Hopper is being launched live on Monday, July 6th. Until then, please treat this page as an insider sneak peak!
Meet Hopper!
Hopper is VIU's virtual support agent. It's designed to help you look for answers to all your VIU Technology related questions. Hopper can help you access knowledge base articles, create support tickets, and even search VIU's other websites!
Where Can I Find Hopper?
Hopper is found on the main VIU technology page. Look for a speech bubble in the bottom right corner!
Tips and Tricks
- Treat Hopper like an actual helper!
- Hopper functions better when you don't try to do it's "thinking" for it. Doing point form, keyword searches isn't it's strong suit. because of it's design, Hopper is much better using full sentence commands or questions. So, something like "tell me how to reset my password" will probably be more successful than "reset password".
- Actually use hopper
- We're still in the very beginning stages of utilizing a technology like this. Your participation in this process, asking questions and following prompts, will be instrumental in helping us shape what Hopper can do.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are we doing this?
Utilizing a Virtual Support Agent allows us to shift our employees to different tasks, freeing up the time they would normally spend on, for lack of a better term, paperwork. A lot of what our agents do is repetitive and inefficient due to the changing IT landscape. With our resources limited, this path allows us to continue to innovate and grow without sacrificing the foundations of what it means to be an IT support team.
Is this stealing jobs/replacing the service desk?
Absolutely not! There will still be human eyes looking at and responding to your tickets, as well as building Hopper itself. Hopper's job is to find self serve options when they're available, and to gather information to pass on to technicians when they're not. This change simply removes a lot of the inefficient, repetitive work that our employees currently do, which leaves more time for them to make actual improvements long term.. Think installing sprinklers rather than just having someone standing in your house with a bucket of water. Surely there are other things that person can be doing, y'know?
Can I trust the answers Hopper gives?
Yes? (mostly). Hopper searches VIU's websites, and provides the information that it finds. It's still dependent on lots of things:
- Is the information available where we asked it to look?
- Was it able to narrow down the answers enough, based on what you asked?
- Is the information it found (which a human wrote) actually correct?
Ultimately, like all computers/machines, Hopper will do what we tell it to. We being you, in the way you ask your question, and the IT department, in how we teach Hopper to find info. As in all things both human and non human, it's up to all of us to make sure the information helps us. Trust your gut if something feels off (and let us know about it when Hopper gets it wrong!)
Is my personal information safe?
Yes! longer answer coming!
Why isn't it giving me an answer/the right answer/more help?
Answer coming!
Is Hopper using AI?
Sort of! longer answer coming!
Something went wrong! Who can I tell about this?
You can tell IT! You can either submit directly through Hopper (In B4 "Hopper is what's wrong!") or directly through the IT Knowledge Base.