CrushBank Introduces the Most Intelligent Helpdesk Ever…Yours Nobody likes to sit on hold – especially when you’re dialing up your own internal helpdesk. Ideally, you want to have a good relationship with the person you’re calling for help. Usually the individual with the least experience is the first line of defense at the helpdesk. He or she could be spending upwards of an hour trying to find the answer to a ticket that should only take them 15 minutes. Harnessing the power of IBMWatson, CompTIA Premier Member CrushBank is changing that mentality. About three years ago, Evan Leonard, president, and David Tan, CTO, drew up the CrushBank concept on a napkin. “We wanted to utilizeWatson,” Leonard said. “And, after 25 years in the managed service space, we wanted to bring cognitive computing and AI into play in the best way possible.” The partners took all the industry information they had and everything they knew about their clients and ingested it into Watson to create a single pane of glass for users. After describing their concept to IBM they became the twelfth partner in the IBM ecosystem. The product, unlike anything else on the market right now, takes all of the unstructured information out there andmakes it searchable to helpdesk engineers. “We always say the dirty little secret behind the helpdesk is that the techs are Googling answers to your questions while they have you on the phone,” Leonard joked. “But Watson has a better level of confidence. With every interactionWatson is getting smarter and smarter.” After soft launching at CompTIA ChannelCon in July 2017, Leonard said that while both large and small clients have an interest in CrushBank, they have seen the most interest in larger companies. “Larger companies have an interest in retaining their intellectual property and having access to unstructured information that is searchable. It increases productivity, decreases escalation and improves profitability,” he said. And, CrushBank’s simplicity is attractive. “CrushBank is the simplest product you can deploy. Other products take hundreds of hours of population. With CrushBank, if you can type in a question, you are qualified to start using!” When it comes to growth of the company, Leonard definitely has a 21st century staff in mind. When hiring he said he looks for helpdesk experience. “We want our marketing people to have digital transformation experience and our product managers to have experience running a SaaS product,” he said. He understands they won’t findmany people who have experience in AI or automation, so the company has been using interns and has been training people on the job on how a cognitive computing product works. But when it comes to the growth of the product, Leonard said they want Watson to become more client-facing. “Right now, you have to type in a question to get an answer. But eventually we want Watson to be able to anticipate the ticket coming in and immediately suggest solutions. Or, if the ticket has an angry tone we want Watson to be able to prioritize it. We also want to be able to hook into more APIs and give our user the opportunity to ask different types of questions,” Leonard said. At the end of the day, Leonard said companies like CrushBank aren’t looking to replace jobs – they’re just trying to do things better and run companies better. “We’re taking the human element out of what we do without taking the humans out.”
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SPRING 2018 | CompTIAWorld
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