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.

The most valuable feature is its scalability. This has been incredibly beneficial for a small team like ours, enabling us to operate effectively around the clock. I have a small team of ServiceDesk personnel based in the Philippines who primarily work U.S. hours, but we are a global company. To accommodate our growth, Espressive Barista allows us to maintain an IT presence 24/7, regardless of geographical location.

Espressive Barista's natural language processing and conventional AI still have room for improvement. We haven't yet found anything that resembles true AI that can learn autonomously without human intervention. However, Barista does help us identify and address some of these areas, allowing my team to step in and create intents and responses to questions. When a user asks a question that Barista doesn't immediately understand, we can recognize the pattern, capture it, and link it to a common intent. This is highly beneficial for acquiring such data, but it's a reactive approach and still requires curation. Natural language processing still has some way to go.

One of our challenges is that our internal employees haven't yet adopted a natural way of interacting with Barista. Getting people to be concise and to the point, rather than being verbose as if they were interacting with a human, has been an ongoing challenge. While they may feel comfortable being conversational in Slack, expecting a human-like response, Barista is a different entity. Barista isn't interested in their recent vacation; it just wants to know they're locked out of their account. So, some users may assume Barista understands their intent when they say, "I'm back from vacation and locked out of my account." Barista, however, may interpret this as a request for the holiday schedule. Therefore, we're gradually educating our users to adapt their communication style for better success with Barista. Conversely, we desire Barista to adapt its behavior based on the interaction, the language used, and the way people communicate.

I wholeheartedly desire an AI that can continuously learn and adapt to our organization's evolving needs. This is the most challenging aspect, as it involves understanding our organization's terminology, procedures, and toolsets. We've made significant progress in this area. However, from an NLP standpoint, we still face challenges with our nearly 3,000 Slack channel users, each with their unique communication styles. People ask questions in various ways, and sometimes there are misunderstandings. They want to interact with us naturally. However, we still struggle with natural language processing. People don't always realize that the bot is a virtual agent designed to be concise and efficient. Sometimes, less is more. It's been a difficult transition for people to grasp that they're conversing with a virtual agent, not a human. They still expect human-like interactions, such as discussing their weekend or holidays or simply pasting screenshots of errors. However, the bot can't interpret screenshots. If they provide the error code and some context about the application, the bot can better understand the issue. So, the key challenge is bridging the gap between human expectations and the bot's capabilities in terms of natural interaction.

I have been using Espressive Barista for one year.

Espressive Barista has maintained a high level of stability throughout the past year. We experienced only one incident where Barista malfunctioned. Our company's uptime has consistently been at 99.9 percent, and even in the instance of the malfunction, it was not Barista itself that was broken but rather our ticket integration system. This demonstrates Espressive Barista's ability to meet our core value of providing optimal uptime at 99.9 percent.

Espressive Barista is a scalable solution that can easily accommodate our growing team and meet the needs of our employees, regardless of their location or number.

The technical support team has been very responsive, and we even have a dedicated technical account manager. Additionally, we have a direct line of communication with Espressive through Slack. Espressive has been exceptionally responsive and helpful, making them one of the best partners we have. Their support team is always available, responsive, and feels like an extension of our own team. This, along with their employee adoption program, has been instrumental in keeping our project on track.

Positive

The initial deployment was neither particularly straightforward nor overly challenging due to the integration requirements. We integrated with our existing ticketing system, Okta, and Slack. Integrations can sometimes require some tinkering to ensure seamless operation. The Espressive team has been incredibly responsive in assisting us with expanding and improving our integrations. We have transitioned from one ticketing system to Freshservice, our ITSM tool. They have been right there with us, enhancing the integration to a level surpassing our previous experience. Their support has been exceptional, always willing and available to act almost as an extension of our own team, enabling us to implement the system quickly with minimal resource allocation on our end. Essentially, they served as a staff augmentation or an extension of our own team during the implementation and ITSM tool migration phases.

The implementation was completed by myself, and three team members within our IT engineering team, and Espressive.

Espressive has been very accommodating in trying to meet our needs and adapt to our current situation. User-based licensing has been working well for us, and we believe we are deriving significant value from it. We anticipate expanding our usage and adding more capabilities, which would necessitate upgrading to an enterprise license from our current IT-focused license. We envision utilizing Espressive across various service areas, including HR, facilities, and legal.

The ability to assist users with repetitive, task-oriented common challenges, problems, or questions without constantly redirecting them to knowledge articles, SharePoint sites, or other resources is particularly valuable. We are meeting users where they are, and we believe the value of Espressive is immense.

We evaluated ServiceNow and Moveworks, particularly its virtual agent capabilities. However, due to budgetary constraints and our current economic situation, implementing such a solution was not feasible. In essence, their pricing was beyond our reach. Barista effectively addressed both our requirements for immediate service impact and cost-effectiveness.

I would rate Espressive Barista eight out of ten.

We utilized Espressive's employee adoption program, which proved to be one of the most valuable services for our implementation. They provided us with a comprehensive package of content, collateral, and messaging, along with strategies for engaging our employees and generating rewards. This comprehensive approach effectively raised awareness about our initiative, its purpose, and the benefits it offered. Espressive's service was truly exceptional, and I wish every software development and delivery company had access to such a valuable resource.

There is some maintenance involved, but it's more about the content than any upgrades or implementations. We have one and a half people allocated to maintaining Barista, so 75 percent of their time is dedicated to this task. Their work primarily focuses on content, but they also collaborate with the Espressive team to implement new features and evaluate potential functionalities for rollout. So, there is definitely a regular maintenance component to this aspect.

Employee adoption is a significant undertaking. It requires careful consideration of how we currently provide service and how we envision Barista providing service in the future. This transformation may necessitate a cultural shift and new ways of doing things, which can be challenging to implement. It is crucial to clearly define our service goals and how we intend to maintain them, and then assess the impact of this change on those goals. Secondly, every tool, software, and application requires ongoing care and maintenance. This is especially true for Slack, which serves as our primary point of contact and support channel. We must dedicate sufficient personnel, time, and resources to ensure that Slack remains a thriving and evolving tool. There is no such thing as a "set it and forget it" approach in this regard.

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.

The knowledge management could definitely be improved. There's no easy way to see or understand the information you have in your system by categories and subcategories. Right now, you can search by what your FAQ title is or the questions, but there needs to be improvement so you can understand what workflows and FAQs you have out there by category and subcategory. That would be a lot more beneficial for maintaining it. Right now, you have to look through miss hits and be like, "Oh shoot, we updated that." Or, "That needs to get corrected." If you have a big update that you need to make and you need to go back into all of your conversation history, you need to keep a good record of it on your own.  

The third year of our contract ends in March, so we have been using this solution for about two and a half years. 

It's stable. They're still working on integrations with other programs, and there's a long way to go with that. The difficult thing with a bot is that every company has their own information, so while they have a lot of things provided, you're still really going to have to provide your own information and put your own time into this.

They can build it up for you if you create it for them, but there's still a lot of work that goes into that, like developing the FAQs or workflows or things like that. Over the past three years they have greatly improved their system. They've really gotten a lot of the kinks worked out of working with ServiceNow that we experienced in the beginning. I can see that they're working on integrating with more and more programs, so it's constantly improving.

Getting people on board with the bot is going to be your biggest challenge. They put it on several of our platforms for us, including Teams and the front of our ServiceNow dash.

It can do small companies or big. It's a very intelligent bot. The more I use it, the better it gets and the programmers behind it do a really fantastic job.

The only thing is to try not to launch it before it's fully ready to go. Make sure you have your information in there and don't rely on people to ask questions to build it out later. Our IT team decided that they would use the information that Espressive already had and then build it out as people asked questions. However, if people use the bot and they don't get the right answer, they don't come back to the bot. It can be really difficult to launch it if it's not at a point where you've tested really well and you're very comfortable with the answers that it's providing. That was one struggle that we had.

Also, understand fully the programs that you wanted integrated, and make sure that the solution has already integrated with that company in the past. One of ours is Workday, and they're still kind of building out their Workday integrations. I'm not saying that they can't do a new integration, it's just a matter of allowing more time for them to get comfortable with that other program.

We have it available for our whole company to be able to ask questions through it. We have around 40,000 employees. Our CEOs obviously probably wouldn't use it, but our senior managers use it. Our corporate office is our biggest user because they're in front of desktops and can easily use it. We are just starting to fidget with the app a little bit and that would be helpful for out in the field. The app is still in its primitive stages but it is very functional. On average, about 10% of our company tends to use it on a pretty regular basis.

It really depends on the project manager you have. In the beginning, we had a few difficulties. We didn't have a solid project manager. Over the past year and a half, we got a really good project manager. She was really on top of things, so we were able to get solutions a lot faster. I think that their updates push out once a month. However, if you have something that's urgent, they can push it out faster for you. I would rate the technical support as a three or four out of five. 

I was not the IT or HR lead, but on the financial side, the main thing we did was try to focus on our biggest areas. We used our ServiceNow environment and looked at what kind of questions we had coming in. I worked a lot with the developers to pull all of that data and then create workflows for areas that might hit HR or IT. Big things like access requests or payroll are on the finance side, but benefits and things like that are on the HR side.

We created workflows for things that would cross departments so we could deflect them to the other team's workflows or FAQs or information. Once we felt like we had a solid base of the questions we would get, we then developed, worked with our different teams, created some test groups, and had them go in and test. We did testing for two or three weeks, then within a month, we launched it out to our greater company.

We also developed during COVID, so we had a limited workforce at that time. I would just spend a half a day or one day a week doing bot development and focusing on trying to find this information so that once we were a full workforce again it would be beneficial to us. We waited until after we had a full workforce after COVID to fully launch. We ended up developing it for a couple of years, but it was during COVID so we had a low amount of people working at the time. I would say you could probably expect it to take six months to get it to a good spot and developed out for your company's specifications before you launch.

We had two to three people per team for deployment. Our IT team was the lead, but each department handled their own sections. I was the lead for finance. HR took a little bit of a different approach and instead of building out knowledge management content, they used the bot to point to their current documentation that they had available in ServiceNow.

Each team had a different method, and then we worked together at a call once a week with Espressive to go over issues or things we needed to do as a whole to make the bot work. Espressive would work with each department for about 15 minutes to an hour each week, depending on the needs of each department.

Our department received about a 70% deflection rate, so that was really great. We were really happy with how it turned out and how we built it out. Our adoption rate was a little lower than we wanted it to be, but I think that's where it's important to think about the tools that you have available ahead of time when you're launching and make sure that all of your departments are on board before just launching it. If they try it and it doesn't work, they're not going to come back to it, so ensure that you're comfortable with having your boss try it and it working before you push it out there.

It is expensive. It's not a cheap thing. I think it averages out to be about two full-time entry-level employee salaries per department. The biggest thing is making sure that you have everyone on board with using it, communicating well, and making it accessible. I think utilizing the mobile option is really important because so many people are on their phones throughout the day, so it makes it a lot easier for people to use. 

You also need someone to support it. It depends on how often you're going to use it, but you're looking at maybe a quarter of someone's workload throughout the year. Espressive can maintain things and update it for you. However, it's very easy to do it and I find it very beneficial to know how the back end works and know how to build out workflows and know your triggers and everything, especially as you're going through and doing all the testing and building.

They'll do it for you but they can't tell you if something's right or wrong. They can't tell you how the question should be answered, so you're always going to need someone to say, "Oh, this works this way or that way." You're also going to run into situations where updates don't go right and you have to go back and figure out what's going on as you integrate into other systems.

The solution requires constant maintenance. They send us information every week and we review it. It takes us about 15 minutes to review and send information back, half an hour to an hour if we're really going in depth on it. We probably spend two to three hours a week in each department on enhancements and reviewing if we're going to do any further integrations and talking about other future use cases or things that we want to improve. That also includes the team meetings we have every week.

My advice is to make sure that everybody's on board with the bot. Really think about what you're hoping to get out of it. It's not meant for advanced support. It's meant for intro level. You have ServiceNow and your front desk and your frontline. This is basically a 24-hour option for a front desk resolver, so that's the expectation and you should think in those terms.

If you have knowledge content available, look at what people are looking up the most and use your past information. Use your stats and user ticket content and go through to see where your trends are and build those out first. Don't expect people to come back to it if you don't have it well-built. Make sure you have reasonable expectations, and that you have someone available to be able to help do the build and think about the way that people talk. Finding the trigger phrases is what really makes a successful bot, so you need someone who understands how people communicate to lead this project.

I would rate this solution as a six out of ten. It's good. It has a long way to go, but I think that will come with time as they integrate with more programs.

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.

The conversational AI is good. We're working to improve it and make sure that our interactions are linked appropriately and not too cumbersome for our employees and staff. We are driving it down to, "What do you need? What do you want?" so that it's one, two, or three questions, intuitive and user-friendly. 

We have the ability to alter phrases, create new phrases, enhance phrases, or change paths. From the dashboard, we are able to get a lot of information we need about what people are asking, where they are dropping off from conversations, and where they do not get the information they need. That has been helpful to us in understanding how we can improve our most common questions. 

Using the control center to extend the language model or design interactive conversations is the bread and butter of the solution. Our success is based on our ability to create those interactions and make sure they're specific to our users so these things don't have to go to our service desk and are fulfilled automatically. Either the user gets their responses through the appropriate knowledge articles, a ticket is created for them, or ideally, we route their questions through automation. 

What would make things easier is easier access to detail about out-of-the-box interactions and what Barista has brought in natively that the employees are using. I am loving the opportunities that are upcoming on the Espressive product roadmap! 

I have been using this solution for about six months.

We haven't experienced any performance issues.

It's definitely scalable. 

Scaling it to different GEOs is something we're looking at. 

 Espressive support has been very good.

Their support responses and their attention to our requirements have been good. 

Positive

It's pretty straightforward but does require organizational decisions on process and ultimately, end-user experience.

We have four Admins. We went through some extensive training and, once you have that training, the ease of using the control center is good. On a scale of five, it is a four, and moving towards five with maturity.

Espressive's marketing team helped tailor roll-out/launch materials within our branding and communication requirements. I love their marketing team and approach! 

We did it with Espressive, in-house, working with our developers. Espressive was really good with helping us bridge any gaps in knowledge and fit and tailor the solution to our environment.

That high percent of the questions that people are asking, where they get help on them right away, is part of our ROI.

The pricing isn't overly burdensome. It's going to be interesting to see how new models come in with new capabilities but, as it is, as a base system, it's pretty good.

We looked at ServiceNow's suite of products and it came down to that and Espressive as the final two. One of the features that was really valuable in Barista was the ability to target information. If a user asks a specific question, and we have a knowledge base article that's three pages long, Barista is able to pull that information and position it at the specific point where the user needs it, to answer the question. The user wouldn't have to go through the entire article. It directs them to the right place. 

The ability to automate on the back end and deflect was also really valuable to us, as well as working in real language. 

We are focused on making sure that the user experience is good, so that Barista is not asking questions that are cumbersome or asking our users to bring in information. That can be challenging because we have existing processes that are more cumbersome for employees. We're working with Espressive to redefine that experience for our users, and to rework some of our major workflows so that the users don't have to bring a lot of information. Rather, we want to automate more things in the back end and make sure that the user doesn't get frustrated and leave an interaction.

Overall, I give the solution a 10 out of 10. I really appreciate the product and the Espressive team.

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.

The chat integration with Barista is great. We have it integrated with ServiceNow. The chat feature allows a user who is using Barista from their mobile device, to get right to the chat integration.

Barista recognizes out-of-the-box phrases that people commonly use in support questions. I would say that the HR inquiries are much easier as most people are typing in the same thing. For example, "I'm looking up benefits," "I'm looking up compensation," etc. . Those are really out-of-the-box and are ready to go. IT is a little bit more complicated. Everybody has different scenarios. "My wifi is down," or "they won't type it in that way." Therefore, it does a great job with certain inquiries that are out-of-the-box, however, it definitely requires some human interaction. Barista is great when it comes to natural language processing and conversational AI. It does a great job with that. I use it almost every day. I can't remember anything anymore, I use Barista as my crutch. Most recently, I typed in "what email address do I use to sign into Teams" and I was shocked that it gave me the right answer. The only reason why I was shocked was that it was a very complicated question and it gave me the correct answer right off the bat. The reason why I was shocked is you would think that it would see my email and immediately start saying, "Hey, I noticed you're having trouble accessing your email." That was not the case. It literally said, "When accessing Teams, use your full email address." I was like, "Oh, wow." Even after two years, the tool continues to surprise me.

The solution delivers localized information in multiple languages. We're currently using that feature now. We have French, German and obviously English. The company has an English-first policy, however, they do make exceptions to certain requests based on the country. It's really based on the country we're doing work with. However, normally we speak  English first across the board. Those two countries were exceptions and we were able to convert a lot of what they put into Barista into their local language.

Given Barista's out-of-the-box content for common industrial applications, the company has continued to grow over the last three years that I've been with my company. We hire around 40 people every two weeks, and will be growing more in the future.  I haven't had to hire another IT person to handle the influx of new hires thanks to Barista. The same phone calls that would've come to the service desk, now are being triaged via Barista. Now my service desk team doesn't have to expand. That's the value, no matter how large the company grows, HR and IT do not have to hire more service desk people to field self-service type of questions.

For IT, we can maintain our growth without having to hire more people. I've split my service desk team in half and we've been able to take fewer phone calls now more than ever, as a lot of inquiries go through Barista.

Its ability to recognize phrases has gotten smarter over time. This most recent integration has been great. I was expecting it not to answer certain questions as they were very complicated, yet it did.

We do use ServiceNow for IT service management. Barista’s out-of-the-box integration with ServiceNow enabled us to leverage our workflow variables and service requests. It's been phenomenal. This is one of the few tools that live up to the sales reps' hype when it comes to integrating with ServiceNow. We've had a complete integration with ServiceNow since day one. We integrated our ServiceNow chat with Barista, and it took an hour to get it set up. That just speaks to the integration compatibility with ServiceNow.

Using Barista, the percentage of support requests that we have been able to resolve without human support personnel involved started at 60% right off the bat, which we were shocked about. We were hoping for 40% and we got 50%. And now we're hovering around 80% and growing, about 1% every month with the goal being to get to over 90%. At that point we would possibly just turn off the service desk phone altogether, and then converting my service desk agents to chat agents only would be feasible.

Barista has reduced service desk costs in our organization. I haven't had to hire more personnel. My service desk team is in Manila, so I don't know off the top of my head what their hourly rates are. I'd hate to estimate or even say something that's not 100% accurate. However, we have had cost reductions.

The deployment of Barista increased the availability of support for our employees. We don’t currently measure the experience that our customers receive via Barista. We're working on a Qualtrics project to integrate Qualtrics surveys. From there, we will start measuring people's interactions. However, since we've been seeing 80% deflection rates coming from Barista for almost a year now, it's safe to say that 80% of our employees are having a good experience using this tool, which is saving every employee countless hours in lost productivity.

There aren't really any areas for improvement. It's a virtual support agent that integrates ServiceNow, leveraging ServiceNow workflows. 

My only comment would be, if Espessive wanted to make this an IT service management tool, maybe they could think about Barista making tickets and adding a feature which will have change management and problem management capabilities. Maybe they could have an ITSM style of service management route through Barista.  That would be my only suggestion for improvement. Maybe it could eventually replace ServiceNow altogether. That said, as of today, I don't see anything that needs to be improved.

I've been using this solution for two years.

We haven't had an issue with it or a minute of downtime in two years. We use it every day for 80% of all of our phone calls that would've gone to a service desk agent. We've never had an outage or issue.

We're at about 5,000 unique logins for Barista, and the other 3,000 are probably our manufacturing workers who are on the line, but they wouldn't actually use Barista - their lead supervisors would.

There's tons of scalability. I don't know exactly how much they can scale, however, it seems like every time we ask for a feature, they have it, either ready to go or in the pipeline. The scalability is very high.

We would love to reach out to other departments and see if they would like to start leveraging Barista for their tier zero needs. However, we just are so busy. We haven't had a chance to really reach out to other departments. While we would like to increase usage in the future, right now, there's just a bandwidth issue.

Technical support is fantastic.

When we told them we wanted to integrate Barista with ServiceNow to do chat conversations, they immediately responded to our ticket. Within an hour, we were up and running. Very rarely can you open a ticket with any company and get a response back. Within an hour, we have what we just submitted as a global support game-changer, up and running. That's just one of many examples I have with Barista where their support has just been amazing.

Positive

I vetted out three different chatbot agents at the University of San Diego before I came to this organization. What we found was that all of those tools required a lot of work to implement and maintain every day. I then left the University of San Diego and this organization had purchased Espressive Barista before I had a chance to even know what it was. 

One of my first projects was to implement this tool that I had never heard anything about. I had to quickly learn how this tool worked and how we were going to support it. I was happily pleased that even though I had never heard of Espressive Barista before, it was simple. Had I known about Espressive Barista previously, it probably would've beat out other chatbots back then. That's how impressed I was with the product and lucky that the product was chosen for me before I even started.

The initial setup was complex. We were rolling it out with HR and IT. Just to come into the company knowing that I had to then get HR together and IT together to come up with a plan, made it a little complicated. It is complicated to work with another department to roll out what essentially was an IT tool.

In hindsight, since we were partners with them, they were very willing to participate. There were some challenges with just trying to get HR to sit in meetings to go over the technical pieces of how we were going to implement it.

The deployment was complicated since we have offices all over the world and we did a global rollout. We went to each location. . I flew to Mesa and all of our other locations to personally be there for the rollout. We offered donuts and diners. If you installed Barista on your phone, we'd give you a donut. That was the easy part, however, I found that all of the coordination of getting all together, setting up travel plans, and having the rollout skills was challenging..

There were only two people needed for the deployment process. I have an employee who is a Barista admin from day one. Then we had two people from HR. Four altogether were on hand to help us roll it out.

The solution does not require any maintenance. It's cloud-based, so the maintenance is happening on the back-end, we don't see it. As a matter of fact, we haven't had an interruption since we've gone live. They do maintenance, we just don't see it. That's the beauty of having a SaaS-based application, a cloud-based application. You don't have to worry about that.

We handled the initial setup in-house.

We've definitely seen an ROI.

We grew from 4,000 employees to 4,500 employees to 8,000 employees and I've yet to have to hire a service desk technician to keep up with that growth. 

Barista's deflecting 80% of our calls. Before Barista, 80% of those deflections were going right to the service desk. Therefore, to keep up with a growth of almost double the amount of employees over the course of three years during COVID, I would have hired ten more service desk people, maybe even eleven to keep up with the growth. I haven't had to hire a single one, thanks to Espressive Barista. In terms of return on investment, I don't have a dollar figure. I had never had to go down that rabbit hole since we have Espressive Barista. Had we not had a chat agent, I'd have put a bunch of metrics on why we needed to bring in a chat agent.

At that point, I would know what the number is, however, I haven't had to do that. I don't have a dollar value for what the return on investment is. I just know, to keep up with doubling the number of employees, if I already had 12 service desk people answering phone calls (and they couldn't even keep up with the volume), I'd have to have hired another 12. That's where my math is coming from. We had 12 before, we now only have six. The other six are now advanced support, thanks to Barista. I would say the return on investment is that I haven't had to double the amount of service desk personnel, even though the company doubled in size.

The pricing is absolutely fantastic. Even though ServiceNow offers their chat and their AI product for free, there's still manpower that's required to maintain that. You probably have to hire two people to maintain ServiceNow's free tool. If I were to hire two ServiceNow admins, full-time, to manage ServiceNow's chatbot agent, it would be more than what we're paying for Espressive Barista. Therefore, even though ServiceNow's tool is "free" there's still a manpower issue in terms of managing it day-to-day and keeping it up and running, which we don't have with Espressive Barista.

A lot of people look at the price and immediately are deterred, however, instead of looking at this as a cost, look at this as a cost-saving. Then look at the company’s growth vision and the amount of employees that you would require over the next three years to maintain that. That will cover the cost of this product.

I'd rate the solution a ten out of ten.

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.

Expressive Barista could improve by adding native integration with WhatsApp, one of the top communication channels in South Africa. When we're trying to sell Barista to customers, we have to tell them that the solution doesn't have out-of-the-box support for WhatsApp. We can develop it, but then we need to have a conversation about how much that will cost.

I have worked with Expressive Barista for about a year now. We're still trying to get our first deal as a reseller.

I rate Expressive Barista nine out of 10 stability. 

I rate Expressive Barista seven out of 10 for scalability.

I rate Expressive Barista six out of 10. The total cost depends on how large the client is. We get Barista from the vendor for a certain price and resell the solution to our customers at a markup. It's negotiable and depends on the customer's budget.

I rate Expressive Barista eight out of 10. 

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.

The solution is available to support us instantly as required.

Sometimes, when a ticket is opened, we need to find out its pending status and provide the information to the person who opened the ticket. This is because they are not automatically notified of the status change.

The reports provided by the solution are not customizable. I would like to be able to apply filters to the reports, as we require them on a daily basis, and provide them to management. The reports have room for improvement.

I have been using Espressive Barista for one year.

Espressive Barista is a stable solution. We have not experienced any performance issues during our time using it.

Espressive Barista has met our scaling requirements.

I am very satisfied with the talented technical support. They have multiple solutions for our needs and provide immediate support. They always have the answers at their fingertips.

Positive

The initial setup is straightforward. Our deployment took one month and required two people: one from Espressive Barista and one from our IT department.

The implementation was completed in-house with the help of the vendor.

We have seen a 20 percent return on investment.

The solution is affordable.

I give Espressive Barista a ten out of ten.

I recommend that every big company that operates 24/7 and in multiple regions and time zones should get Espressive Barista to fulfill their requests and optimize their user support. I recommend Espressive Barista.

Maintenance for the solution is required.

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.

Our primary use case is for an internal help desk.

We implemented this solution because we were trying to drive some scale for the organization. It contributed to the strategy of trying to automate more of the business.

We saw a pretty healthy climb in deflection rates when we started using this product. This is really important. We were well over 30% to 40% deflection right out of the gate. Over time, it starts to level out a little bit, but we're continuing to see at least 30% deflection rates, meaning an engineer doesn't have to get involved and people can self serve and find the answer to their problems without having to engage with an agent. We're looking for opportunities to continue to drive that forward, but I think it's pretty effective if you can get that level of deflection.

On average, we see 30% of support requests resolved without human support personnel involved.

The results we were seeing started very quickly, within a few months. Getting ramped up on the out-of-the-box content is pretty quick.

Given the out of the box content for common industry applications, we got good value out of the solution right from day one. It's hard to put an exact dollar amount or metric on that. One of the main points is the commonly asked questions and common tech stack. A lot of that was pre-built into the solution, which means that we didn't have to create our own content. This is something that you really want to be able to shy away from.

For example, it's helpful that the Microsoft stack, Okta, and other pretty well-known and widely used technology stacks already have content in the system. I found that the content in their broader database was pretty robust, which helped us ramp up. You don't have to spend a lot of time creating content prior to the launch, which makes it a fairly straightforward launch. More than anything, a lot of getting set up is educating your end-users.

Over time, managing it operationally has gotten easier. This may be a reflection of its ability as it's collecting phrases and building out the broader database. It's allowed us to spend less time having to add information about what scenario somebody needs when they say something. Over time, I've seen the operational overhead continue to decline, pretty drastically. At this point, we don't have to spend a tremendous amount of time on the upkeep of the platform, which is good.

When it comes to how well it performs, it depends somewhat on how good your data is. For example, you have to make sure that your in-house customizations are going to continue to work with the standard integration, such as with Active Directory.

I'm not sure exactly how much this solution has reduced our mean time to resolution, although it's probably at least 20%. Tickers are getting answered by a virtual support agent in real-time with a caller, versus a ticket being created, sitting in a queue, someone picking it up, then calling them and resolving it. It's a much faster turnaround. 

Using this solution has helped increase the availability of support for our employees to 24/7. We don't have agents all over the world and Expressive is on all of the time.

Our employee satisfaction scores have gone up a little bit. We had high sat scores before, but it was because we had people killing themselves answering all of these tickets. Now with our rate of deflection, they're able to manage the workload in a more scalable way.

The satisfaction of the employees has definitely not decreased, which is good because it means that people are still happy with the level of support. We already had a high customer sat score. The good news is that we were hoping it wouldn't make the sat score go down, because now they're not talking to a live agent, which many people, in some cases, would prefer.

This product has a couple of really good features.

Its real strength is in natural language processing. When you ask it a question, it has a pretty good sense of how to answer it. This is one of the things that they have done the best job on.

This was a pretty important feature for us. It means that you could be discussing the subject with a virtual support agent and it would be able to, as you ask the questions, interpret the types of questions you were asking and understand what you were trying to ask. This is a difficult task because not all people ask questions in the same way. Then, it is able to bring back content that is fairly accurate in addressing the question. That was definitely a contributing factor in our decision to implement it. Without that capability, the solution was not going to provide a tremendous amount of value.

Out of the box, the system is very good at being able to recognize phrases that people commonly use in support questions. I think that they've built some intelligence into that, and it includes a pretty broad database of standard technology stack questions and answers. 

It is very good to see the direction that they are taking this product in. For instance, the work that they're doing regarding automation. The platform is able to interpret a question and respond with a knowledge article that contains information on how to fix the problem. Examples of this are resetting a password and unlocking an account. The ability to automate that process is where it shows continued value.

Our developers have used the Barista Control Center to extend the platform by adding content, and they've found it fairly easy to do and manage. There have been instances where there wasn't standard content available, so they've had to extend the platform so that when people ask a question about an application or system, it's mapped directly to the content.

The solution has provided a solid set of automation capabilities but would like to see the continued expansion of even more advanced automation capabilities. 

Having more prebuilt connectors for people is always preferred because it's something you can start from versus having to go and build something custom. They are starting to do that with some of the recent connectors that I've seen for Workday and some of the Microsoft stack. They're moving aggressively in that direction.

I have been working with Espressive for approximately a year and a half.

There have been hiccups here and there, but the biggest and best technologies out there still have hiccups every once in a while. Overall, it's been a stable platform.

We're pressure testing scalability now, as far as trying to build that automation and how we extend the product. So far, it's proven to be pretty scalable. We haven't had any issues with performance because of the existing load on the system, so I've not seen any scale issues.

Espressive was involved in the employee onboarding process. Their customer success team helped us the whole way along. They have been good.

When we started with them, they were still building out their customer success program and there were some growing pains there. However, I wouldn't say that anything was problematic. I think they were always very receptive to feedback and made sure that we were successful. That was the overriding goal the entire time with them.

Their attitude was "Hey, we want to get you up and running to be successful, so we'll do whatever it's going to take to do that."

We haven't had to deploy the solution in a year and a half but talking to other customers, since then, just trading stories, we've learned that the onboarding process has gotten much more streamlined.

The technical support has been good. When there have been issues, our team has been able to engage with the support team. I haven't heard of any major issues with not getting the support we needed.

I would rate the technical support and eight out of ten because they're still maturing as a company.

Positive

We did not use a similar solution prior to this one.

We went looking for this type of solution because we wanted to know how to better manage investments in a help desk and be able to drive the strategy on automation and scale.

Espressive is set up as a SaaS subscription service.

The initial setup was fairly straightforward. More of the process is on the change management within your own organization and making sure that people understand how it works. They need to learn how to engage with it because you can have them go to the solution via Slack.

There are lots of different entry points into Barista and making sure that you clearly map out what's going to work best for your organization seems to be more of the challenge. The tech is there and ready. A lot of it was preparation inside the business in terms of adopting this new way of supporting people and teaching them how they were going to access it.

The change management and the communication was probably the longest part of the process. The deployment was a few months, maybe as long as a quarter. We were able to get people on board and adopt it pretty quickly out of the gate because we had done so much work on comms and training and a lot of announcements around it. Our employee base is pretty tech-savvy, so they were happy to engage with the technology. It wasn't a huge effort to get people to engage with it. It was more around just making sure people were aware of it and how to use it.

Barista has helped us in terms of cost savings, from a cost avoidance perspective. Instead of having to hire more service desk agents as the company has grown and expanded, we've not had to make those investments.

It is difficult to estimate how much money we have saved but it would be at least a couple of staff, which is equivalent to a few hundred thousand dollars per year.

When I look at technology and purchase it, I consider what the return on that investment might be. This solution has yielded a good return on that investment.

The price for the licensing is fair. We were an earlier customer, and that's always advantageous. I don't know what their pricing looks like today and I can't remember exactly what we paid but I thought it was a very fair price.

This wasn't going to be done by adding more people. It needed to be done with technology, and so going out into the market, we considered a few vendors that play in this space. In our search, we found Espressive to be the most complete platform for all of the different areas that we wanted to be able to address.

ServiceNow has a solution but we're not a ServiceNow shop. There's a company called Moveworks that has a solution that's more geared just to IT, versus Espressive, which allows you to work not only in IT, but HR, legal, and other areas. It allows you a lot more of an enterprise-wide ability to operate this platform, which is a real plus.

There were some other smaller players, like Zendesk, which has a little something there. Many vendors are dabbling in it, but with Espressive, that's their core business. That's what they do. Some of the things I talked about as far as expansion beyond just IT were big pluses and the technology stack as a whole was just better.

We run the business in English, so we haven't had a requirement to have it serve content in different languages.

Barista has just released some capabilities where you can start building out some of your own custom integrations around driving automation. We are now starting to work on that. We have a handful of automations around account lock and password resets, and things like that, but we're now starting to look at tasks related to procurement.

There aren't very many things that this product needs improvement on. Automation has been the one that I've been the most bullish on, and I've pushed the company and the customer success team that works with us on this. I ask them how we can continue to make automation a bigger part of our platform because that's where the long-term value proposition's going to be.

Having a database of questions, and answers, and being able to provide people with the content is great, but I think we're moving beyond that and into this space where people are going to just want the problem to be solved right then and there.

They don't want to have to go reading an article and then figure it out. They would prefer just to have something be done for them. I think we're to that place now where you should be able to do that.

The top 10 most commonly asked questions in every organization have many questions in common. With being able to automate those top 10, all of a sudden you get deflection rates that are 50% to 60%. That's where that market and where the tech stack is going, and I think Espressive is moving in that direction.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

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.

From an admin standpoint, the analytics and the metrics that you're able to pull from Barista are extremely helpful. It allows you to really dig in there and see exactly what people are asking and how they're asking it.

For example, I can go in and say, "Well, on this day or during this month we're getting X amount of questions about this application. We have to go in and update content for that specific application or that specific question." Using this feature, we can pinpoint where we need to make our updates or what content to add.

The accessibility of this solution is very good. We use the web browser desktop application, mobile phone application, and now, we're working on our Teams integration with it. Once the integration with Teams is complete, it will probably be a big leap for us.

This solution is able to deliver localized information in multiple languages and for a company as big as ours, we have people all over the world and there are tons of users everywhere. I don't know the exact number right now but I think Barista knows eight-plus different languages. English and Spanish are our most common ones and Czech is probably our third most common one. Not many solutions that are out there are going to provide Czech as a language. I think it's really important for our users to be able to ask questions in their own language and get a response back in that language as well.

I use the Barista Control Center to upload my own content and curate it. It gives me the ability to add new content from scratch or update older content. I can use it to perform testing; for example, if I feel that there is a specific sentence that isn't triggering a specific response then I can make changes to it.

In terms of ease of use, the Barista Control Center is of medium-level difficulty. They have other methods to curate your own content in addition to this. This is the one that the representatives use so I wanted to learn it. I'd say that it definitely takes time to get used to it. It took me between six and twelve months in my off-hours at work to learn it. For people learning it from day one, it's probably easier.

Although they've done some work on their metrics dashboard, there is some fine-tuning to do for people that just want to go in there at a glance and see their metrics. This doesn't affect me as much because I pull the metrics from them and upload them to my own Power BI dashboard. It would be nice if their out-of-the-box dashboard were improved.

I have been working with Espressive for almost four years. We were early adopters and began working with them when they were just getting started.

We haven't had any issues with stability. For instances where we have had a problem, it's on our end where an account didn't get renewed for the year or something like that. It's very rare that we've had a problem. To this point, we've had at least 99% uptime with it.

The technical support that we get from Espressive has been amazing. I'm surprised sometimes at how quickly I get support from them because as a third-party vendor, they have a lot of other customers.

I have a chat going with them on WhatsApp where I can just ask a question and there they are. It feels like any time of the day, they're available for me. I think we're very lucky that they're able to support us that way.

I would rate the technical support a nine out of ten.

Positive

We attempted to use a different solution before this one, for chat, but it didn't have the natural language understanding or any type of deflection built into it. This was a chat queue manager application.

As a cloud-based deployment, the initial setup is pretty straightforward. Like with every company, there are some security-related issues that need to be taken care of. That said, I don't remember any major issues when we deployed it.

It took approximately a quarter to complete our deployment. The length of time was needed because of the various issues that we had to deal with, such as security. I'm sure that for many places, the process could be a lot faster.

No maintenance on our end is required. If there is any done by Espressive on the back end, it's not noticeable to us.

I don't recall the actual cost but efficiency-wise, there was a significant improvement. We were able to move the help desk away from phone lines. Instead of taking one call at a time at a desk, which is normally a 10-minute call, with perhaps an eight-plus minute wait time, now the analysts are able to take multiple chats at the same time. It might be two to three chats, depending on the analyst. This minimizes the amount of time that a user sits in the waiting queue.

We went from 10, eight-plus minute queues to maybe slightly above three minutes right now of a wait time, depending on the time of day. I think that fact alone made it worth the cost. The users are able to get up and running a lot faster.

We began to realize a lot of the benefits by year two. We had it running for all of 2019 and by 2020, we were already seeing that trend where Barista was taking on a lot of the workload and deflecting a lot of the chats coming in. It was so much so that in 2020, we started experimenting with shutting off the phone for a day or two days a week, and letting Barista be the main point of contact for support. Eventually, that led us to do that full time, as of last year.

This solution has definitely helped us to decrease our mean time to resolution. It is especially obvious when you consider that we're seeing that almost half of the interactions coming in are being deflected.

I began with the company after the Espressive onboarding process began, so I was not involved in evaluating other similar products.

It is part of Espressive's idea to try and get our users and employees to be as efficient as possible. A lot of the success is going to be how much Barista can deflect questions that are coming in. It's definitely in their best interest for our deflection rate to go up and for things to work smoothly for the users.

Some of the people coming in are not used to talking to a virtual support agent like this. I still have people that are kind of confused about it but we do a good job of going to them and teaching them how to use it. I think so far, everyone's been pretty good with it.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.