Southern Cross Health Society’s Chief Digital Officer Roxanne Salton says that enabling self-service for internal users is a strategic priority.

To this end, her team worked on the introduction of a virtual agent (chatbot) called Mahu, which was rolled out in May of this year.

SCHS’s service desk team receives approximately 1,400 tickets and 450 phone calls per month from internal end users. They already automate the majority of their service request provisioning process through service management tool ServiceNow, however Salton says they are always looking to innovate further.

Analysis of incoming tickets and user feedback showed large amounts of low complexity tickets being triaged manually by the service desk, leading to longer resolution times. In addition, the service desk worked business hours, with only a limited support service available outside those hours. With employees needing more flexibility when they worked through the pandemic, this after-hours service became more important.

Salton and the team saw an opportunity to introduce a virtual agent (chatbot) service. Digital Platforms (DP) senior management were actively involved in this process, driving engagement, and seeking endorsement. 

“A proof-of-concept within an agreed scope was organised and a vendor in Spark64 was engaged to provide Artificial Intelligence expertise. Various teams worked together along with business end-users to identify critical use cases. We deduced that a virtual agent in ServiceNow was the right solution for us – and the concept of Mahu was born,” says Salton.

Service desk team members were empowered to drive requirements for Mahu. The successful on-time, on-budget delivery of the new service consisted of a three-month implementation project broken down into six two-week sprints. 

The first two sprints focused on initial configuration and capability development of key service desk personnel. The final four sprints centred around cycles of end-user testing, feedback, improvement, and re-testing. “At the end of the three-month project, we had put together a product which serves our people in a user-centric, natural, and meaningful way,” says Salton. 

“We had exceptional engagement from core project team members and from various DP teams wanting to be involved in the delivery. The team completed relevant formal training and three Mahu champions with a passion for user experience were appointed to drive the building of conversations relevant to the Southern Cross environment and our ways of working. As they continued to build their knowledge and capability, their sense of ownership and pride in the delivery grew,” she says.

An organisation-wide competition was launched to name the virtual agent to drive engagement from end-users. “We wanted the virtual agent to be for everyone. The name needed to be something inclusive (non-binary). A shortlist of names was put together by the project team and presented to our DP leadership team. Mahu, meaning ‘to heal’ in Te Reo Māori, was chosen. The name is also a nod to the word Māhutonga, which refers to the Southern Cross constellation. The naming competition generated lots of positive feedback and served to get people interested, use the virtual agent, and treat it as a new member of the Southern Cross whānau,” Salton adds.

Mahu successfully launched in mid-May 2022 and there were 332 conversations through the chatbot up to mid-July. Seventy per cent were completed successfully. “This indicates 232 fewer simple tickets needed to go to our service desk, allowing the team more time to look at more complex issues for customers,” says Salton.