Haderslev Municipality: Effective IT support with a chatbot

Haderslev Municipality is located in the northernmost part of Southern Jutland and has around 55,500 inhabitants.

Delegate has helped Haderslev Municipality develop a chatbot that eases the pressure on IT support staff.

Challenge

Haderslev Municipality has experienced that users with IT challenges often contact IT support through various channels (support portal, email, and telephone), which means that a single task is attempted to be solved by several support staff at the same time. At the same time, the municipality wants to give users the experience that IT support is closer. Therefore, Haderslev Municipality wants to streamline and improve the process between the approximately 2500 IT users and the municipality's IT support.

Solution

Haderslev Municipality had already successfully rolled out Microsoft Teams. It was therefore natural to investigate the possibility of a support universe in Teams, where most users are already daily. In addition, better attachment of superusers of the individual systems would be an advantage. This way, errors could be related to a lack of knowledge about the use of the systems. Delegate's solution was a chatbot that eases the pressure on IT support staff by helping users solve their IT problems easily, user-friendly and intuitively. To get started quickly and build up experience with the chatbot, Haderslev Municipality decided to create a knowledge base that was built around the existing support documents within selected systems and processes. The municipality also had a large number of support documents to support users in their use of various systems and programs. One of the goals of the solution was to have various options to support users in the process of solving their IT problems. It should also be ensured that users can always fall back to other systems or superusers if the support documents cannot solve their challenges. The chatbot's primary interaction is to ask the user which area they are experiencing challenges in and to ask the user to describe the challenge. Based on the user's response, the chatbot searches for documents and presents the user with links that can alleviate the user's challenge. If this does not solve the user's challenge, the user informs the chatbot of this. The chatbot then gives the user the option to contact a superuser or other help through a Teams channel. If this also does not solve the user's challenge, a case is created in the municipality's helpdesk system through an integrated creation form (Power App).

Result

Haderslev Municipality's new chatbot streamlines and improves the process between the approximately 2500 IT users and the municipality's IT support. Today, the municipality has a solution that is easy for developers to work with and at the same time is easy for users and superusers to operate.

"Chatbots are new for many people - at least for us - so Delegate's support and advice has been a positive experience and made the journey safe. Although we are at the beginning of a larger journey, we see a huge potential for a better support experience through Microsoft Teams."

– Jens Poulsen, Haderslev Municipality

In the development of Haderslev Municipality's chatbot, Delegate used Microsoft's Power Virtual Agent. Power Virtual Agent has continued development potential, but the solution's integrations are already strong. At the time of writing, Power Virtual Agent has the ability to integrate with Microsoft Teams, Facebook, Skype, GroupMe, and many other platforms as Power Virtual Agent is part of the Power Platform.