Create Actions

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:

Encourage users to leverage existing resources before going through a well-formed ticket skill
Reduce the cost of support
Track success with a closed ticket behind the scenes

Actions and Sub-actions Overview

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:

ITSM Knowledge Search: Used to search and display knowledge articles to resolve a user's request. The default out-of-the-box web service associated for this action is Get KB Articles.
Send Text: Used to display information in text format such as a message, FAQ response or URL to a key resource.
Create Closed Service Request: Used as a sub-action to a main action in order to create a closed service request in ITSM. The default out-of-the-box web service associated for this action is Create ServiceRequest.

View Actions List

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:

Name
Sub Action
Last Updated By
Last Updated On

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.

Find Actions

In the search field, you can search for existing actions in the Actions list. To search for an action:

Specify the action Name.
Press the Enter key.
Skills Builder fetches all the records matching the specified details in the list.
To return to the complete results list, delete your search criteria and press Enter again.

Create a New 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:

On the Actions page, click New Action.
The New Action page appears as shown below.
Enter a Name for the new action. Ensure that the name is unique, else, you will be prompted to change it.
Note

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.
Note

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.
1. Select Text Response to send a message to the user in plain text (including hyperlinks).
2. Select Web Service from the drop-down list for actions that require executing a web service.
  Note
  - Web services are created on the Web Services page in the Skills Builder. Based on the selected web service, Skills Builder displays the values configured for the Web Service Details, Path Parameters, Query Parameters, Request Headers, Outbound Mapping and Inbound Mapping, and these values cannot be edited. However, you can choose to override the values. Web Service responses are configured as card, image or quick replies. For more details, refer Create a New Web Service.
  - In the Web Service Details tab, selecting the Response Type is optional. If the response is left blank, then the web service is invoked without sending any response to the user.
  - Context attributes set in the Inbound Mapping webservice will be available during skill fulfilment. For example, the following Key and Value executes a web service to identify the ticket, which can be used as a context attribute (key) in the skill fulfilment.
In the User Prompt section, enter the User Prompt Message.
Note
- This section is used to prompt the user with a message and configure system actions based on the user response.
- Entering user prompt is optional. If the user prompt is left blank, then the associated skill will be executed without the user prompts. The user prompt can be updated if required, even after the action is created.
- Each user's response can be configured to invoke a Sub-action.
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.
Note

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.
Click Save to save the action, else click Cancel.

Use an Action in a Skill

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:

In the Pre-conversation Action section, select the Action as Send Text from the drop-down list.
Select the Override Response Message check box under Text Response to tailor the text shown to the user for your skill.
Enter the Response Message to be displayed while executing the skill. For example, you can specify the URL where the user can reset the domain password.
Enter the Action Parameters. For more details on creating skills, visit Creating your First Skill.

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:

In the Pre-conversation Action section, select the Action as ITSM Knowledge Search from the drop-down list.
The system automatically displays the Key and Value under Action Parameters, which is defined in the ITSM Knowledge Search action. In this example, the Value * for the keywords is a wild card that returns all the knowledge articles. The no_of_Articles Key, with its corresponding number of articles Value is used to limit the number of articles returned during the search. As per this example, the number of articles returned is 1. You can also choose to override the Action Parameters by selecting the check box and edit the values, if required. For more details on creating skills, visit Creating your First Skill.

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.

Transfer to Agent

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.:

Define the action as required.
Navigate to the User Response Options.
Enter the Option to display 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, Continue or Transfer to an Agent.
For example, If the user selects the option 'Yes', then execute the sub-action Create Closed Service Request. If the user selects 'No', then execute the sub-action Transfer to Agent.
Click Save.
Now, while creating a skill, you can link this action to the required skill in the Pre-conversation Action on the Skills page.
The following image displays how you can execute a skill and control the conversation by redirecting the end-user to a live Agent in a pre-conversation action.

The following example displays how Luma responds and redirects to an Agent.

The conversation will be transferred to a live agent.

The user stays in the Agent Chat Console queue until a live Agent accepts the chat request as shown below. User can enter 'Exit from Agent' to get back to Luma conversation.
Click End Chat to end the chat conversation with a live Agent.