Getting Started with Watson Assistant: Ready for Liftoff
In the last part of our getting started series, we show you how to take your assistant live without disruption (5/5)
Now that you’ve planned, built, completed, and tested your assistant, you should feel confident setting your first assistant live! So how do you effectively do this? And how do you make sure your live assistant is set up to rapidly identify problems and make improvements?
We’ll get to all of that, but before we do, just a reminder of where you are in your first-assistant-journey:
First-Assistant Getting Started Steps
- Plan it out — a few hours (you already did this!)
- Build it — half of a day (you already did this!)
- Complete it — a few hours (you already did this!)
- Test and improve it — half of a day (you already did this!)
- Launch it — a few hours (you are here)
Separate ‘Test’ from ‘Live’
Once you go live, you’ll want to separate the assistant you use to test your latest changes from the live assistant that you show your customers. This lets you tinker and build new use cases without giving customers an untested experience. Once you are comfortable with the changes in your development assistant, you can easily push them to your live one.
To start, simply create a new assistant and call it something like “Live Assistant.” Consider renaming the assistant you were using during the build phase to “Development Assistant” to keep things clear:
Next, you need to save a version of your dialog skill and add it to your live assistant. What is a version exactly? It’s a locked “snapshot” of the dialog skill you were working on. Meaning, once a version is cut, it cannot be changed by anyone. This allows you to continue working on the latest and greatest updates while your customers get to use a proven and tested version of your skill.
Save a new version of your skill once you’re happy with the latest changes. If you save a version and later realize it has an issue, you can always go back and save another version again later!
To save a version:
- Make sure you’re in the Plus plan or higher (the Lite plan doesn’t have the versioning feature)
- Navigate to the Versions tab of your dialog skill
- Click “Save new version” in the top right and call it something like “Live Skill — April 2021”
- Assign your newly saved version to your live assistant
And that’s all it takes to correctly version your dialog skill! Use your development assistant to make changes, fix issues, and build new use cases. Once you have tested your development assistant and feel good about it, it’s super easy to update your live assistant! Just navigate back to the Versioning tab, save a new version of your dialog, and assign that new version to your live assistant.
Set up your improvement process
Before going live, make sure that the improvement features we covered in the part 4 are connected to your live assistant. Both features are only available in the Plus plan and above, so make sure you upgrade out of the Lite plan before trying to enable.
Autolearning
The first feature is Autolearning, which observes conversations with customers to surface better answers more often, saving you lots of manual effort.
Go into the Autolearning tab, and select your live assistant as the data source for observation. Then simply toggle the switch on and let your assistant improve itself.
Intent Recommendations
The second feature is Intent Recommendations, which groups messages from your users and gives you a list of suggested intents sorted by how often the messages come up. Using this feature will save you time figuring out which uncovered topics need to be addressed next.
To enable Intent Recommendations, go to the main Intents page and select “Recommendation sources” at the top of the page.
Select your live assistant as the data source. Once there is enough traffic flowing through, you can leverage Intent Recommendations based on the real inquiries coming from your customers.
Set up your channel integration
Remember back in the first post in this series when you selected which channels to launch with? Well, now is the time to finally set that channel up. The process for web chat and phone are detailed below.
Web chat
Watson Assistant comes with an easy to embed web chat widget that most of our customers will use as their initial channel. If this is your channel of choice, navigate to your live assistant and create your web chat on the Integrations section of the page.
Theming
First, set up your theme. It’s important for your customers to recognize the assistant as a company-approved experience –– otherwise they will likely ignore the assistant, wasting the effort you have been putting in.
Matching the assistant to your brand’s colors, giving it a name, and adding an avatar image or company logo goes a long way towards better engaging your customers.
Home screen
Next up is the home screen. Customers often aren’t sure what the assistant can help them with, or how to get started in the conversation. Use the greeting message to give them an idea of what your assistant can handle. Use the conversation starters to help them get started.
Be sure that your assistant is trained to answer your conversation starters. We recommend having the last starter be “See how I can help”, and configuring your assistant to return a list of topics it can handle.
Suggestions
The “Live agent” tab is where you set up the system to hand the conversation to a human agent when needed—see part 3 of this series. Following that is Suggestions, which you should also enable.
Suggestions helps ensure that customers always find a path to solving their problem.
Suggestions will recognize when the assistant is not confident in its response, as well as when the customer is getting frustrated. It will surface a menu with intelligent options for topics the customer might discuss instead.
If those options are still not what the customer wants, we give them two other avenues. The first is surfacing the conversation starters that you set up in the home screen. The second is the “Connection to support” field. You can customize this option so that when the customer clicks on it, they either get connected with a live agent, or they are given a phone number or email address to continue solving their problem.
Embed (developer needed)
You are now ready to launch your assistant. Make sure your changes are saved and navigate to the Embed tab for the last step!
To launch, grab a developer who controls the website. Give them the embed code by simply clicking on the button in the top-right to copy this code snippet. Have them paste the code snippet into the page(s) where you want your assistant to live and then redeploy the site.
And that’s all it takes! Your assistant is now live on your website.
Phone
Watson Assistant also comes with an easy to set up phone integration. If this is your channel of choice, navigate to your live assistant, click “Add integration” on the right-hand side of the page, and select Phone.
Telephony systems and architectures in enterprises are complicated, so we decided not to outline the phone setup process here. To launch over the phone, we recommend finding someone who has experience with all of your existing telephony and contact center setup. Have them check out our in-depth guide on how to integrate Watson Assistant with call center software.
Final Thoughts
Congrats on launching your first assistant! We are as excited as you are :)
Rest easy knowing that your assistant is already set up with the appropriate fallback methods if things go wrong, and knowing that you have all the tools you need to improve your assistant rapidly now that it has launched!
