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Ask The Experts: Getting the most out of Smart Assistant

David Fulton,Product Manager, Web Experience Center Of Excellence,

July 2010

Agenda

Presentation (15 minutes):Overview of the uses that Smart Assistant can be put to

Review of what we refer to as ‘the continuum of Smart Assistant applications’

Review of how the various applications of the capability can be realized in incident rules

Overview of best practices covering all use cases.

Overview of future roadmap for Smart Assistant

Discussion (45 minutes)

Uses of Smart Assistant

What is Smart Assistant?Smart Assistant is the capability to parse an incoming request and determine whether there is knowledgebase content that potentially resolves the issue

Smart Assistant supports two use cases:Automated responses to consumers

• Through incident rules for:– Offering smart assistant when the consumer is submitting a

question through the web (and before an incident has been created)– Responding to email that is directed straight to your service mailbox

Manual selection by agents• When working an incident• When working a chat interaction

Offer on all Incoming Requests

Offer to Certain User Types

The Smart Assistant Continuum

The KB covers the

vast majority of customer

enquiries

The KB covers the

vast majority of customer

enquiries

Offer on Certain Request Types

The KB won’t answer all customer questions

Offer in very specific cases

Contain Costs

Interact with

Customers by default

Provide Preferential

Service

Interact on certain

requests

The KB won’t answer all customer questions

Offer Smart Assistant in All Cases

The incident rule on the right applies the highest level of coverage on incoming requests

No account taken for customer characteristics, request content or source

Typically one of the initial rules in the rule-base

Not typically restricted in this use case – you’ll typically restrict when you have a number of rule conditions

Offer Smart Assistant for Inbound Email

Smart Assistant can also be used to direct users away from email submissions

This example rule applies a response template & smart assistant – and automatically responds to the originator

Smart Assistant becomes part of the automated email response

Offer Smart Assistant to certain users

In this scenario we use a customer characteristic to determine whether smart assistant is presented

Note –not all fields on the contact record can be used in this fashion – SLA for example

If this is an existing customer (custom field) then offer the smart assistant response

Offer Smart Assistant based on certain request types

In this scenario we are using characteristics of the request to determine an offer

This is a useful technique to avoid offering smart assistant content when the specificity of the customer request will make generic answer content inappropriate

If this Is a question about rebates or refunds or the customer talks to returns or replacements, don’t offer a smart assistant response

Offer Smart Assistant based on certain request types

The following scenario is where the restrict product or category choices on the rule are typically utilized

This technique is useful to stop content with similar concepts but on other parts of the product or taxonomy tree to filter into the results

When the request is about product information, only include answers with that category

Offer Smart Assistant in very specific cases

In this scenario you will only offer up Smart Assistant in very specific scenarios:

perhaps using a combination of incident or contact data to determine an offerthe offer would likely be the exception to the rule

You may also decide to use characteristics of the users session on the web to determine an offer – through a capability in Customer Portal called conditions

Lets look at a simple example, used by default in the current reference implementation

Offer Smart Assistant in very specific cases

In Customer Portal, within the ask.php page, there is a simple condition that uses the context of the interaction to determine a presentation:

 

<rn:condition answers_viewed="2" searches_done="1">

        <rn:condition_else/>

            <rn:widget path="input/SmartAssistantDialog"/>

        </rn:condition>

This means that if 2 or more answers (a >= value is inherent) are viewed or one or more searches have been done in the visit, don’t show the smart assistant dialog

This condition can be removed, edited (increased etc)

Best Practices

Smart Assistant is just another way of looking at SearchAll of the capabilities that govern search (weightings, keywords, product/category taxonomies, exclude lists, synonyms etc) will apply to your Smart Assistant Results.

Make sure those assistive capabilities are tuned!

A number of our search technologies are used to determine ranking:

Smart Assistant works by doing a search with your submitted content against the knowledgebase

After those initial results are discovered, it then treats the customer request as if it was an answer, and compares it against browse trees (clusters of answers) to see which area it would ‘fit’ within

SA_NL_MATCH_THRESHOLD can be used if you want to ensure that your content is associated with closely matching clusters (the default) or best matching clusters – the latter being much more restrictive on the content that will be returned.

Best Practices

As finding matching content is a ‘search’ problem, the responses that Smart Assistant provides are only as good as the content in your knowledgebase

Ensure that your taxonomy choices within answers are appropriate – spot check answers for correct content and structure

Pay attention to alias (thesuarus.txt) and incident stop lists (exclude_answers.txt)

Spot check incidents to see the responses given to consumers on the web – investigate smart assistant suggestions that you don’t feel are appropriate

• Anomalies will suggest that there is something in your search tuning or content that needs tweaked

If in doubt, schedule a knowledge base tune-up with RightNow

Keep in mind that submission of a question on the web is a two step process where Smart Assistant is involved.

Look at your message base entries for the Smart Assistant dialog to ensure that you are reducing abandonment by having a strong call to action.

Roadmap for Smart Assistant (Short Term)

Modify Smart Assistant to automatically filter previously viewed answers out of the suggested answer list

More granular abandonment reporting:  more granularity on user activity when they abandon out of a smart assistant dialog

Look at establishing more a configurable “confidence threshold” for Smart Assistant results.  If SA does not provide good answers then do not display them

Create a new canned report for “WSS Resolution Rate” - display and trend the number of users who view an answer (or guide) and do not escalate to the Ask a Question or Chat channel

Roadmap for Smart Assistant (Long Term)

Smart Assistant 2.0Natural language processing to identify the most important keywords to feed to Smart Assistant.

Application of “grammar lenses” established from clustering existing KB content.

Elaborate on the continuum model for customers allowing them to define how strictly deflection is applied.

More contextual rules tied to user behaviors to determine whether an offer is made

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