Bring Your Own Service Desk to Watson Assistant
Use our new open-source starter kits to integrate with almost any service desk for web-based agent escalations
We recently put out a blog showing off how Watson Assistant’s new and improved architecture model gives you and other enterprise companies a true end-to-end platform to build great assistants on, without having to abandon your existing customer care tools. In this post, I’ll focus specifically on how you can easily integrate your chat interface with almost any service desk for live agent handoff.
A bit of background: Watson Assistant comes with our web chat integration, an engaging and fully extensible front-end client that can be deployed in minutes. Web chat helps ensure that your customers are always able to find a path to a solution: Disambiguation clarifies unclear customer messages, Suggestions gives customers a way to repair broken bot conversations, and Search connects with existing content and knowledge bases to surface relevant results. Ultimately, if all else fails, the last resort for an assistant is to connect with a service desk and escalate the customer to a human agent.
We offer built-in integrations to Zendesk and Salesforce that can be set up in 5 minutes. In the last few months, we also released open-source starter kits, letting you easily connect with Twilio Flex, NICE inContact, Genesys Cloud, and Oracle Cloud B2C in a matter of hours.
These starter kits provide you with working integrations to some of the most popular service desks. Simply download a copy of the GitHub repository, enter in your service desk and web chat credentials, and get the integration working immediately!
We cover the essential features: starting and ending the escalation, sending messages, and agent details. We also give guidance on hosting the integration, as well as resources to help with implementing more advanced features like authentication and routing. These starter kits allow for full extensibility – you can customize your integration with additional functionality and build connections to other tools that your company uses.
It’s also easy to build custom connections to service desks besides the ones we support with starter kits or built-in integrations. By following our template and examples, customers have already been able to quickly get their custom integrations up and running.
A vast amount of tools in the service desk market meet our technical requirements: LivePerson, Kustomer, Nuance, Live Chat, and more are all possible. To find out if your company’s tool is feasible or if you’d like help building an integration, check out our adoption guide and contact us here.
We believe our customers deserve full flexibility and are excited to give that to you by stepping firmly forward with our open-source integrations. Sign up for Watson Assistant to start building, and if you haven’t already signed up, join the IBM Watson Apps Community to continue the discussion with our experts and other Watson Assistant users.
Also, be sure to subscribe to our IBM Watson blogs to see more deep dives on other sorts of integrations that are possible with Watson Assistant!
