Manage smart assist

The new-age customer service industry is moving toward the vision of being intelligent rather than process-driven while interacting with customers. Pivoting on intelligence capabilities helps unleash the productivity of agents to perform better on key performance indicators and—at the same time—deliver better customer experience.

Smart assist is an intelligent assistant that provides real-time recommendations to agents, helping them take actions while interacting with customers. It allows organizations to build a custom bot and plug-in to their environment. These custom bots interpret conversations in real time and provide relevant recommendations such as knowledge articles, similar cases, and next-best steps to the agent's user interface.

The smart assist feature can be enabled across all channels, such as Chat for Dynamics 365 Customer Service, SMS, and Facebook (excluding Entity Records Channel), making it a consistent experience for agents.

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The smart assist recommendations are displayed only after the agent sends a message.

Value proposition

Contextual recommendations are generated based on real-time conversations.

Plug-in organization-specific recommendations are displayed to agents in real time.

Action-oriented recommendations are displayed for agents to send responses or run automated actions.

Intelligence is powered by using Microsoft Azure or third-party capabilities.

Agents can achieve improved average handling time and first call resolution.

Prerequisites

Productivity pane must be enabled. Out of the box, productivity pane is enabled by default.

Smart assist must be enabled.

One of the following:

AI-suggested similar cases and knowledge articles should be enabled by your administrator.

Develop a smart assist bot and integrate it with Omnichannel for Customer Service. The smart-assist bot interprets the conversation context in real time and provides suggestions to agents. For information: Build a smart assist bot using Azure Bot Service.

[!NOTE]
Power Virtual Agents bots aren't supported as smart assist bots.

Enable AI suggestions for similar cases and knowledge articles

To enable AI-suggested similar cases and knowledge articles, see Enable AI suggestions for similar cases and knowledge articles.

Enable smart assist for the bot framework in Omnichannel for Customer Service

To enable smart assist for the bot framework in Omnichannel for Customer Service, perform the following steps:
1. Create a bot user

Add smart assist bot to a workstream

Create a bot user

Create a bot user in the application to work as a smart assistant to the agent. A bot user is created as an application user and assigned the Omnichannel agent role. If your bot needs to search for knowledge base articles, then you need to provide either the Customer Service Manager or Customer Service Representative role.

You can create an application user only in the web client. Use the bot application ID of the smart assist bot to create the bot user. More information: Create a bot user

Add a smart assist bot to a workstream

After you create a bot user, you need to add the bot to the workstream so that agents who use the channel of this workstream can see the suggestions.

In Customer Service admin center, go to Workstreams in Customer support, and select the workstream in which you want to add the smart assist bot.

Expand Advanced settings, and select Add bot in the Smart Assist bots area.

In the Add from existing panel, select a bot user from the list, and then select Add.

You can add multiple bots to a workstream based on your business requirements.

See also

Macros
Agent scripts

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Overview of templates in Customer Service

When you (an agent) get an incoming conversation request, the system searches and opens the records like case, contact, or account. However, your organization might have different requirements and want to use different custom entities and correlate to a conversation.

Also, Omnichannel for Customer Service allows you to open third-party web applications in the application tabs. Your organization might have different line-of-business applications, and while starting a session, you might want to load the line-of-business applications for a specific conversation type.

For example, when you accept an incoming chat conversation notification, a session starts. For every chat session, when the application identifies the customer, you want to open a contact record, related case page, SharePoint site, and the line-of-business application.

To choose the applications you want to open for every session, in accordance with your organization's requirements, session templates are introduced.

You can use the following templates:

Session templates

Application tab templates

Notification templates

See also

Associate templates with workstreams
Understand and create workstream

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