be physically present. This has significantly improved our coverage for the Australia and EMEA time zones, as well as for areas that fall outside of the traditional West Coast or East Coast time zones. As a result, we are better equipped to meet the needs of our global workforce without the need for continuous hiring.

It is used by our employees to ask questions that they would normally ask of our service desk, to get help with all of their needs.

For general service-request questions, it has been really helpful. For example, if I need to understand my benefits, have payroll questions, or want a license approved for software. Having access to this solution gives users a different way, one that is more aligned with self-help, to get the answers they need expeditiously without having to spend a lot of time waiting.

The collective learning that Barista does across its customer base has helped in its ability to recognize phrases. We're looking at what people are asking and how their experience can be improved. The Barista dashboard is helpful in identifying where Barista is learning and where it's not learning. We've seen a good deflection of tickets and service requests away from our support team. 

Barista has been able to answer a high percentage of support requests without any human support personnel involved. We're looking at our deflection rate and are working to increase deflection further and enhance our interactions. 

Barista has definitely increased our support availability to 24/7. If our employees want to work off-hours and get self-service, it's a great resource. They can do it at any time. That has impacted productivity, especially when we can get to requests for access to productivity software faster. And for questions that they may have, whether a service request or a topic that is available through a knowledge article, it's certainly helpful that they can self-serve.

Our company has an IT, HR, and finance department. We have been attempting to use the one bot for all three departments. I'm on the finance side, and we programmed it to provide internal knowledge for our employees. We have clubs across the country, so my part was to ensure that employees could find the financial information they need, such as "How do I enter a mispunch?" Or, "Where's our benefits information?" Things like, "How do I pull my P&L?" Or, "Where's my expense report?"

We created workflows and FAQs for the bot to respond to, and then tried to deflect those from having to submit tickets into our ServiceNow platform. If the bot couldn't answer a question, at least it could provide the back and forth communication so that our agents responding to tickets in ServiceNow could have more information to go off of to resolve the request.

The bot is pretty easy to update and keep up to date. Espressive itself is pretty easy to work with. We can pull the reporting pretty easily, and they're getting better with it. 

By using the information that we gathered from ServiceNow on all the questions that we'd had over the past several years and utilizing our categories, subcategories, and using that data, we were able to come up with the most common questions and then tackle everything from big to small issues.

Espressive sends us a weekly report that says, "Hey, what do you think about this? Where should we go?" It takes us about 15 minutes to review and send back corrections. The more that people use it, the better it gets and we just keep continually improving it.

We solve self-service requests with this solution.

We partner with our HR department, which does not have a help desk like IT does, to roll out Barista so that both HR and IT can answer questions 24/7. We can cover requests from, "I need to submit a vacation form " to "I need to look at my W2", all the way to IT requests like "I need a new laptop" or "I'm getting an error message on my screen." We filter those via Barista.

Before Barista, I had quite a large service desk team. After Barista, I was able to cut the team in half and promote the other half to an advanced support team. I had a very large service desk team that was very inundated with the same calls, every day, from the same people, who were very frustrated. After implementing Barista, the calls that they get really have value. All the non-value calls are being answered via Barista. The team that I promoted now handles the more difficult type of scenarios that Barista can't resolve. They're happy since they received a promotion and they're no longer answering phone calls. We have them monitoring the chat.

There has been a culture change in the IT department where we now have a trusted team who can answer more complicated issues, thanks to Barista. They're also helping other areas of IT take on more work, as they have more free time. They're not attached at the hip to the phone. For IT, it's been that type of transformation. Then on Fridays, we turn off the phones at 12:01 AM and leave them off all day. We call those Barista Fridays. If you were to call our normal service desk line, it would tell you to access Barista and submit your ticket via Barista. That's a change in the company which has had some very positive results.

We are a reseller of Expressive Barista. Most of the use cases are related to self-service IT support. 

I like Expressive Barista's integration with Microsoft Teams.

What we're using it for is strictly IT-related content. People ask Barista questions and get answers to their IT questions.

With our end-user community able to ask IT questions and Barista providing answers, it's greatly reducing our ticket count and frees us up for other projects. We no longer have to answer repetitive questions.

In our organization, people now understand that when they have an IT question, this is the first place that they go to. It's a great tool because people can ask their questions there and, if they don't find the answer they're looking for, Barista actually logs a help desk ticket and routes it accordingly. It's great as a one-stop shop for our users.

We're in the range of a 50 to 60 percent deflection rate, but that's because we haven't fully integrated everything that Barista has to offer yet. I would assume it has reduced our help desk costs and I believe it has decreased our mean time to resolution as well.

Also, Barista's out-of-the-box content for common applications is excellent. We have only, in some cases, had to make minor changes to the out-of-the-box answers, just to make them suitable for us; but only a few. Otherwise, it has been spot-on. We saw the benefit from this capability instantly.

We have folks in Taiwan and Europe, and Barista is up and running 24/7.

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.

We integrated Espressive Barista with our many SaaS-based applications. The solution provides end users with instant access to applications whenever they need it. This resolved 50 percent of IT tickets on a daily basis. Espressive Barista also provides users with instant help, so they don't have to wait for IT support. For example, if a user is logged out and needs to reset their password, Espressive Barista can help them do so immediately.

The solution is deployed as SaaS.

Espressive Barista scores an eight out of ten for its ability to recognize phrases out of the box.

Espressive Barista has good natural language processing and commercial AI. Users can customize their language interface to suit their needs, as the solution is used by people from all over the world. Users can choose their preferred language, and the interface will be customized accordingly.

It is good that the solution delivers localized information in multiple languages.

Espressive Barista's out-of-the-box content for common industry applications has been helpful since it was implemented.

Espressive Barista's collective learning across its customer base has improved its phrase recognition. We also talk to our support engineer, who is working in parallel. Last time, we integrated Barista with the conference system, so that whenever we have new information, we can feed it into the system. We also integrated it in such a way that it can now provide generic answers from the internet.

The solution has been able to close up to 50 percent of the tickets without human support.

Espressive Barista reduced our service desk costs by 20 percent.

Espressive Barista helped us reduce our meantime.

Espressive Barista starts working immediately to help resolve a failure or ticket, even before it is picked up by a person.

The solution helps provide support to the users around the clock.