Inside Chatbots – Answer Bot Vs. Personal Assistant Vs. Virtual Support Agent

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Inside Chatbots – Answer Bot vs. Personal Assistant vs. Virtual Support Agent

Artiﬁcial intelligence (AI) has made huge strides in recent years and chatbots have become all the rage as they transform customer service. Terminology, such as answer bots, intelligent personal assistants, virtual assistants for business, and virtual support agents are used interchangeably, but are they the same thing? The concepts are similar, but each serves a different purpose, has speciﬁc capabilities, varying extensibility, and provides a range of business value.

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Before we dive into each solution, a short technical primer is in order.

A chatbot is an AI-based solution that uses natural language understanding to “understand” a user’s statement or request and map that to a speciﬁc intent. The ‘intent’ is equivalent to the intention or ‘the want’ of the user, such as ordering a pizza or booking a ﬂight. Once the chatbot understands the intent of the user, it can carry out the corresponding task(s).

To create a chatbot, someone (the developer or vendor) must determine the services that the ‘bot’ will provide and then collect the information to support requests for the services. The designer must train the chatbot on numerous speech patterns (called utterances) which cover various ways a user or customer might express intent. In this development stage, the developer deﬁnes the information required for a particular service (e.g. for a pizza order the chatbot will require the size of the pizza, crust type, and toppings). Fulﬁlling the intent requires integration with a business system, such as a pizza vendor’s point of sales system.

From a business perspective, a chatbot must be built to provide a valuable set of business functions, which requires integration into business systems. Without these integrations, a chatbot will simply carry on a conversation, basically small talk. The clear differentiators between a chatbot that acts as an answer bot, a personal assistant, or a virtual support agent are:

Support for the context Systems integrations Overall scope and of the business. purpose.

Now, we’ll explain each of these chatbot solutions and what they can do and not do when applied to a service desk.

Answer Bots:

An answer bot serves one primary purpose: to understand user or customer questions and provide the best possible answer. The primary beneﬁt to a service desk is ticket deﬂection. Think of an answer bot as a modern FAQ. Instead of performing a traditional search, the user’s natural language request is interpreted and a knowledge base is accessed to return the best answer or answers. Usually, an answer bot connects to an existing knowledge base. And, depending on the scope of the tool, the answer bot may or may not have its own knowledge base that covers a large number of user questions and whether a user's expectations can be met by this type of interaction. If a user gets stuck, an answer bot offers a direct transfer to human support which may salvage customer satisfaction. Unfortunately, an answer bot does not save the business any money and can even add costs as users learn to request a transfer to a human and they become commonplace.

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Intelligent Personal Assistants:

Siri and Alexa are the most familiar of all intelligent personal assistants. Their capabilities are a combination of an answer bot and the provisioning of personally oriented services, such as booking a reservation at a restaurant, getting news, or finding a nearby business. The knowledge bases behind Siri and Alexa, though quite impressive, are not available for augmentation by individual businesses. However, software development kits (SDKs) exist for developers to create business services (i.e Alexa skills) which are exposed through the personal assistant. If you are offering services to the public, this option makes sense. But, when customers or users require authentication or authorization to access specific functions, the interactions can get a bit cumbersome and complex for multi-step (stateful) processing. Conversely, for a general purpose FAQ, they can be an omnipresent channel and connection into other systems. With their SDK, intelligent personal assistants can be developed into an answer bot to deflect tickets.

Virtual Assistants for Business:

Microsoft refers to Cortana as a virtual assistant for business. The distinction between a business assistant and personal assistant is primarily in the services provided and the presence and accessibility of the interface to business information. Cortana is available in Windows 10 and assists with functions that originate or involve the day to day usage of Windows, accessing files, and using other installed MS applications. From a business perspective, Cortana has some unique capabilities that most personal assistants can’t provide. The user is already signed in, authenticated, and typically using the same user id and credentials throughout their business domain. This makes it easier and more user-friendly to use Cortana’s SDK to create additional business services. For example, the user can drag and drop files into a new service built in Cortana's SDK. And, the user's email may be known to Cortana, so asynchronous communication (a typical problem with many channels) is inconsequential. Ticket creation and remote device management are streamlined as a ticketing solution can pull information without user involvement. Finally, developers who are familiar with the REST API can use Cortana’s SDK to create service desk specific features, but beware that this is a full-fledged development effort that requires ongoing support and maintenance.

Virtual Support Agents:

The purpose of a virtual support agent (VSA) is to simulate a human support agent (think Level-0 agent). Rather than ﬁlling out forms or composing emails, users describe their question or request in natural language to the VSA. If clariﬁcation is necessary, the virtual support agent has the intelligence to interactively guide the customer to provide additional information. The VSA draws knowledge from a variety of data sources in order to intelligently respond to the customer. These data sources continuously improve based on user conversations. The VSA will either resolve the user’s question or request, resulting in a zero-touch resolution, or escalate the problem to a human agent. Even the best VSAs will occasionally require human intervention. If a human agent is unavailable, the VSA will automatically create, categorize, prioritize, and assign a ticket. Actionable tickets, with complete and accurate data, become the norm.

Generally, either a messaging application (e.g. Skype, Slack) or another chatbot such as Cortana provides access to a VSA. The VSA will perform necessary business functions. For example, a VSA will support all of the services found in a service catalog, but do so conversationally in order to appeal to the varying needs of users. In addition, a VSA will provide many of the same internal networking, coordinating, and incident handling functions provided by a human agent. For example, performing user callbacks to gather additional information, scheduling times for a tech to service a desktop, or automating follow-up with users to ensure their issue is resolved. This frees up more costly human resources to work on higher-value activities. Keep in mind that a VSA does not have to solely serve end-users. It can support agents by effectively managing requests and issues end-to-end, relieving managers and senior agents of routine tasks – a level-0 agent.

A VSA will enable the creation of new services by working in harmony with backend IT systems. As such, a VSA must have authentication and authorization that operates with existing infrastructure, along with connectivity to backend systems to fulﬁll or track these services, automate them, and manage them across humans and systems. The critical distinction between a VSA and other types of chatbots is the ability to go beyond simple ticket deﬂection and handling and to provide the productivity and scalability gains from automating tasks normally performed manually by an end-user or human agent.

About Serviceaide Serviceaide provides customer support and service management solutions to a growing global portfolio of clients who benefit from efficient ticket processing to deliver excellent customer service. IT Service Management functionality ensures that IT systems meet service level agreements and business objectives. The solutions feature a virtual support agent with artificial intelligence, configurable ticket management, ITILcertified processes, scalability, and data connectivity; all with a low administrative burden and cost of ownership.

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