Smart assist

  • 3 minutes

Customer service organizations are moving from process-driven, customer-driven interactions toward delivering intelligent solutions. Organizations are using AI to provide contextual details to agents based on what is occurring at that moment. This ability to pivot based on intelligence helps agents perform better on key performance indicators (KPIs) and deliver a better customer experience. As agents become more efficient and productive, the organization's cost of operating the call center drops.

Smart assist can help organizations become more intelligent. Smart assist is an intelligent assistant that provides real-time recommendations to agents to help them more effectively act on items while interacting with customers.

By using smart assist, organizations can build custom bots that they can plug into environments to help interpret conversations in real time and provide relevant recommendations to agents, in the context of the current conversation. Companies can use this functionality to attach recommendations that are specific to their organization. For example, as an agent works with a customer, smart assist can suggest relevant knowledge articles or identify similar cases that could potentially help an agent find a solution. Additionally, action-oriented recommendations can be provided to help run automated actions such as next-best steps or actions. The information is presented to agents by using Microsoft Adaptive cards that are displayed through the user interface.

Smart assist can be enabled for non-entity-based channels such as chat, Short Message Service (SMS) messages, Facebook, and more, to provide a consistent experience for agents.

High-level steps to deploy a smart assist bot

After you've created a smart assist bot, you'll need to enable it in your environment.

The following five steps are needed to enable smart assist and deliver intelligent suggestions to users in Omnichannel for Customer Service and Customer Service Workspace:

  1. Create author adaptive cards that will render content. These cards act as a content delivery system that allows data to be consumed and rendered in multiple applications, while maintaining the application's appearance and behavior.

  2. Build a smart assist bot. Define the automation that will be used in real time, locate the data to be presented to the agent, and specify the adaptive card to be displayed.

  3. Create a bot user. A bot user acts as a smart assistant to the agent. This application user will use the smart assist bot that was created. For example, to search for knowledge articles, you can create a bot user that points to the smart assist bot and has been assigned the necessary permissions to access knowledge articles that will need to be created in the application.

  4. Add a smart assist bot to a work stream. This addition ensures that the created bot user is included in the work stream so any agents who are part of that work stream can see suggestions that the bot provides. For example, a live chat work stream that is used with authenticated and unauthenticated chats would have the knowledge article smart assist bot added to help locate potential knowledge articles.

Potentially helpful articles found by the smart assist bot are displayed to the agent in the productivity pane.

For more information on how to deploy Smart assist, Create smart assist solutions in Dynamics 365 Customer Service..