Client story Bekaert overcomes language barriers in Microsoft 365 adoption with training and support from Insight
By Insight Editor / 28 Jun 2022 / Topics: Cybersecurity
By Insight Editor / 28 Jun 2022 / Topics: Cybersecurity
Employees at Bekaert, a global leader in steel wire transformation and coating technologies, are collaborating across the world with Microsoft 365. The company, headquartered in Belgium, asked Insight to help develop an adoption roadmap, provide training, and measure the success of the tools. In addition, Insight also installed a multilingual chatbot to assist Bekaert’s service desk.
Collaboration tools are an essential ingredient of a successful hybrid work environment. Bekaert had already migrated to Microsoft 365 before the pandemic, but the virus certainly increased the need for training and change management. Some of the questions that were frequently asked by Bekaert’s users: “how can we organize brainstorm sessions outside of a physical meeting room? How can we share a document and work on it together without sending dozens of copies by e-mail? How do we attend a seminar or share the recording of an online meeting?”
An additional challenge is the fact that Bekaert has nearly 10,000 users working in more than 40 different countries. Instead of offering training and support in just one language, they wanted to ensure that most of the staff could find guidance in their native language. To help them do this, Bekaert turned to Insight. Bekaert wanted to increase the awareness of Microsoft’s tools among its employees while providing them with access to learning opportunities, as well as tips & tricks.
“We didn’t need to reinvent the wheel but wanted a partner who could help us set up webinars and an information corner for our employees. Insight knows Microsoft’s products, has the right expertise to guide our users and brings in survey materials to measure adoption rates”
Koen Vereeken
Global IT Lead Technology Infrastructure at Bekaert
Insight helped Bekaert by organising workshops and evaluating the maturity level. The first workshops included basic training on, for example, using Teams or OneNote. After each training, the participants are asked to take a survey and share some topics they find interesting for future workshops. The project launched in October 2021 and after just six months Bekaert noticed that people started asking for more advanced trainings.
In addition to the webinars, Insight also helped build a network of digital champions, people who receive extra training to become ambassadors. Bekaert now has 13 champions who are active in the different regions, covering most languages in the organization.
To track the adoption of the Microsoft Office 365 tools, Bekaert developed a one-year roadmap with several milestones and KPIs. Insight measures the use of the tools with solutions such as CoreView and Microsoft Productivity Score.
Chatbot support for Bekaert’s service desk
Part of the project is the implementation of a chatbot to support the IT service desk. This bot helps employees create tickets for issues that need the attention of an IT expert. Bekaert wanted to make the solution available in multiple languages. At first, they thought of using Power Virtual Agent to build the chatbot. However, this tool requires users to recreate the bot for each individual language. Insight therefore suggested Microsoft Bot Framework, which is a more advanced version of the tool.
Insight built a fully operational chatbot system that speaks four languages: Chinese, Spanish, English, and Dutch. The project was completed in just two months. The chatbot is easy to use because it is embedded in Microsoft Teams. This also means that users now have an additional channel to contact the service desk.
In a next step, Bekaert wants to make the bot more intelligent and enable automatic resolution of basic questions.
Thanks to Insight’s support and assessments, Bekaert knows they are on the right track. For example, 84% of the 10,000 employees are now using OneDrive and SharePoint to share documents. And about three in four people communicate with Teams.
Bekaert offers four learning paths that cover all possible use cases for both beginners and more advanced users. Moreover, 80% of the languages in Bekaert’s network are supported by the learning framework and the availability of digital champions.
As for the chatbot: within the first weeks, the service desk found that 20 to 25% of their tickets were coming through this new channel. This makes the work of the IT team more efficient.
“Thanks to Insight’s pragmatic and flexible approach, we were able to deploy the chatbot in a short time frame.”
Koen Vereeken
Global IT Lead Technology Infrastructure at Bekaert
Bekaert wanted to increase awareness of Microsoft 365 collaboration tools among its 10,000 users. To do this, they drew up a roadmap and asked Insight for support with training and assessments of the adoption.
Insight has set up workshops, communication strategies and a champions network. The knowledge framework is available in several languages to cover most of the regions in which Bekaert operates. The progress is monitored, while surveys help to understand the maturity level and current needs of users.
In addition, a multilingual chatbot was installed to support the IT service desk. So far, 20 to 25% of the tickets is generated by the bot.
Bekaert offers four learning paths for beginners and advanced users. All regions are covered by digital champions, supporting 80% of the spoken languages.
84% of Bekaert’s Office 365 users share documents with OneDrive and SharePoint instead of e-mail.
73% of the 10,000 employees at Bekaert communicate with Microsoft Teams.
Within the first weeks of installation, already 20 to 25% of IT service desk tickets are generated by a chatbot that serves users in four languages.
