Astound

Employees at large enterprises cite poor IT and HR service as one of the main reasons they are de-motivated or, worse, quit. Great service experiences empower employees and separate leaders from laggards across industries. Until recently, HR and IT departments could not figure out an efficient way to keep up with the growing volume of requests for routine services like password resets and PTO approvals. The future of exceptional employee service is AI-driven automation. The future of AI-driven automation for employee service is Astound.

Based in Silicon Valley, Astound helps enterprises deliver better employee service by infusing intelligent automation into every phase of the lifecycle of service requests. “Many of the most respected organizations in the world are using AI today to deliver the best employee service possible,” mentions Dan Turchin, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer, Astound. The industry veteran states that during his career spanning more than two decades, he observed enterprises that struggled to automate service tasks, until the advent of disciplines such as AI and machine learning. The availability of these technologies led to Astound’s interactive, autonomous, AI-driven platform that enables employees to ask questions, submit incidents, and order goods and services.

Astound’s intelligence solution follows the lifecycle of employee service requests. A typical example is trying to gain access to business applications like WebEx. Traditionally, the process was painful and involved multiple approvals and provisioning tasks.

The future of work is AI-driven automation. We’re proud of the value we’re creating for global enterprises and look forward to delivering new products that improve service experiences for every employee who has ever called the help desk

With Astound AI, an autonomous virtual agent diagnoses the issue using natural language and takes action on behalf of the employee to provision access. When the virtual agent, called Answers, is not able to resolve the issue Astound’s Predict and Advise applications hand off the task to live agents with AI-driven contextual recommendations about how to fulfill the request faster. Astound Analyze, a predictive analytics dashboard, helps service owners continuously improve how employee services are delivered. Organizations like McDonald’s and adidas have standardized on the Astound AI platform to improve employee service for millions of team members around the world.

Turchin discusses why McDonald’s, which serves approximately 70 million customers every day across its 40,000 outlets worldwide, selected Astound. They chose Astound’s AI and machine learning platform to automate the routing and resolution of service requests. It has helped the team significantly reduce call volume and downtime for employees. In addition, the integration with their ServiceNow ticketing system has helped IT agents lower escalations and save a significant amount of time that was previously spent addressing service requests.

Astound is backed by leading venture capital firms and employs many of the world’s leading computational linguists and researchers in artificial intelligence and natural language processing. “The future of work is AI-driven automation. We’re proud of the value we’re creating for global enterprises and look forward to delivering new products that improve service experiences for every employee who has ever called the help desk,” said Turchin.