Watson Assistant web chat: the comprehensive customer care solution

A well-designed virtual agent is step 1 to solving your customer-care needs. Step 2 is creating a robust channel where your customers can interact with that agent. Watson Assistant’s web chat is that channel, but it’s so much more.

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IBM watsonx Assistant

9 min readJul 13, 2022

The first question we always get when we talk with clients about implementing Watson Assistant is about IBM’s Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology. Once we’ve shown them how well our NLP stacks up against the competition, the next question is, “How can this fit into our existing architecture”. After all, utilizing the full capability of Watson Assistant means making your virtual agent accessible at any time.

Creating a custom user interface to deploy on your website (optimized for desktop and mobile) requires time and talent better applied to creating quality content and connecting it with your existing tech stack. That’s why Watson Assistant automatically includes the web chat channel integration for every assistant.

Web chat allows your team members to bring their full expertise to bear on creating the ideal user experience for your customers. The build interface lets business users manage the web chat’s content, and advanced customization options let developers configure how web chat fits into the organization’s existing tech stack.

This is a step forward from the traditional setup where business users (the experts on the complexities of customer care cases) were prevented from participating fully in the construction of the virtual agent and developers had to create conversations on top of using their skills to manage the API and various integrations.

By allowing the whole team to get involved and letting each member play to their strengths, web chat enables faster deployment and shorter time to value for your assistant. This is in keeping with Watson Assistant’s improved channel orchestration and its evolution toward an authoring experience built around actions.

Throughout this post you’ll notice we’ve included conversations from Lendyr.com: Lendyr is a fictional financial service company IBM created to showcase Watson Assistant’s capabilities. Lendyr’s site is live, and ready to let you see web chat’s full range of features in action. Head there to take the web chat feature tour, and keep reading to preview how to launch web chat and the upside for your customers once it’s embedded on your site.

Getting started

The cost of ownership for a custom interface is significant. Accessibility standards, browser testing, debugging; all of these take time and development resources. With web chat, IBM handles all of that foundational work on top of hosting the web chat channel on the IBM cloud.

With hosting and fixes taken off its plate, your team can focus on getting your agent conversing with your customers. That starts with customizing your assistant’s homepage with web chat’s UI editor.

All the tools you need to align your web chat’s UI with your organization’s theming and branding lives here. You can customize the chat panel’s style, edit the web chat launcher, and personalize the web chat home screen (including your assistant’s greeting and conversation prompts).

The UI editor is low-to-no code, so business users can make those edits without needing to lean on the development team. The UI editor is also where you’ll find the JavaScript code snippet you’ll need to embed web chat on your website.

The result of this architecture is a user interface with a significantly lower cost of ownership and maintenance compared to building and maintaining your own channel:

The auto-generated embed script lets you deploy web chat onto your website in mere minutes
The foundational work of testing (browser, performance, accessibility) and bug fixes are handled by IBM
New functionality from Watson Assistant is automatically supported with web chat; there’s no need to upgrade and redeploy to access all the latest, greatest features.

A rich user experience

Web chat facilitates a smooth back and forth between the assistant and the end user by ensuring that: A) there’s no dead space on the screen and: B) the user has the tools necessary to get from request to resolution.

Personalized, consumable help, powered by an extensive web chat

Web chat supports various types of rich media that can provide your customers with a more informative, delightful experience. UX customization available through web chat include:

Embeddable video from YouTube, Vimeo, or your custom upload
Support for rich text through Markdown
iFrames to embed third-party apps like Google Maps
Integration with client-side third party apps, such as WalkMe tours to guide customers through how to use the app

Developers and business users that are comfortable with JavaScript have a wealth of customization options available. Watson Assistant’s extensions allow authors to enable advanced functionality. Through web chat, your assistant can:

Pull in real-time data from a database
Reference a Customer Relationship Management system like HubSpot
Submit a service ticket through integration with a CCaaS like ZenDesk

All of this functionality is ready to be enabled without the need for a deep dive into any technical notation.

Developers create these extensions by importing OpenAPI documents and configuring supported options, which in turn makes the functionality accessible to business users.

Those users can then employ web chat’s custom response types to render the information gathered from the extensions as interactive, dynamic cards like content carousels, flight trackers, mortgage forms, the list goes on and on!

These tools provide the kind of user experience customers in today’s market expect, and web chat lowers the lift for your content and development teams to make that experience available.

Drive adoption of your self-serve digital application

A well-developed web chat guides and teaches the user how to use your existing self-serve application or website. As already noted, web chat can integrate with third party apps like WalkMe, an app designed to guide users through how to use an app to accomplish their goals.

That’s the beginning of the ways that web chat can help users help themselves. Take advantage of web chat’s event system to interact with the website. For instance, change pages, scroll, and auto fill information based on user authentication when filling out forms.

You can further drive self-service through web chat via deep linking to applications like email or service desks. One of our favorite use cases is password updates. With web chat, you can directly link to your web chat, send an email notifying your customer that their password needs to be updated, and take the customer to your website with web chat already activated and the “Update password” action activated.

Web chat gives end users a great set of tools to get from request to resolution. Of course, it’s impossible to foresee everything that can happen in an assistant/user interaction, but web chat has built-in tools to prevent users from ever hitting a dead end.

Intelligent fallback methods to ensure users can always find a path to solving their issue

When the customer launches web chat, they’re greeted with your assistant’s welcome message and the three suggestions you configured in the web chat editor. Both the desktop and mobile launcher can be easily customized from within the product, and advanced customization options are outlined in the web chat documentation.

Once the conversation gets going, the user can pivot from one topic to another and, thanks to Watson Assistant’s NLP, web chat will automatically route them to a different action before returning to the topic or, if your customer’s input isn’t matching up with any of your actions, web chat will surface suggestions to get the conversation back on track.

Web chat’s configured to connect with ZenDesk and Salesforce out of the box. Alternatively, your development team will easily be able to configure web chat to connect with the contact center of your choice (e.g. Genesys, NICE, Oracle).

With that done, your customers can easily be connected from web chat to a human agent, whether because the customer’s input isn’t matching any of your assistant’s training, the customer demands to talk a person, or as part of a warm agent handoff.

Built for enterprise

The speed with which you can configure web chat’s content and customize its connections mean that It’s ready to scale for businesses that operate on a national or global scale. The UI editor lets you align web chat with your brand’s style requirements quickly, and the extensive customization capabilities mean you can deploy the app without having to abandon a single brick in your existing tech stack.

Authors and developers have an extra tool in their belt to customize an assistant thanks to IBM making its Carbon Design System available to use in designing your assistant’s UX. Carbon is IBM’s open-source design system, built on working code, that allows developers to utilize base themes, UI elements and human interface guidelines.

There’s a lot of tools to choose from in that menu

Of course, deploying a virtual assistant for enterprise requires more than advanced customization and configuration; businesses need to ensure that end users’ personally identifying information (PII) is appropriately filtered out of conversational logs. Credit card numbers, addresses, contact information; all these and more must be appropriately filtered to ensure that your organization is meeting both internal and government-mandated security requirements.

Web chat makes filtering PII easy through the application of pre- and post-message webhooks, ensuring that end users’ private data doesn’t hit IBM’s servers and won’t be visible in your Analyze page. This means you can still view the conversations and learn from them to improve your content without your customers’ privacy ever being compromised.

Since web chat is designed for use by both developers and business users, web chat’s product documentation includes sections covering Web chat setup, which gives business users the information needed to get started, and Web Chat development, which outlines advanced customization tools for developers.

Plus, since the development team is never sitting still, web chat has a dedicated release notes page in the Watson Assistant documentation. The notes are organized by version number and can be found under the release notes for Watson Assistant.

Customize it

IBM has published a series of GitHub tutorials covering advanced customization features:

We’ll be covering those topics in this space here shortly. In the meantime, the sooner you get started building and sharing your assistant, the better. If you haven’t gotten started with Watson Assistant yet, head to Watson Assistant’s site to get started building an intelligent virtual agent today.

Consult our Web chat development overview to see how your development team can customize and extend web chat to meet your organization’s needs.

Finally, head to Lendyr.com to see Watson Assistant’s web chat in action! Follow the prompts in the side panel to interact with Lendyr’s assistant and see how it uses web chat’s capabilities to deliver a rich, engaging, and delightful experience for the user.

Make sure to follow IBM Watson Assistant on Medium for all of our latest and greatest features. Happy building!