Guided assistance gives agents and customers the ability to locate answers or text explanations by selecting responses from question branches in guides. This lets agents quickly find information they can provide to customers when working with them on the phone, when responding to an incident, or when chatting. In addition, guides can be embedded in answers so customers can use them on the customer portal.
Configuring guided assistance
You can create as many guided assistance guides as you need to help your agents and customers locate appropriate responses to questions related to different topics. Each guide can include multiple question branches, so you can use a single guide to lead agents to answers regarding different models of a product or multiple service plans.
You first need to edit your profile to include permission to create guides. Staff members with appropriate profile permission can create, copy, delete, and rename guides from the Guided Assistance explorer.
Creating guides
If you attempt to delete a guide that is being used in another guide, a dependency warning will list each location where the guide is used and provide you with an option to cancel the deletion.
When creating a guide, you add questions to the guide, add text for the question responses, and associate answers or text explanations with each response. You can also insert existing guides into other guides if you have a set of common questions and answers you want to use in multiple guides.
The questions you add to guides can be simple or complex. If you think your agents may need additional context to better understand a question, you can add a web page or an image that will appear with the question text.
For a guide to be valid, all questions in the guide must be associated with responses, and all responses must be associated with other questions or with one or more public answers or text explanations.
Once a guide has been saved, you can click the Create Answer button on the ribbon to create an answer to associate with your guide.
A Call URL node is used to link a guide response to an absolute or relative URL. For instance, a customer-facing guide could lead customers to a solution that requires the involvement of support agents. In this case, you could add a Call URL node to route customers from the guide to your site’s Ask a Question page.
You can also pass parameters through the Call URL function by defining name-value pairs in the question or response properties. For example, when linking to the Ask a Question page, you can pass parameters to automatically set values for fields such as Product, Category, or a custom field. To accomplish this, you must first update the question name to indicate the name of the parameter you want to set. You can then edit the response properties to set the value you want.
Alternately, you can add name-value pairs to question properties to declare a static parameter. Static parameters are parameters that are carried through a guide’s remaining branches and are passed through any Call URL function that exists in the question’s sub hierarchy. To test Call URL functions and parameters, click the Preview button and select an option for previewing your guide.
Adding guided assistance to workspaces
Before your agents can use guides, you must add the Guided Assistance relationship item to a custom incident or chat workspace. Once added, the Guided Assistance relationship item functions as a container for displaying guides to your staff on the agent desktop.
Guides can be displayed manually, based on a guide search or selection performed by an agent. They can also be loaded dynamically, based on a workspace or script rule. Guides can also be embedded in answers so customers can use them on the customer portal.
Several design options are available for the guide searching feature. By default, the Guided Assistance Search report is used when performing searches, but you can select a different search report to use instead.
Also, as an alternative to displaying the default Search for a Guide and Select a Guide buttons, you can display the guide search fields inline at the top of the control. You can also choose to hide the left navigation page if you want to restrict agents from jumping freely to different sections of the guide.
In addition, when the Guided Assistance relationship item is added to incident workspaces, the Guided Assistance button is automatically displayed on the ribbon. By default, this button provides both select and search options for locating guides.
Because guide content (such as question text) is highly contextual and not wholly descriptive of a topic, it is not indexed for searching. However, answers associated with each guide are very relevant to searching, so the content of those answers is indexed. For this reason, when a search is performed, the results are based on the content of associated answers, not on the content of the guides themselves.
Therefore, in order for a guide to be searchable, you must associate it to an answer. And so that it can be searched for intuitively, the answer’s content must be relevant to the topic addressed by the guide. There are two ways to associate an answer to a guide.
- Associate the answer to a guide response: When editing the Guided Assistance relationship item on a workspace, you can select a response on the guide and use the Associated Answer button to associate an answer to it. This creates a natural association because, in this case, the answer is part of a solution path defined by the guide.
- Select a guide from the answer’s Guided Assistance field: A guide may not contain any responses that link to answers from the knowledge base (could be associated only with text explanations). In this case, to make the guide searchable, you must associate it with an answer using the Guided Assistance field in the answer editor. On the default answer workspace, the Guided Assistance field is located on the Details tab. Here, the answer is associated with a guide named Service Plan Assistance, and the guide will be returned in guide searches when the search criterion matches the answer’s contents.
Guided assistance functions are available as triggers and actions when configuring rules for incident and chat workspaces. For example, you can design a rule on an incident workspace that will open a guide based on the incident’s product or category.
Once you create a guide, you can export it to a guide definition file and import it into other RightNow CX interfaces to create a new guide. You can also extract a subset of the guide’s questions and responses to either create a new guide or save to a guide definition file that you can then import into another site.
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