Haderslev Municipality: Effective IT support with a chatbot

Haderslev Municipality finds that users with IT challenges often contact IT support through different channels (support portal, email, and telephone), which means that a single task is attempted to be solved by several supporters at the same time. At the same time, the municipality wants users to feel that IT support is closer to them. 

Haderslev Municipality wants to streamline and improve the process between the approximately 2,500 IT users and the municipality's IT support.

Haderslev Municipality had already rolled out Microsoft Teams with great success. It was natural to investigate the possibility of a support universe in Teams, where most users already work daily. In addition, a better connection of super users of the individual specialist systems would be an advantage. This way, errors could be related to a need for more knowledge about the use of the systems.

Delegate's solution was a chatbot that eased the pressure on IT support staff by helping users solve their IT problems in an easy, user-friendly, and intuitive. 

To get started quickly and gain experience with the chatbot, Haderslev Municipality chose to create a knowledge base built around existing support documents for selected systems and processes. The municipality also had a large amount of support documents to support users in their use of different systems and programs.

One of the goals of the solution was to have different options to support users in solving their IT problems. It also ensured that users could always fall back to other systems or super users if the support documents could not solve their challenges.

The chatbot's primary interaction is to ask the user in which area they are experiencing challenges and ask the user to describe the challenge. Based on the user's answers, the chatbot searches for documents and presents users with links to solve the user's challenge.

If this does not solve the user's challenge, the user informs the chatbot of this. The chatbot then allows the user to contact a superuser or other help through a Teams channel. If this does not solve the user's challenge, a case is created in the municipality's helpdesk system through an integrated creation form (Power App).

Haderslev Municipality's new chatbot streamlines and improves the process between the approximately 2,500 IT users and the municipality's IT support. The municipality now has a solution that is easy for developers to work with and easy to operate for users and super users.   

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

– Jens Poulsen, Haderslev Municipality

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