Espressive Barista Reviews

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.

When it comes to neutral language processing and conversational AI, it's very good, very solid. We haven't had any issues as of yet. These abilities are important for us because they allow the application to understand the questions that are being asked, regardless of location. We have people from Italy and Taiwan using the application and everyone is giving us very positive feedback on it. We all have different ways of speaking or writing in English and the application does a very solid job of recognizing what's being asked regardless of how it's being asked.

I use the Barista Control Center to create solutions for us that aren't in Barista. It's fairly easy to learn. With just a little bit of repetition, you get the idea of how it works. Within a few days I was up and running and adding content and adding new questions. It's very easy to use.

And we just used the Barista Control Center to integrate with ADP. It's not completely done yet, but what it's going to do is automate our new hire and term processes. Automating those processes is going to be a huge help because they are all manual right now.

I would like to see improvement to the out-of-the-box verbiage, with the questions going to the right place.

We went live with Barista about three months ago.

The stability is very good. It's solid. We haven't had an issue with it.

The scalability is very good as well.

We have about 1,200 employees and contractors and Barista has been opened up for everybody.

The solution's technical support is very good. They're easy to get in touch with and easy to work with. They respond quickly and they respond with answers.

Positive

We did not have a previous solution.

Once we purchased the product and started working with their implementation team, I worked on it as a co-project manager. The initial deployment was straightforward, for the most part.

Their implementation team knows what it's doing. They asked us to spin up a VM, and we spun up a VM and installed software for them. They worked with us through the whole process of setup and configuration. They made it very easy to implement. There were two people involved on our side. Part of my responsibility was training our colleagues on how to use Barista, through IT productivity training sessions that I held.

We also used Espressive's Employee Adoption Program and it went very well.

There is maintenance in the sense that there are times when we see somebody ask a question that applies to us but it simply is not in Barista. We go in and we create that content, but that hasn't happened very much.

Our return on investment is that our end-user community can get quick answers to their questions.

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.