Virtual Agent

Getting Started

Virtual Agent provides a means for better understanding customer issues, offering self-service options, and connecting with live agents when necessary.

Virtual Agent can be deployed to your website or mobile app via our Chat SDKs, or directly to channels like Apple Messages for Businesses or Google Business Messaging.

While you’ll start off with a baseline set of core dialog capabilities, the Virtual Agent will require thoughful configuration to appropriately handle the use cases specific to your business.

Access

The Virtual Agent is configured through the AI-Console. To access AI-Console, log into Insights Manager, click on your user icon, and then Go to AI-Console. This option will only be available if your organization has granted you permission to access AI-Console.

How It Works

The Virtual Agent understands what customers say and transforms it into structured data that you can use to define how the Virtual Agent responds. This is accomplished via the following core concepts and components:

Intents

Intents are the set of reasons that a customer might contact your business and are recognized by the Virtual Agent when the customer first reaches out.

The Virtual Agent can also understand when a user changes intent in the middle of a conversation (see: digressions).

Our teams can work with you to refine your intent list on an ongoing basis, and train the Virtual Agent to recognize them. Examples include requests to “Pay Bill” or “Reset Password”.

Once an intent is recognized, it can be used to determine what happens next in the dialog.

Intent Routes

Once an intent has been recognized, the next question is “so what?“. Intent routes house the logic that determines what will happen after an intent has been recognized.

• Once a customer’s intent is classified, the default behaviour is for the Virtual Agent to place the customer in an agent queue
• Alternatively, an intent route can be used to specify a pre-defined flow for the Virtual Agent to execute, which can be used to collect additional information, offer solutions, or link a customer out to self-serve elsewhere.
• To promote flexibility, intent routes can point to different flows based on conditional logic that uses contextual data, like customer channels.

Intent Routing

For a comprehensive breakdown of the intent list and routes, please refer to the Intent Routing Selection.

For a comprehensive breakdown of the intent list and routes, please refer to the Intent Routing section.

Flows

Flows define how the Virtual Agent interacts with the customer given a specific situation. They can be as simple as an answer to an FAQ, or as complex as a multi-turn dialog used to offer self-service recommendations. Flows are built through a series of nodes that dictate the flow of the conversation as well as any business logic it needs to perform. Once built, flows can be reached through intent routing, or redirected to from other flows.

Flows

For more information on how flows are built, see our Flow Building Guide

Core Dialog

While much of what the Virtual Agent does is customized in flows, some fundamental aspects are driven by the Virtual Agent’s core dialog system. This system defines the behavior for:

• Welcome experience: The messages that are sent when a chat window is opened, or a first message is received.
• Disambiguation: How the Virtual Agent clarifies ambiguous or vague initial utterances.
• Digressions: How the Virtual Agent handles a new path of dialog when customer expresses a new intent.
• Enqueuement & waiting: How the Virtual Agent transitions customers to live chat, including enqueuement, wait time, & business hours messaging.
• Post-live-chat experience: What the Virtual Agent does when a customer concludes an interaction with a Live agent.
• Error handling: How the Virtual Agent handles API errors or unrecognized customer responses.

If you have any questions about these settings, please contact your ASAPP Team.

Flow Nodes

Flows are built through a series of nodes that dictate the flow of the conversation as well as any business logic it needs to perform.

1. Response Node: The most basic function of a flow is to define how the Virtual Agent should converse with the customer. This is accomplished through response nodes which allow you to configure Virtual Agent responses, send deeplinks, and classify what customers say in return.
2. Login Node When building a flow, you may want to force users to login before proceeding to later nodes in a flow. This is accomplished by adding a login node to your flow that directs the customer to authenticate in order to proceed.
3. PI Node If API integrations are available within the virtual agent, you are able to leverage those integrations to display data dynamically to customers and to route to different responses based on what is returned from an API. API nodes allow for the retrieval of data fields and the usage of that data within a flow.
4. Redirect Node Flows also have the ability to link to one another through the use of redirect notes. This is powerful in situations where the same series of dialog turns appear in multiple flows. Flow redirects allow you to manage those dialog turns in a single location that is referenced by many flows.
5. Agent Node In cases where the flow is unable to address the customer’s concern on its own, an agent node is used to direct the customer to an agent queue. The data associated with this customer will be used to determine the live agent queue to put them in.
6. End Node When your flow has reached its conclusion, an end node wraps up the conversation by confirming whether the customer needs additional help.