Providing efficient support to staff members was problematic for the University of Johannesburg’s (UJ) information and communications services (ICS) support team during the lockdown.
Challenges included limited support staff, large IT-related call volumes, common user-related support issues, and a lack of self-service support material is available.
Gijima proposed using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to alleviate and remediate the problematic aspects that were causing difficulty for UJs support team.
Gijima first focused on eliminating aspects causing difficulty before progressing into refining the requirement to provide additional services and features available with the technology stack chosen. Utilising Bot Registration channels in Azure, Gijima catered for multiple platforms to communicate with UJs chatbot, named Robbie. For this Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Teams formed the hotspots for interactions with the chatbot.
When Robbie was introduced to UJs staff members, the university’s support team noticed they were not overwhelmed by the number of incidents logged. There was a reduction in the number of incidents logged; incidents such as VPN use and password reset were less frequent, and high priority call times were reduced.
UJ Stakeholder Aaron Bessick says: “It has been a learning experience that would not have been possible without the patience and great effort for Gijima to understand our needs from the developers.”