In a typical help desk, a customer describes a problem over the ticket to an agent who asks questions and tries to diagnose and fix the issue. It's a time-consuming, painstaking, and frustrating experience for many customers, especially those who prefer self-service. In comes the Zia Answer Bot, an intelligent bot for your web and mobile apps that automatically and instantly resolves your customers' most common questions. Zia Answer Bot uses machine learning techniques to identify questions it can handle while letting your team solve the rest.
So how does it work?
As soon as the customer asks a question, Zia Answer Bot responds to it with relevant articles from the knowledge base. As the Bot suggests articles, customers can click the "thumbs-up" and "thumbs-down" buttons to refine recommendations. This way, Zia Answer Bot learns which help article is best suited to answer specific questions.
Benefits
Here are some of the benefits of incorporating Zia Answer Bot in your help desk:
- Delight customers by resolving problems faster and enable your support team to focus on things only they can do.
- Improve self-service efficiency while reducing the cost of providing support.
- Reduce repetitive work so your agents can focus on processing more service requests.
- Increase customer engagement and enhance your company's brand and image.
Building Answers for your Bot
Before you enable Zia Answer Bot for your web and mobile apps, it's essential to prepare your knowledge base articles. By adding a lot of knowledge base articles, you make your Bot capable of answering customer questions in the most digestible way. Keep in mind that if a KB article doesn't exist, your Zia Answer Bot won't be able to deliver the answer to your customer, at which point they can submit a ticket for further assistance.
Here are some tips for writing articles for the Bot:
- Keep the contents of the article brief and relevant. Customers prefer FAQs over long-form content.
- Write in a simple and easy-to-understand language without jargon and technical terms.
- Add appropriate resources such as photos, videos, screenshots, or GIFs.
- Identify topics that require new articles to be added.
Note:
- You must have at least 30 articles available in your knowledge base to use Answer Bot.
- Power your knowledge base with more articles to help improve Answer Bot's ability over time.
Enabling Answer Bot
Enabling Answer Bot is a simple process that you can do in a click without wasting much time or effort.
To enable Answer Bot:
- Click the Setup icon ( ) in the top bar.
- Click Zia under the General menu.
- On the Zia settings page, select the department from the top of the page.
Answer Bot will be enabled for the department chosen here. On the bottom of the page, toggle on Answer Bot.
Answer Bot now taps into all the KBase articles added to your help desk and suggests them to your customers to resolve their issues.
Personalizing Answer Bot
Now that you've enabled Answer Bot for your help desk, it's essential to name your Bot and set appropriate greeting messages to integrate it into your workflow.
To personalize Answer Bot:
- Click the Setup icon ( ) in the top bar.
- Click Zia under the General menu.
- On the Zia settings page, click Personalize Bot under Answer Bot settings.
The Personalize Bot panel will open on the right side of the window.
- On the Personalize Bot window, do the following:
- Enter a name for the Bot
- Enter the greeting message that will appear in the conversation screen when an end user opens it up for the first time
- Enter the message to be used by the Bot to respond whenever it's unable to resolve a customer's input
- Enter the message to be used by the Bot to respond whenever the end user down-votes its answer
- Click Save.
Voilà, your Bot is on its merry botting way.
Training Zia Bot
Zia Bot is a self-learning bot that learns from the success of its interactions and becomes even better. So the moment you enable Zia Bot, she will start learning from your article database. Remember that this may take several minutes or even hours, depending on the data size, but it usually takes 5-10 minutes with less than 100 articles. Besides the initial learning, Zia Bot also relearns over time. For example, when an article suggested by Zia leads to a resolution, it uses this feedback to assist customers with similar issues.
Nevertheless, even with automated learning, there will still be areas where bots run into trouble. For instance, you may want to suggest to customers a couple of articles you've just added. But the Bot isn't learning as fast you'd like. At this point, you need to train the Bot for the new intents manually.
To train the Bot manually:
- Click the Setup icon ( ) in the top bar.
Click Zia under the General menu.
- On the Zia settings page, click Update the Bot under Answer Bot settings.
The Bot will now begin to train itself for the new intents.
Enabling Zia Answer Bot for the Help Center
By enabling Zia Bot for the Help Center, you can introduce machine-learning powered article suggestions to your customers when they access your Help Center. Note that it is the ASAP add-on that provides end-customers with access to Zia Bot.
Prerequisites
- The ASAP widget must be enabled and connected to an active Help Center.
- You must have enabled Answer Bot for the department associated with the Help Center.
To enable Answer Bot for the Help Center:
- Click the Setup icon ( ) in the top bar.
- Click ASAP under the Channels menu.
The list of ASAP add-ons configured in your help desk portal appears.
- Click the Show in help center icon ( ) corresponding to the add-on.
The ASAP widget icon is displayed in your Help Center.
Your customers can now click the ASAP icon on the Help Center to see a chat window and a greeting from the Zia Bot.