Live Assistant Best Practices

Ocelot's AI-assisted Live Assistant provides users with 1:1 assistance from a live agent in real time for more complex inquiries requiring human intervention. The purpose of this article is to help you set up live assistant to most effectively meet your institution's needs and goals. To help you navigate the article we have broken it down into the following sections:

• Setting Up Departments
• Setting Up Agents
• Considering Live Conversation First
• Enabling Live Assistant Timeout
• Establishing Operating Hours
• Agent Status
• Conversation Security
• Conversation Etiquette

Setting Up Departments

Determine if you will initially launch one department or multiple departments. Your contract has a limited number of live assistant agents, so if you are planning to launch multiple departments it is important to consider the number of agents allocated to each. 

For more information about live assistant agent limits, review the Contract Limits for Live Assistant article. 

If you need to add additional live assistant agents to your contract, contact your Client Success Manager.

Setting Up Agents

After determining the number of departments launching, set up each live assistant agent for the appropriate department. Permissions Managers have the ability to request new user access and adjust user permissions. 

For more information about the capabilities of each permission type, review the User Roles & Permissions article.

If an agent will serve multiple departments, the Permissions Manager must select all applicable departments within the Permissions tab of the admin portal.

Best Practice: While setting up live assistant agents, you can review the Live Assistant Who's Online Page to ensure each live assistant agent is assigned to the correct department.

Considering Live Conversation First

You can configure live assistant to launch before users engage the virtual assistant ("live conversation first"), to launch when specifically requested by the user, or to be offered as an option when the user asks a question that the virtual assistant is unable to answer. 

The live conversation first configuration enables users to engage with a live agent, if one is available, immediately upon launching the virtual assistant window. The user can confirm whether or not they would like to speak with a live agent before being connected with one, or engage the virtual assistant instead. This configuration removes the additional step of the user having to request a live agent, and can create a positive user experience by reducing the amount of time it takes to engage a live agent.

For more information about the live conversation first configuration, review the Customizing the Live Conversation First setting on the Virtual Assistant article.

The virtual assistant first configuration enables users to determine whether they would like to engage with a live agent immediately, only if they ask a question the virtual assistant cannot answer, or not at all. This configuration enables the user to decide at what point in their conversation, if any, they would like to connect with a live agent, and can reduce the number of tier 1 inquiries handled by human staff members.

Enabling Live Assistant Timeout

Configuring the timeout allows agents to maintain their availability without the disruption of logouts. 

For more information about configuring the Live Assistant Timeout, review the Navigating the Admin: Behavior Settings article

Establishing Operating Hours

Determine the available hours for each department and live agents, as well as any desktop, browser, or audio notifications agents should have enabled while scheduled to work in the Active Conversations queue, to ensure live conversation participants are assisted quickly. 

For more information about setting up notifications, review the Enabling Notifications and Alerts article.

Consider updating your virtual assistant's welcome message and your department's webpage to include operating hours for live assistant, and how users can access it.

Best Practice: Ocelot recommends reviewing your office's virtual assistant peak usage times as a guide for determining operating hours for live assistant. For more information about identifying peak usage times, review the Virtual Assistant Analytics article.

You will also need to determine a policy for how agents will handle new live conversations at or near the end of operating hours. Things to consider include:

• What is the cutoff time for live agents to accept a new live conversation? Is that cutoff time at or before the end of operating hours?
  
• How will live agents handle conversations that are still in the Active Conversations queue after the end of operating hours?

Best Practice: Before setting themselves to "Away" at the end of live assistant operating hours, the last available agent should assign any remaining conversations in the queue to themselves so they do not appear as "Available" after the end of operating hours. Setting your status to "Away" will not automatically end any existing live conversations.

Agent Status

Define your department's policy for when live agents should set their status from "Available" to "Away." 

Best Practice: If an agent will be unavailable for more than 5 minutes, that agent should should set their status to "Away."

If the last available agent sets themselves to "Away" before picking up remaining live conversations, and another agent does not become available within 2 minutes of the last agent setting themselves to "Away," then the live conversation participant will receive a message that there are no longer any agents available and will be prompted to leave a message or return to the virtual assistant.

A live conversation will automatically timeout after 60 minutes of inactivity. Remember to engage with your browser every so often where the live conversation is active to avoid being timed out.  

Conversation Security

Develop a policy for how live agents will verify a user's identity before engaging in a conversation, such as confirming unique personal information like the user's name, student ID, or school email. This verification process may be similar to your identity verification policy for engaging in telephone conversations.

You may also choose to enable live conversation authentication. Live conversation authentication allows customers to choose whether live conversation participants need to log in using their SSO credentials prior to being placed in the live conversation queue or upon the prompt from a live agent during a live conversation.

For more information about configuring live conversation authentication settings, review the Live Conversation Authentication article.

Conversation Etiquette

If needed, additional live agents from the same or another department can join an existing live conversation to provide additional support or information. The additional live agent can join the conversation by assigning the conversation to themselves.

You will also need to define a process for transferring a live conversation from one live agent to another. This may include introducing the live conversation participant to the new live agent by sharing the live conversation participant's contact information and the conversation up to the point of transfer so the live conversation participant does not have to repeat themselves.

Best Practice: For the best user experience, we do not recommend transferring a live conversation to "Unassigned" within a department, or to a different department unless there is at least one active live agent currently available.