Understanding Agent Assist

Immediate and accurate responses to customer queries are the key to higher customer satisfaction. Providing automated, just-in-time assistance to your agents makes it easier for your team to deliver excellent service. 

Agent Assist is a virtual assistant and a cognitive natural language question-answering system meant to help support staff resolve the visitor’s queries faster. Comm100’s Agent Assist feature helps the agents address the customer queries by presenting them with the relevant information whenever needed.

Note: The word Intent has been used interchangeably with the word Question. An Intent is a question that the visitor has. For example, how can I see my purchase? Or an issue that needs to be resolved by the user. For instance, “I can't log in to my account.”.


Why Comm100 Agent Assist?

It is likely for the agents to lack the necessary resources or capability to resolve customer queries in a limited time. They might own limited training or provide inadequate explanations. The manual and tedious data entry, search, and navigation process to the relevant information directory prevents their instant response capability.

Comm100 Agent Assist operates side-by-side with the agents. It provides relevant information to the agents from your help resources, ensuring instant response and correct information.

You should consider Comm100 Agent Assist because of the following features:

  • Intent discovery: Comm100 Agent Assist identifies the customer’s intent by mapping and extracting the relevant data from any given information directory.
  • Call resolution support: Comm100 Agent Assist checks whether the customer’s information exists in the database and then shares it with third-party CRM data using webhooks. It provides instant insights into your customer details.
  • Process automation: Comm100 Agent Assist increases productivity by expediting the response time of agents. Agents make use of readily available information about the customer and intents.
  • Contextual support: Agents can use the data provided by the bot for next-best-action-alerts, insights, and guidance based on the ongoing context of the communication with the customer.
  • System and knowledge integration: The Comm100 Agent Assist bot integrates with the existing customer service system. It lets you work with your system without the need for any additional training to use the bot. You can integrate or add relevant data into the help resource to enrich the Agent Assist bot’s suggestions.

 

Agent Assist Workflow

Agents receive answer suggestions from knowledge articles, chatbot intents, and canned messages matching with the intents in the agent console. If Agent Assist is enabled, then Agent Assist receives the chat support request whenever the Live Chat or Ticketing & Messaging request escalates to an agent.

Agent Assist identifies, matches, extracts, and stores the customer’s intents using artificial intelligence and natural language understanding algorithms. It identifies and locates the keywords of the customer’s intent with its content sources and provides the agent console’s relevant results.

Agent Assist recognizes intent using its help resources containing similar questions and synonyms of different keywords and phrases. It delivers some suggestions to the agent by computing and matching the contextual intent with its help resources based on the confidence score.

You can set the number of suggestions and the minimum confidence score for the suggestions to be displayed in the agent console. Agent Assist delivers suggestions with the highest score as possible answers to the intent.

Figure 1. illustrates an overview of the workflow of Agent Assist.

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Using Comm100 Agent Assist in Agent Console

You can use Comm100 Agent Assist for receiving matching answers. When the visitor questions the agent, the Agent Assist maps the question to its content sources, fetches the matching results, and presents it to the agent. The agent has the option to preview the suggested answer or send it directly to the visitor.

With a single click on the suggested answer, the typing field populates with the response. With a double-click, the suggested answer is sent directly to the visitor. 

Agents can also choose to ignore the suggestion and send a custom answer to the customer.

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When a visitor sends multiple questions, the agent can select the question for suggestions from Agent Assist. The agent needs to hover over the questions to select the specific question and click the Show Agent Assist Suggestions button.

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Adding Agent Assist Synonyms

Agent Assist produces suggestions by recognizing a keyword. Intents can be exhibited in different possible ways depending on different situational contexts by the customer.

A word can be used differently based on location or local dialects, identity, and user situation. It is essential to list all the possible words associated with a keyword for recognition by Agent Assist. The availability of a good set of training data for a word enables the bot to understand more variations of phrases.

Comm100 Agent Assist allows you to maintain a repository of words associated with intents and train them for a single keyword. The more words you feed into its synonym data, the smarter it becomes.

 To add synonyms, follow these steps:

  1. Log in to your Comm100 Control Panel.
  2. From the left navigation menu, go to Bot > Agent Assist > Synonyms.
  3. Click New Agent Assist Synonym.
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    The New Agent Assist Synonym page displays.
  4. In the Keyword text field, type a word.
  5. In the Synonym text field, type a synonym.
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  6. Click Save.
    Comm100 saves all the synonyms associated with the keyword.

 

Agent Assist Confidence Score

When a client types an intent, Agent Assist measures its accuracy while matching it with its existing help resources. The accuracy represents a number or score. The score indicates the confidence that the suggestion or result is the right match for the customers’ intent. The higher the score, the greater the match and accuracy in the answer.

The confidence score ranges from 0 to 100, where 0 represents no match, and 100 represents an exact match.

For an intent, Agent Assist provides multiple suggestions in decreasing order. The first suggestion represents the best matching answer, and the last suggestion represents the least confidence score.

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Figure 2- illustrates the possible score ranges for different answer types.

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The table indicates the typical confidence associated with the answers and scores, as illustrated in Figure 2.

Example Answers

 Confidence Score Value

Score Meaning

“You can update your phone number in the account using the following steps:”

85 to 100

Exact match to the customer’s intent

“Please follow the steps below to change or edit your contact details:”

> 70 (Greater than 70)

High confidence answer – completely matching to the customer’s intent

“You can visit the settings page to change the number you’re reachable to.”

50 to 70

Medium confidence answer – fairly to somehow matching to the customer’s intent

“If you’ve updated the details, it’ll reflect in your account in 24 hours.”

30 to 50

Low confidence answer – contains some matching keywords and partially matching to the customer’s intent.

“Below are the plans you can choose from:”

< 30 (Less than 30)

Very low confidence answer- not relevant to the customer’s intent. 

Choose the threshold that suits your need. If you need accurate answers, then set the threshold to a higher score. If your objective is to answer as many questions as possible, then reduce the threshold to a lesser score.

You can easily set or change the minimum score and the number of suggestions as per your need.

 

Setting the Confidence Score and Number of Suggestions

To set the confidence score and number of suggestions, follow these steps:

  1. Log in to your Comm100 Control Panel.
  2. From the left navigation menu, go to Bot > Agent Assist > General Settings.
  3. On the General Settings page, turn on the Agent Assist toggle key.
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  4. In the Options section:
    1. Set the value of the confidence score in the range of 0-100.
    2. Set the maximum number of suggestions.
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    3. Click Save.
Note:  A very low score can affect all your suggestions and bot behavior. Comm100 recommends setting it in a limited number of scenarios.