New to Virtual Service Agents?

[#1]

Hey all,

I've been using JSM for several years and am constantly looking for ways to ensure my agents only end up getting tickets that require a human to help with. Basically I wanted to expand Tier 0 support (self service / knowledge base / etc) to make it easier for customers to get what they need and relieve some stress on my team.

Up until Virtual Service Agents I had tried:

1. Setting up Confluence to serve up articles - mostly successful, but as it scaled it got messier as not everyone was maintaining quality of keywords/labels/etc.
2. Building our own chatbot - hilariously expensive and crashed and burned almost immediately due to no exec support
3. Help text / text on all request types - Something I always add, but hard to tell how much it works and if I'm being honest I believe it gets ignored....
4. Announcements - Similar to #3 - I always use them, but it's like firing in the dark since there's no feedback and easy to ignore.
5. Training / Enablement - I personally really enjoy this, both for the upskilling but also for connecting with folks, but, like #1 hard to scale since there's exactly 1 of me...

I always do my best to do all of these, but getting them all done can be challenging (especially as many times this isn't my job, it's something I do on the side to help other groups out).

All that is to say I was glad to see Virtual Agents (VA's) go live a while back. It does require Cloud Premium or higher, but they've helped me fill a few gaps:

1. "Always on" - I can plug the agent into a slack channel and folks will always have "someone" to ask for help from.
2. Confluence integration - The integration with Atlassian Intelligence lets it dig through Confluence spaces, which has helped answer a bunch of questions I hadn't taught it about. This does require Confluence be updated and maintained, but can help folks out quite a bit.
3. Routing - One of the biggest pluses in my mind is the agent can help route tickets. As we've all seen customers may put tickets in the wrong spot, making it harder to help them. Automating even a portion of this has been a huge help for my teams.
4. Metrics - The agents track various metrics on how they're utilized. This gives me a much better idea of how my Tier 0 is doing and lets me improve the agent by identifying weak spots.

Check out this youtube video for more info on them.

I've also put this Udemy course together walking folks through concepts about VA's and setting one up. Check it out here for a special discount!

Betting there's things I haven't figured out yet, but curious what others think of VAs and how y'all use them?