hi everyone and welcome to this edition of virtual agent academy my name is paul von nistroy and today we're going to talk about streamlining the virtual agent to live agent routing experience so i'm not alone this evening or this afternoon i'm accompanied by some of my colleagues who i'll briefly introduce um marcel goodsol is from hr product management and bill usb from our conversational interface uh product management team as is scott rhodes also conversation conversational interface so the topic of today i said is virtual agent to live agent handoff the agenda for today uh before i start with the agenda if there's any questions throughout this presentation i feel free to post those questions in the chat we will have people looking at that and we'll have moments during the session today that we'll come back to those questions um right our goals for today is first of all to make clear um what routing from virtualization to life agent means and why it is required at some point in time and we're going to talk specifically out at supporting multi-department live asian transfer and with multi-department live agent transfer we mean a question can be excuse me handed off to either the it department or the hi hr department or the finance department et cetera and and what can we build in in terms of mechanisms to make sure that uh the agent chat is handed off to the live department to the right department and to the right live agent and the third topic for today will be advanced work assignment i'm going to talk about what it is i'm going to show you a little bit about what it looks like and how it can help make sure that the conversations end up at the right agent right let's jump right in so transitioning users from virtual agent to live agent support across multiple departments so the assumption is that there's an end user who started the conversation using virtual agent and at some point in time that conversation needs to be handed over to a live agent using chat so let's first of all look at a little bit of the context and you may have seen this slide before this is really the full picture from left to right as to how an end users can start a conversation uh using their channel of choice right whether it's our portal our mobile device it's team it's slack and then there's a few and then that conversation ends up at the virtual agent that's the symbol in the middle and the virtual agent being part of the platform has extras who has access to a ton of information that can be relevant right from the start of that conversation but it recognizes the user so it can provide a personalized greeting it can notify the user of outages so it can preempt having a question or issue being raised it knows which cases or which incidents or which other issues may be open so it can ask the end user is this what you um would like to ask your question about and all this is being very uh proactive so it really prevents the end user from typing anything in that we already know of that end user and it doesn't only stop with providing knowledge or information on how to do things it actually resolves some of the issues as well easy actions like resetting a password providing access to a specific server or ordering something from a catalog or even using our integrations uh leveraging data from outside of the platform at certain points during the conversation or maybe at the end of the conversation there may be a need to hand over the conversation to a live agent right and because we now know all of the context of of the uh conversation of the topic uh that the end user wants to uh i don't know more information about or the issue they want to have resolved we now can use all that information to route that info to write that conversation to the best possible live agent specifically today we're going to look at whether there's multiple departments how do we how do we set that up how do we set up the conversation in such a way or how do we learn from the conversation in such a way that we understand which department needs to be routed to if i would double click on the last portion of this slide it could look something like this employee started the conversation there could be different topics and using smart routing will find the right department and the right user so finding the right department is based on the conversation itself right so the smart routing for it service management incidents or requests obviously you need to be routed to the i.t department hr etc um so that's really what the multi-department hand of the live agent is all about and we're going to show you some ways of doing that in today's session now let's take one step back and ask ourselves so what would be what could be a potential reason for conversations to be handed off to a live agent uh there's a couple of reasons we can think about first of all it could be an automatic transfer to a live agent when something unexpected occurs this can be an error or something doesn't work as expected and we have no clue whatsoever in that situation the conversation automatically transfers to a live agent a second situation is when upfront the topic author defines that at a certain point in the conversation it would be best to hand over to a live agent this can be when we don't have sufficient information to handle this ourselves or when the issue or question at hand is too complicated to be solved by a virtual agent or there could be a different situations as well and then the third option here is a menu will transfer to a live agent upon the user request so now it's the user who decides i would like to speak to a live agent right then they can either use the connect support option at the top of the uh chat interface or they can type something like please contact me to a live agent and both will then be redirected to a live agent all right so those can be some of the situations that we encounter um what that would look like for the end user and for the agent is something like uh it shows on this page here on the left hand side the conversation for the end user continues in the same chat window the same console right as if the user would be talking to the virtual agent only now this user is talking to a live agent and the live agent we're showing the agent workspace visualization here sees the conversation this is what we meant with knows the context context so he sees the entire conversation up to the point that the live agent handover took place so the live agent doesn't have to ask all sorts of questions that the virtual agents already asked because we know that information all right now there's one more thing that you can ask yourself so i can understand how we can hand it off to the right team but within that team how do we know to who to hand it off with which specific agent we would like to handle this specific request or question best and for this we can use advanced work assignment and on the left hand side you can see there's different types of input today we'll be looking at chats coming in but that could be cases incidents uh walk-up centers all sorts of work that needs to be routed using specific queues and you see some queues in the middle here on the blue cylinders like product chat building chat flip chat but then it needs to be assigned to the best agent now what is the best agent we can look at a certain number of things as i said in the title here we can look at availability so which of the agents has the highest availability we can look at capacity right so what's the what's this specific workload of an individual agent and we can also look at skills so we can even use specific skills that the agent either has or aspires to learn to be used as a mechanism to assign the work to the the benefits of advanced work assignment are huge i mean this is something that takes away a lot of the manual triaging it also takes away a number of the inefficiencies right rather than work piling up at somebody who happens to be the expert but already has a lot of work all your way around as finding it to somebody who doesn't have a huge workload but doesn't have the skills that's all inefficiencies and by using advanced work assignment we can take away those user inefficiencies and the whole process will run smoother all right that said let me first ask if there's any questions that have come in on the chat before i hand over to myself any any questions no questions so far so i'll say that's really quiet but luckily that's um the sound all right marcel i am i'd like to hand over to you then um you're going to take it from here sure thank you paul um so for today's build exercise we're going to take a very basic use case on how to look at how virtual agent to live agent transfer supports transferring between an hrq or an itq and paul if you can go to the next slide please we are under some assumptions for today's exercise so we are going to assume that this is coming from a unified portal strategy meaning an organization has one main portal and from that main portal users can access virtual agent they can access information across different departments and as such they're going to need a live agent strategy that helps route the user to the correct department based on the type of question or preference that they select secondly we're going to assume that the organization is on advanced work assignments so um chat or connect support which is our legacy chat is not going to be in today's scope so we'll be sharing what that user experience could look like using advanced work assignment and the use of agent workspace in agent chat and assuming an organization is using virtual agent currently or currently has a chat strategy so that governance process has been thought out and it's a question of how do we actually set this up so paul i'm going to quickly take control of the screen okay and let's go ahead and start our build exercise so you'll notice we're on the chat setup window and i wanted to start here because this is where you really need to set your foundation for the live agent support discussion and you'll notice i have a couple options here so i want to make sure my live chat is enabled um i can select an option to allow users to download a transcript of that chat session and i may want to set a wait time right and the wait time again is being calculated by a business role that's based on the previous 20 chats that have come in so that's going to be a dynamic calculation that shows for that end user now what's most important here is see where you have the fulfiller uis we want to make sure that we have agent workspace selected so for today's demonstration we're going to be using agent workspace but you can see that i have the option to select connect support as well from here but just make sure that your fulfiller uis are selected to the right chat routing engine that you currently support and then not uh last but not least down at the bottom we have what we call context variables and basically these are components of information that describe um something about that chat experience right so the application context variable really refers to am i using connect support or am i using advanced work assignment your device type that could be portal that could be mobile um your language your portal if you have separate portals as well as what type of queue so just make note these are variables that you can pull into virtual agent and utilize them as needed to set the right type of experience so if we switch over to our virtual agent designer having covered that we want to set up a brand new topic here so this is going to be created as a topic some organizations have set this as a reusable topic block so that you can reuse it in different types of scenarios or put this in the fallback so we'll just call this va live agent handoff and i'm going to select a category for it so maybe i want to say it's a setup topic and i'm going to say it's a topic but you can see here i could have selected topic block if i wanted something like this to be reusable now before we proceed any further i want to make sure i pull in my live agent variables to use and this is where i want to pull in my application variable but if i wanted to set this up using a particular queue and i wanted to say want something to be you know specifically routed to this queue i would use the live agent queue but for purposes because i want to set it to the application that maybe hrit is using i'm going to select that application context variable so i've selected that and i previously built an nlu intent in a model so i'm just going to pull that through and then we're going to hit create so back on the blank canvas we may want to start with a prompt so if i simply drag that over i'm going to say which department which department do you need assistance with and we can enable nlu because we want that intent to be discoverable with an utterance and now comes the fun part so we can add some labels so we can say something is broken or i need help with access right so this is going to be something that describes the itq whereas if i say something about my employment or a direct report that is something that is going to describe an hr type queue so we're going to save that and now we get into our utility so we have a decision to make at this point and our decision is going to be based on the user's input do we route that q to hr do we route it to it so i can set this to be hr and what we're going to do is just grab that input so something about my employment and then we're going to say this other branch is going to be i t and we are going to add the itq so something is broken okay so now we've set our decision and we are going to now grab a script action and this is where we want to show our live agent variables so see because i added that in the properties it's showing up here so we can say set hrq and we're just going to do a really simple query here so we are going to use va variables and we're going to say live vars and we're going to say live agent application equals hr right because that's going to be it's a system variable here but that's going to be a prefix to set that hrq we're going to close that command and use a system variable so we're going to say is live agent available and then copy that so we're going to do the same exact thing over on the it side so i'm going to drag another one over so we're going to set the itq here and we're just going to copy paste but now we're going to change this to itsm because that is the system variable that sets the i t side q so lastly we're going to connect this to a live agent so we've established our cue connections and now we're going to do live agent handoff and we're going to add one more query and here we are gonna say let's just get rid of this va system connect to agent and we are almost done we're going to link these two because again we want it to fork and and set that so now we're going to publish this so we've built our live agent handoff so now as an end user so assuming i'm coming in and just utilizing virtual agent for some assistance so i could say something like help with distribution list because maybe i'm coming here and i'm a new manager and i need some assistance with a distribution list and i'm going to add to the list but it prompts me to enter an email and maybe i'm like well you know i would rather see a list of emails i'm not sure what to do i need to contact a live agent so i can say live agent to trigger that topic and i can say something is broken or i need help with an access issue and i can be routed over to my it agent here and so you'll notice in the agent workspace for it i'm accepting that incoming chat and it can say how long i have to accept that chat and if bess who my it agent is isn't available or her status is set to something besides available maybe she's away or on a lunch break it will round robin to the other individuals sitting in that queue um so again very different from the model for connect support or maybe your resident expert could be overloaded and can't get to all the chats so here i have an estimated wait time you know and beth can come in and say hello how can i help and she can start interacting with that end user so you know you can continue the chat here but let's end the conversation and let's show what that hr experience looks like so i am requesting now again to speak with a live agent and i'm going to say something about my employment or a direct report so this could really be anything related to employment but you can see my expected wait time is less than a minute because maybe my chat department isn't super overloaded at this point so as roger seed who's my hr agent we can accept that particular chat coming in um and again as paul mentioned you can see the context right so on that previous example with the it agent maybe bess over here could see the user had some issues with a distribution list um and they actually requested to connect the live agent at a certain point in that conversation so she has some indication there's some assistance required setting that list up so there's some context whereas on the hr agent side maybe we don't have contacts but we can ask the user what they need assistance with so i'll pause there are there any questions from the audience at this point okay no questions all right there are two questions sorry um one question is does the client use the virtual agent designer or is it only for internal use um i'm not sure i understand is the the question more who would be using the designer to set something like this up can you provide some more information ah the answer is yes that is the question hey marcel i think i think if the client hears is the end user um no the end user does not use the virtual agent designer the designer is intended only for the author to build a topic there and publish it and then all the requesters which means here the client i hope they will be able to use these topics but the designer is only dedicated to the one who built this and usually it's admins okay uh the second question myself that came in is and i'm not sure at what point exactly the question was asked is is this similar to using pre-chat survey yeah that's a great question um it is and pre-chat can be really useful maybe if you're not necessarily using virtual agent or you are using virtual agent and maybe there's some clarifying questions to get it to the right queue maybe you have several cues um so yeah i mean pre-chat is definitely an option but scott i'm not sure if you had some more information you could share yeah i can add it yeah sure like pre-chat is something that's available in the base license so we needed a way that base license chat customers could use could gather some information that could be used for routing uh but virtual agent is like the step up think of it you know that's the more advanced thing a lot more logic you can do so you can definitely use pre-chat to do this but the capabilities are more basic with what you can do with virtual agent that's it no more questions at this point myself okay great and one thing to mention too so when paul shared that slide of the different ways to reach out and connect notice there's um the ability to contact support here so if i initiate a new conversation that window will um become active this cue is actually um you can't really set multiple cues from this particular spot so if you choose to have this active you may want to have a designated cue that handles this so this contact live agent is actually set if you navigate over to agent it's actually set in this particular area um so if we pull this up you can designate you know if you did have a multiple portal strategy you could have different cues set to to invoke from that window or that chat client but in this case because we're talking about a more unified portal um you can see that i have the live agent application in this particular portal just set to pick up to hr um so that's one consideration you really can't branch it from this particular area um so the options here are to really have a designated queue or even you know turn this off or deactivate it if it's if it's not serving to your benefit so that really wraps up the the virtual agent chat client experience now the other component of this is around advanced work assignment because we want to talk about how these things got routed in the first place and so you'll notice i have an area here right and for those who haven't seen advanced work assignment this might be a little bit unfamiliar but you're going to have a menu item called service channels that and then you have your cues that you may have for hr it finance other departments and how information gets to the right queue using assignment rules present states really speak to you know is is the user away are they available and then reasons for rejection if they can't take a particular chat so under service channels we're just going to take a look at chat but you can see there's other channels supported and if we go in here we can just see the type is designated as chat so that's what you want to select as you set this up and capacity and utilization is a fairly new concept but it's really what gives advanced work assignment the power behind the routing engine to get it routed to the right agent based on skill capacity availability so you can set things like default work size so maybe i don't want people to have more than four chats at once maybe for my top multi-taskers they can handle that but maybe i even want to scale that down a little bit and underneath here you can see where the cues maps to those service channels so all i'm doing is i'm actually in the queue menu and i can see all the different cues that could be related to this particular service menu so maybe on the it chat queue if we take a look at how items get routed using this particular chat i can see that i've selected using um a two-tier dot walk so i'm actually selecting my context application remember we looked at those context variables on the chat setup so i'm actually pulling that variable to say i want it routed if it says itsm and i want it routed to this particular agent group here based on this assignment role so this assignment rule could be capacity based it could be skill based um and you know i can have multiple different groups but for this for demo purposes we just have one here now let's take a look at an hr type queue i'm going to pull up the payroll queue because this one's a little bit more complex so if we take a peek at what payroll looks like you'll see that there's instead of a simple query we have something a little bit more advanced and this is where you could use advanced work assignment to say i want it based on a particular pre-chat category i want it available if the user is in a particular hr topic or they have selected a particular conversation from virtual agent so you can really use a lot of logic in here to really be specific about what type of work gets routed to what type of queue and you can see i have my payroll group here that may be specialists handling this particular type of queue the present states are important so you'll notice on my users if we go back to let's say roger he has the option to say i'm available maybe just for case today or maybe just for chat um so he can set or have this presence state defaulted for him and then reject reasons right so if you're tracking this what's the reason my agent is being um or rejecting this cue right is it not their expertise or they're just too busy um lastly we will end up on the operations dashboard so out of box this is leveraging performance analytics to give you a bird's eye view of what's going on with all of your different live chats so you might have waiting work items available agents and depending on your persona right if you're the q manager the team manager or the channel owner you're going to see items like how long am i users waiting how many chats we're handling etc so this is out of box for advanced work assignment so just jumping back now over to some frequently asked questions um we covered a couple of these in the demonstration but i just wanted to to share this with everyone because these questions come up quite a bit um and it's kind of beneficial to talk through these but something like well if i'm using a virtual agent survey um what survey gets sent to the user if they transfer over to a live agent and the answer is once they transfer to a live agent they're going to get the live agent survey they're not going to get the virtual agent survey so that's something you may want to consider when you know if you if you do invoke a live agent strategy the second one how do i calculate cue wait time using advanced work assignment and as we previously mentioned it's a business rule that calculates wait time based on the previous 20 records so it's a dynamic rule you're free to change it but out of box that's the logic that we ship it with the next one can i go back to virtual agent directly from live agent without starting a new conversation so today we don't have the ability to go back but it's very simple just to initiate a new conversation if you have an additional question but it's not possible for the live agent to transfer you directly back to the virtual agent another one can i use connect support for some queues in awa for others absolutely and that's the reason we gave you the flexibility on the chat setup page to set your application to either connect or advanced work assignment and then can it and hr operate independently from one another if let's say it or hr wants to begin configuring advanced work assignment first the answer is yes you can operate independently but on the chat side you probably want to come together in some sort of governance strategy to figure out what that live agent experience is going to look like but essentially when you get down to the workspace level those are completely separate plug-ins separate products so if you want to operate independently on the workspace side that's fine it's just suggested that you you know kind of have some sort of joint strategy if both organizations plan to have a chat strategy at some point and lastly does the three dot menu on the chat client support multiple cues and the answer to that is no we discuss some options maybe you want to have a designated cue or simply deactivate that feature so that wraps up today's presentation we can open it up for questions thing i want to point out marcel is on the connect support option versus the agent workspace option is that starting in paris for new instances it's actually that part is hidden because we don't give connect as an option so you might see differences if you're looking at customers or previous customers as opposed to new customers or new instances now the reason for that is because connect is kind of in a maintenance mode where we're not adding new features to it so we're trying to encourage people to move over to agent workspace awa but if you do run into a customer where they absolutely need to use customer connect support for whatever reason it is possible to enable to get to that point um you need to open a ticket through support as a maintenance request i just wanted to point that out if you see differences thanks marcel no thanks scott do we have any other questions from the audience this is not in the chat i think that's one q a i think we have one about domain separation so the question is what the main level support level is this and the question was asked just a minute ago so i think this has to do with advanced work assignment whether it's domain separated i'm not sure if that's it yeah i don't know if it's awa or your top workspace in general i can't really comment specifically on workspace because i know they're doing they're doing some stuff to make it fully domain separate but there were some issues i think with agent workspace in general in awa um i'm not sure i don't know exactly the level of support but it's fully should support domain separation we went through many exercises in this and we do have customers that are using domain separation today all right anything else any last comments um no there's no more chats for q and a's coming in so i think that's it okay great thank you everybody and we'll see you in two weeks