Leave No Problem Unresolved — Connect to a Live Agent with Watson Assistant

Introducing pre-built integrations with Zendesk and Salesforce for live agent handoff

Photo by NordWood Themes on Unsplash

Have you been forced to call a customer service line recently? If you have, chances are this story may sound all too familiar — hearing a robotic set of numbered menu options (which have somehow always changed) and then continuously pressing 0 until you finally hear the magical words “Okay, I’ll connect you to an agent”. Unfortunately, your reprieve only lasts a few moments until you’re forced into a digital queue doomed to repeat the same story 3 or 4 times before you finally get to the right department. Customer service doesn’t need to be this way. In a world where every minute matters, great customer service isn’t just a differentiator — it’s imperative.

We understand how hard it is to create a customer experience that can delight consumers. Most customer service solutions only solve part of the problem. Your business needs a product that can work right away, be deployed easily, and connects to the systems you’ve already invested in. We get it. That’s why we’ve updated our virtual assistant product, Watson Assistant, to seamlessly connect with Zendesk and Salesforce. (For an overview on Assistant, click here) How can these pre-built integrations help your organization? Let’s take a look.

Connections that Matter

Watson Assistant isn’t your average chatbot. We’ve built it using best-in-class AI technology that’s used to understand what a user is asking. For more information on this, please click here. We know, however, that some problems require a human touch. With our new pre-built service desk integrations, users can quickly connect to a live agent without ever leaving the chat window. But we didn’t stop there. We wanted to make sure that when a user engages with a live agent they are able to have a meaningful interaction. To facilitate this, we automatically summarize the conversation so your agent can begin helping right away. If they need additional context, the agent can also see the entire chat history. This means users don’t need to repeat the same story over and over again. Most importantly, it means your customers get the experience they deserve.

Let’s take a deeper look at these integrations from the user and agent perspectives:

Here is the user view in the webchat client - this customer is looking to increase their credit limit. The Assistant has been trained to pass this kind of request directly to an agent.

Next, we see the agent view through the Zendesk platform. As shown in the bottom right, the agent has access to the user chat history from Assistant. There is no need for the user to repeat their request.

Finally, we see the user view when conversing with the agent. The user can click the chat bubble at the top of the chat window to go back to the Assistant.

Time to Value

Excellent service. Meaningful connections. You may have the best intentions in designing your customer experience but at the end of the day, providing great customer service can be expensive. Previously, building service desk integrations could take months of development work with considerable cost to a business. Now, those integrations only take minutes to set up with a few simple clicks.

If you want to give your customers an experience they’ll tell their friends about, come build with Watson Assistant. To learn more about setting up these integrations, check out our how-to videos for Zendesk and Salesforce. If you are not yet a Watson Assistant customer but you’re ready to start building, sign up for Watson Assistant here.