This article deals with the following topics:
Support teams have a wealth of documented knowledge and self-help sites for end users. The problem is getting the end users to actually use that content to resolve their issue or request. With actions in Luma, a Skill can encourage users to leverage this content including Service Desk knowledge articles, text-based FAQs and URLs prior to initiating a skill conversation. This can reduce the number of tickets reaching the Service Desk team, improve Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) and most importantly improve the customer experience.
Following are some of the key benefits of using Actions in Luma skills:
Bot Administrators and Developers can create actions and sub-actions to guide the user's conversation for a request.
Action: An Action is a set of tasks that can be executed by the Skills Builder whenever it is invoked. Actions can be created to display text messages such as FAQs and URLs, and also to execute web services, such as returning the relevant knowledge articles. These are displayed as prompts to the user during the conversation. Each user response can be configured to invoke a Sub-action. Actions can be triggered before executing the skill conversation when configured in the Skill definition. While defining a skill, select the required action (text message, ITSM knowledge search, or Knowledge base articles) from the ‘Pre-Conversation Action’ drop-down list to invoke the specific action. If nothing is selected, the action will not be invoked and the skill execution continues normally.
Sub-action: Sub-action is a type of action but it denotes the end of an action chain. Sub-actions cannot invoke any other system actions or sub-actions, and as such will not have any conditional prompts to be configured.
The following video provides an example of a Skill to help the user reset their domain password. In the first scenario, Luma provides the URL to a knowledge article, which is found useful by the user. Since the article is helpful, a closed service request is created to record the request. In the second scenario, the user does not find the knowledge article useful. Skills Builder confirms whether the user is on VPN. When the user responds positively, Skills Builder creates an open ticket so that the support team can get in touch with the user to resolve the request.
Skills Builder contains the following out-of-the-box actions:
To access the actions, click Actions icon from the left panel. The Actions page appears as shown below with the list of pre-defined actions.
The Actions list includes all the actions added in the Skills Builder by the Administrator as well as out of the box actions. It includes the following details:
You can sort any of the columns in ascending or descending order by clicking on the column header.
Items per page: From the drop-down list, select the total number of items you want to view per page, for example, 5, 10, 25 or 100. Click the arrows to navigate to the next or previous pages.
In the search field, you can search for existing actions in the Actions list. To search for an action:
Bot Administrators and Developers can add new actions in Skills Builder and specify the corresponding user prompts and responses. The configured actions are used to prompt the user with a knowledge article, URL, question or data that may resolve the user's request prior to starting the skill conversation. To create a new action, do the following:
Enter a Name for the new action. Ensure that the name is unique, else, you will be prompted to change it.
In case of a duplicate action name, the following error appears. |
Select the Sub-action check box to hide the User Prompt section. A Sub-action is an action which denotes the end of an Action chain. Sub-actions cannot invoke any other system actions or sub-actions. Sub-actions also do not have a prompt with responses.
If an action is associated to any skill, then the action cannot be changed to a sub-action. Similarly, a sub-action cannot be changed to a main action if it has already been associated to any of the actions. |
In the Parameters section, enter the Key and Value.
Parameters are hard coded values inside the action, for which values are not taken from the end user through prompts. Out-of-the-box actions such as Send Text and ITSM Knowledge search have pre-defined values and can be overriden when these actions are used at the skill level.
Select the Type as Text Response or Web Service. Web Services help to integrate with external systems to perform certain tasks to fulfil the user's request.
Select Text Response to send a message to the user in plain text (including hyperlinks).
Select Web Service from the drop-down list for actions that require executing a web service.
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In the User Prompt section, enter the User Prompt Message.
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In the User Response Options section, enter the Option which will be provided to the user. For example, Yes or No. Then select the corresponding Sub-action from the drop-down list. The Sub-action values include Create Closed Service Request, Exit and Continue. If the user is not satisfied with the response to the request, then they can select the No option, which will continue the conversation and prompt the next set of actions. If the user is satisfied with the response, then on selecting Yes, a closed service request is created. Alternatively, if you want the user to exit the conversation, then select the sub-action as exit. In case the user enters any other response apart from what is configured, then the user exits the current conversation.
The options defined in the User Response Options section are displayed as quick replies in the channel as shown below (Yes and No), and trigger the respective Sub-action. |
Actions are used while defining a skill, so that it can be triggered before executing the skill's conversation. The out-of-the-box actions which can be used at the skill level are ITSM Knowledge Search and Send Text. Let us see how to use these two actions in a skill, by navigating to the Details tab of the Skills page.
Send Text Action: Use Send Text action to prompt users with URLs or text messages before continuing with the skill. To use Send Text action in a Skill, do the following:
Following is an example of how the Send Text option appears during the Luma conversation while resetting the password. It displays the URL using which users can read and understand how to reset their company password.
ITSM Knowledge Search: Use the ITSM Knowledge Search action to return knowledge articles related to the user's request. To use ITSM Knowledge Search action in a Skill, do the following:
Following is an example of how Luma prompts the ITSM Knowledge Search option while resetting the password. It displays the knowledge article using which users can read and understand how to reset their company password.
The Administrator has the flexibility to control the conversation by redirecting the end-user to a live Agent in a pre-conversation action. This helps when a user reviewing a knowledge article or text FAQ in a pre-conversation action may not understand the article and the Administrator may want to offer an option that immediately takes the user to an agent.
To set up the Transfer to Agent option, perform the following steps.: