AtBot October 2020 Update

This fall update for AtBot includes some very exciting new features that our customers have been asking about for the past year. The update boils down to two major new concepts in the AtBot platform: Live agent escalation, and Concierge bots.

Escalating from AtBot to Live Agent

Bots are great at fielding questions and providing automated ways to facilitate customer requests. But there are some times when it is appropriate to escalate a user to a live agent for additional help or to perform a task that the bot is just not capable of doing. AtBot can now be configured in two different ways to support live chat escalation scenarios.

Omnichannel for Dynamics 365 Customer Service

The first such configuration is for use within Omnichannel for Customer Service. In this scenario, the bot is added to the Omnichannel portal as an agent and can escalate chat conversations through the configuration of workstreams, queues and routing rules.

Live Chat Bridge in Power Automate

The second such configuration is for use within any application (but it works really well in Teams) through the use of a new action in the AtBot Logic connector in Power Automate (or Logic Apps). This new action allows you to take 2 bot conversations and connect them through a live chat bridge. This bridge will exist until one of the users ends the live chat conversation.

For additional information on this new capability, see the AtBot documentation on Omnichannel integration as well as the Live Chat Bridge.

Concierge Bots

The concept of a concierge is a single bot that a user can interact with which has multiple other bots underneath it that it farms the queries out to. AtBot Concierge Bots can be connected to bots within your AtBot tenant, or through Direct Line to any other bot built on the Microsoft Bot Framework.

External Bots

Any bot built using the Microsoft Bot Framework which supports the Direct Line channel can be registered as an External Bot in AtBot. This means you can now integrate custom or legacy bots that your organization has built before starting to use the AtBot platform for a seamless experience for your users.

Agent Configuration

The bots that serve the Concierge Bot are called agent bots. At the top of this configuration is a single LUIS app which contains intents that will route user queries to the correct agent bot. Next you have the Agents where you can select which LUIS intents should be assigned to that bot.

In order to facilitate proper conversation logic, you will want to make some slight adjustments to either your custom bot code, or the skills that your AtBot bots run. These adjustments are documented on our External Bots page as well as our page on Concierge agent configuration.

Go Make Some Bots!

There has never been a better time to learn how to build bots using AtBot. Sign up for AtBot Premium today and you get $25 in credit toward your bot usage. In just a few hours you can build sophisticated bots for Teams, Alexa, SMS or the Web. As always, we’d love to hear from you! hello@atbot.io