Pras invests €50,000 in a customer portal with advanced GenAI functionalities

Pras Consulting, a 1005 Romanian IT services and consulting provider, has launched a new customer portal that integrates advanced self-service and GenAI components, following an investment of approximately €50,000. The new Customer Support portal reflects Pras’s belief that Artificial Intelligence can assist IT professionals in triaging requests, solving simple issues, and escalating cases to a higher support level when needed.

The new service integrates the ServiceDesk Plus MSP platform from ManageEngine with GenAI functionalities powered by ChatGPT. A major advantage is the chatbot’s ability to interact using natural language questions that tolerate typos or incomplete phrasing. This eliminates the need for users to search through predefined menus, which is time-consuming, especially in the vast and complex world of IT support.

The company handles several hundred support requests each month, and during peak hours, waiting times to speak with a consultant can reach up to 15 minutes. The new service, available through a secure customer portal, will significantly reduce this wait time, being available 24/7 and enabling instant intake and qualification of any support request.

The €50,000 investment covers ManageEngine licenses, OpenAI subscriptions, portal development, and the training effort required to tailor the LLM technology.

“We are an IT services company, and the quality of customer interaction and experience is a competitive advantage. The new Customer Support service, the portal, and the ChatGPT-based chatbot are all designed to reduce waiting time and streamline client interactions with the Pras team. We’ve trained the chatbot on datasets relevant to general IT services and specific PRAS operations so that it can understand and resolve specific requests. It evaluates both the general knowledge it has access to (public sources on the Internet) and PRAS’s internal libraries of incidents and past resolutions. Depending on the issue, the chatbot escalates the ticket to a human consultant. For critical matters — such as cybersecurity incidents or issues that could lead to operational downtime — clients can always connect directly with a dedicated expert,” says Paul Roman, Managing Director at Pras.

In addition, Pras has integrated the customer portal with other ManageEngine customer support features, such as time tracking, task allocation, and client relationship management.

Looking ahead, the company plans to adopt AgenticAI, an advanced technology that enables the creation of virtual assistants capable of making autonomous decisions in primary support scenarios. These agents could perform tasks like User account setup,  Onboarding new employees into the appropriate AD groups, Email acount creation, Granting user access to essential applications. Analysts predict that by 2028, over 33% of business applications will include AgenticAI capabilities, up from just 1% in 2024.