Tutorial: Build a conversational assistant

Last Update: Sep 2024 • Est. Read Time: 7 MIN
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With Customer Assist, conversational assistants can help you collect information from customers before they connect with an agent to speed up response times and close conversations more quickly.

In this article, we’ll learn how to build a conversational assistant that prompts the customer for basic information (for example, the customer’s name and the team they want to reach) and then, based on the collected information, connects the customer to an agent from the appropriate support team.

Who can access this feature?
User typesAdmins can access the Customer Assist page.


In this article

Prerequisites

If you are new to conversational assistants in Kustomer, see Introduction to Customer Assist before you begin this tutorial.

Tutorial overview

You can build conversational assistants to use across your brands with Customer Assist.

Follow along with the tutorial below to learn how to set up a basic assistant with the following sections:

  • Add a new conversational assistant
  • Create and edit dialogs and dialog interactions
  • Link dialogs into a flow
  • Save, publish, and manage conversational assistant versions

Through this tutorial, we will build a sample conversational assistant that asks the customer for their name and the team they'd like to reach before the assistant transfers the customer to an agent from the selected team. 

Add a new conversational assistant

First, we’ll create a new conversational assistant from the Customer Assist page.

To add a new conversational assistant:

  1. Go to Settings > Kustomer IQ > Customer Assist.

    On the Customer Assist page, select Add Assistant to create a new conversational assistant.
  2. In the Add Assistant box, enter an Internal Name, Description, and Public Name for the assistant:
    • Internal Name: Required. Appears as the name listed for the assistant on the Customer Assist page in Kustomer. Use a short descriptive name that will help you manage your conversational assistants.
    • Description: Optional. A brief description of the assistant that appears in your Kustomer app.
    • Public Name: Recommended. The display name of your conversational assistant to appear for customers in the chat widget.

Note: You can update the Internal Name, Description, and Public Name later under Assistant Settings in the assistant editor.


Select Create to open the editor for the assistant.

Create and edit dialogs

Now that we have a new conversational assistant, we’ll use the dialog editor to create and add new dialogs for the assistant and also edit the default Welcome and Complete Assistant dialogs.

Step 1: Edit the Welcome dialog

The editor automatically displays the Welcome dialog when you select or create an assistant on the Customer Assist page.

By default, the Welcome dialog includes a Send a Message interaction with a default message and redirects the customer to the default Complete Assistant dialog.

Let’s edit the welcome message to let the customer know that we’ll ask them some questions to help them connect with the right agent.

To edit the Welcome dialog, select Welcome from the Dialogs sidebar to open the dialog editor. Edit the text in the Send a Message interaction.

Select Save Draft in the dialog editor to save any updates to the conversational assistant.

Step 2: Create and add new dialogs

The editor includes two default dialogs for each assistant, a Welcome dialog and a Complete Assistant dialog. The Welcome dialog is the first message the customer views when they start a chat. The Complete Assistant dialog is the last message the customer views before they connect with an agent.

You can create and add dialogs for the customer to view after their first message and before their last message with the assistant.

For each dialog, you can edit the name, interactions, and end interaction for the dialog.

Let’s create and add two new dialogs to the conversational assistant. We’ll create one dialog to ask for the name of the customer and a second dialog to ask the customer for the support team they want to reach.

Step 2a: Add new dialog: Ask Customer Name

Each dialog contains a set of interactions. For this dialog, we’ll use a Customer Text Response interaction to ask the customer for their name.

  1. From the Dialogs sidebar, select Add Dialog to open the editor for the dialog. Enter a descriptive name for the dialog. For this example, we’ll use “Ask Customer Name” as the name for the dialog.

  2. From the dialog editor, select Add Interaction > Customer Text Response. Edit the message prompt in the interaction for the customer to enter their name.

    You can also save the customer’s reply as an attribute. In this case, to save the name as a customer attribute, select in the interaction the option to save the customer reply as an attribute in Customer (Klass) > Name (Field).

Step 2b: Add new dialog: Ask for Team

Each dialog contains a set of interactions. For this dialog, we’ll use a Data Attribute Question interaction to ask the customer to select a team to connect with from the available options.

  1. From the Dialogs sidebar, select Add Dialog to open the editor for the dialog. Enter a descriptive name for the dialog. For this example, we’ll use “Ask for Team” as the name for the dialog.

  2. From the dialog editor, select Add Interaction > Data Attribute Question. Edit the message prompt in the interaction and select to display values from Conversation (Klass) > Assigned Teams (Field).

    For the Custom Values box, select the teams you want to provide as options for the customer. The customer will view these options as response buttons in the chat.

Step 3: Edit the Complete Assistant dialog

By default, the Complete Assistant dialog doesn’t include any interactions and transfers the customer to an available agent.

Let’s add a Send a Message interaction to the dialog to let the customer know that they will be connected with an agent from the selected team.

To edit the Complete Assistant dialog, select Complete Assistant from the Dialogs sidebar to open the dialog editor. From the dialog editor, select Add Interaction > Customer Text Response. Edit the text in the Send a Message interaction to acknowledge the customer’s selection.

Select Save Draft in the dialog editor to save any updates to the conversational assistant.

Now that we have all of the dialogs we want for the conversational assistant, we’ll link the different dialogs into a flow to reflect the order you want the dialogs to appear for the customer.

The available dialogs for the assistant appear in the Dialogs sidebar to the left of the dialog editor. The Dialogs sidebar displays the name, interactions, and end interaction for each dialog.


Note: Red anchors with a strikethrough indicate unlinked dialogs. Green anchors indicate linked dialogs.


Step 1: Review the dialog flow

Let’s review the dialog order, or flow, we want for the dialogs in this conversational assistant example:

Welcome → Ask Customer Name → Ask for Team → Complete Assistant

  1. Welcome dialog: The assistant sends the customer a welcome message.
  2. Ask Customer Name dialog: The assistant asks the customer for their name. The customer replies with their name.
  3. Ask for Team dialog: The assistant asks the customer for the name of the team they want to reach. The customer selects an option from the available response buttons.
  4. Complete Assistant dialog: The assistant acknowledges the customer’s selection and transfers the customer to an agent from the selected team.

We’ll reference this flow to link the dialogs in order.

To link the dialogs in order, we’ll select and link the dialogs available in the Dialogs sidebar in order based on their position in the dialog flow:

  1. From Dialogs, select Welcome to open the dialog editor. Go to the Redirects to Dialog block in the editor and select the next dialog in the flow: Ask Customer Name.
  2. From Dialogs, select Ask Customer Name to open the dialog editor. Select Add End Interaction > Redirect to Dialog to redirect the customer to another dialog after their response. In the Redirects to Dialog block, select the next dialog in the flow: Ask for Team.
  3. From Dialogs select Ask for Team to open the dialog editor. Select Add End Interaction > Redirect to Dialog. We want the assistant to acknowledge the customer’s selection and transfer the customer to an agent. To reflect this, select the Complete Assistant dialog in the Redirects to Dialog block.

Select Save Draft in the dialog editor to save any updates to the conversational assistant.

All dialogs available in the Dialogs sidebar, except for the Complete Assistant dialog, should have green anchors next to the listed end interaction for the dialog.

Save, publish, and manage assistant versions

Learn how to save, publish, and manage different versions of your conversational assistant.

Save drafts of your conversational assistant

Select Save Draft in the dialog editor to save drafts of your progress at any time.

Publish your conversational assistant

Publish your conversational assistant when your edits are complete and you are ready to add the assistant to your chat widget.

Select Save and Publish in the dialog editor to create a new version of the conversational assistant.

Once you publish an assistant, you will be able to select and assign the assistant to your available brands.

To select a default assistant for a brand, go to the Customer Assist page and select the Rules tab. Select the channel you want to set a default assistant for, and then select the desired brand and assistant from the drop-down menu.

If a default conversational assistant is selected for a brand, the customer will chat with the assistant by default.

For example, if we selected the sample conversational assistant we’ve built as the default assistant for a brand in Kustomer, the default customer chat would follow the assistant’s dialog flow:


Manage conversational assistant versions

You can save and manage multiple versions of your assistants to track changes and to switch between different versions easily.

To create a new version of an existing conversational assistant, select Create New Draft from the dialog editor for the assistant. Select Save and Publish to publish the draft as the latest version.

To manage the version of your assistant available for use in Kustomer, select More Optionsimg from the dialog editor. Select Delete Assistant to delete your conversational assistant. Select Latest Version to view and compare versions, edit a previous version, or select a new version to be available for use across your brands in Kustomer.