Introduction
It's important to give our users tools to allow for human intervention when Forethought's AI is unable to provide a response. With customizable handoffs, we ensure flexibility and in this guide, we'll walk you through how to harness it.
Our handoffs use requests to your help desk and chat providers to pass information collected from the initial Forethought widget interaction (such as chat transcripts, inputs to ticket fields, relevant contact details, etc). If Forethought is unable to solve your customer's inquiry, to get the question to an agent, we can provide a handoff via ticket creation within your helpdesk or through integrations to the chat provider your agents leverage.
Pre-requisites
To utilize Handoffs in Workflow Builder, you need to ensure you've set up your helpdesk integration (Zendesk instructions, Salesforce instructions).
For ticket creation, Forethought must have access to your help desk and the relevant permissions required. If you're using Salesforce or Zendesk, you'll have basic handoffs ready out of the box. Once the connector is authorized by a user with adequate permissions, these handoffs will automatically show up within the Workflow Builders action section.
For live chat handoffs, you need to make sure you have a live chat queue set up within your help desk or chat provider. If you use both handoffs and no agents are available for live chat, the handoff process will default to creating a ticket in your help desk.
If you're using a help desk other than Zendesk or Salesforce, please contact your implementation team for help with setup.
What is a Handoff in Workflow Builder?
Handoff actions exist to connect end users to support agents when their issue is not able to be resolved automatically through Forethought’s AI platform, whether this is because the AI has yet to have examples of the issue type or the issue requires specific human attention.
Our handoff actions give the flexibility to tailor handoffs to various situations while remaining simple to implement. Handoff customizations include:
- Custom verbiage is used to keep experiences consistent with your branding and keep messaging specific for different handoff situations
- Context variables, which can be defined as parameters passed to the workflow and the existing fields of your ticket forms
- Adding ticker tags to maximize efficient routing for our customers’ support teams.
How to Use and Customize Handoffs
Handoffs in Zendesk (Basic)
Once you've connected your helpdesk to Forethought, your basic handoffs are ready to go. The image below is an example of a basic Zendesk handoff with no customization.
When testing your basic Zendesk handoff, it'll look like the below image. After one step you're able to effortlessly intake customer reports and requests by clicking on Preview intent.
You're good to go! Publish your changes to the handoff and you're all set.
Handoffs in Zendesk (Custom)
Suppose you'd like to start leveraging skills-based routing and live chat capabilities, as well as collecting additional information from your customer's report based on a ticket field. Great! with some simple modifications to an individual handoff config, we can accomplish all three of those goals.
After checking the “Include agent chat handoff” box, specify a department to route to for a specific handoff. You can also pass additional chat tags to further influence routing or prioritization based on Zendesk automations.
Ticket fields that use free-text inputs (as opposed to dropdown or numerical fields) may be filled with context variables defined earlier in the interaction. Simply type $ to see which context variables are available.
Now, when testing your chat, it'll look like the image below.
You're good to go! Publish your changes to the handoff and you're all set.
Handoffs in Salesforce (Basic)
Once you've connected your helpdesk to Forethought, your basic handoffs are ready to go. The image below is an example of a basic Salesforce handoff with no customization.
When testing your basic Salesforce handoff by clicking on Preview intent, it will look like the image below.
You're good to go! Publish your changes to the handoff and you're all set.
Handoffs in Salesforce - Custom
Suppose you'd like to start leveraging skills-based routing and live chat capabilities, as well as collecting additional information from your customer's report based on a ticket field. Great! with some simple modifications to an individual handoff config, we can accomplish all three of those goals.
In Salesforce's case, you'll need a Button ID and Deployment ID for the specific chat queue you'd like to integrate with for this specific handoff. This guide can help you find that information. This allows you to customize your handoffs and route to different queues based on different report/request types.
Ticket fields that use free-text inputs (as opposed to dropdown or numerical fields) may be filled with context variables defined earlier in the interaction. Simply type $ to see which context variables are available.
When testing your basic Salesforce handoff, it will look like the image below. After one step, you'll effortlessly intake customer reports and requests.
You're good to go! Publish your changes to the handoff and you're all set.