Introduction to Customer Assist

Last Update: Sep 2024 • Est. Read Time: 3 MIN
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Optimize your organization's support experience with Customer Assist, our virtual conversational assistant (chatbot). You can add conversational assistants to your chat, SMS, WhatsApp, and Kustomer Voice experiences to promote customer self-service, boost agent productivity, and speed up response times.

Design and apply custom rules, or flows, for conversations to accomplish the following with conversational assistants:

  • Collect information from customers before they connect with agents
  • Use AI to respond to customer inquiries using information found in your knowledge base
  • Automatically connect customers to the team they want to reach
  • Equip agents with valuable information before they connect with customers
  • Route Kustomer Voice calls to the right team
  • Reduce repetitive interactions for both customers and agents
  • Provide the customer with support articles related to their issue

If a customer wants to connect with an agent after interacting with the conversational assistant, the entire conversation history is sent to Kustomer for agents to view in the customer timeline.

Once a customer completes their conversation with the conversational assistant, it will submit the conversation to Kustomer. Like any other interaction, your agents will see the entire conversation thread within the timeline. If the customer abandons their conversation with the conversational assistant before interacting with it (sending a message or clicking a button), nothing will be sent to Kustomer for agents to work on.

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


Conversational assistants are available for Chat, SMS, WhatsApp, and Kustomer Voice. In this article, we'll explore how conversational assistants work in Kustomer and introduce you to the main concepts you need to know to understand and build conversational assistants in your organization. 

For a step-by-step conversational assistant tutorial, see Tutorial: Build a conversational assistant.

For information on how to set up an IVR for Kustomer Voice, see this article.

In this article

Dialogs

Dialogs are the main building blocks for conversational assistants. Each conversational assistant has two dialogs by default: a Welcome dialog and a Complete Assistant dialog. These default dialogs cover the first and last conversational exchange your customer has with the assistant before the customer connects with an agent.

Each dialog is a distinct unit of conversational exchange between the assistant and the customer. You can use the dialog editor to define each dialog's interactions and end interactions.

You link dialogs together into a linear or branched flow for each conversational assistant.

To learn more about dialogs and how to use the editor, see Conversational assistant dialogs.

Interactions 

You can use interactions to gather information about your customers and guide them through the conversation path. There are two types of interactions you can use:

  • Interactions without redirects
    Interactions without redirects are the main building blocks for each dialog. An interaction is a message or question for the customer within a dialog. Interactions allow you to collect information from the customer and help you personalize the support experience.

    Some interactions allow the customer to reply with text or a response button. In your Kustomer organization, you can set customer button responses to be saved as text, a selected data attribute, or Klass.

    Interactions without redirects continue to the next interaction within the dialog.

  • End Interactions (interactions with redirects)
    End Interactions are interactions with redirects. Based on their response, these end interactions direct the customer to another dialog in the flow or end the assistant for the customer (for example, to connect the customer with an agent).

    End interactions help you link dialogs together to create your conversational flow.

For more information on each specific type of available interaction, see Conversational assistant interactions.

Flows

Flows refer to the linear or branched conversational flows you can create for each conversational assistant.

You link dialogs together with end interactions to create conversational flows.

Flows reflect the order of the dialogs you want the customer to experience in their conversational exchange with the assistant.

Volume control

Volume control settings allow you to automate the assistant's response to abandoned conversations and missed customer messages sent outside your normal messaging hours. 

You can offer customers options to submit support requests through an alternate channel.

Volume control settings are available in the Assistant settings for your conversational assistant.

For more information, please see Conversational assistant volume control settings.

Customer Assist page

The Customer Assist page allows you to create, view, and manage the conversational assistants available for your Kustomer organization.

You can access this page by going to Settings> Kustomer IQ > Customer Assist

See Add a conversational assistant to learn how to add a conversational assistant.

You can do the following from this page:

  • Add a new assistant by selecting Add Assistant.
  • Duplicate an assistant by going to More Options> Duplicate.
  • Delete an assistant by going to More Options> Delete.
  • Open an assistant's dialog editor and assistant settings by selecting the conversational assistant or the edit icon .
  • Search for existing assistants.
  • Copy the conversational assistant id.
  • Filter through assistants based on status (Draft or Active).

Conversational assistant ID

The Customer Assist page displays the name and unique id of each conversational assistant available for your organization.

You can use the assistant id to customize Chat SDK settings for each brand. Select the copy iconnext to the assistant id to copy and paste the id.