The Jira Service Management virtual service agent

Pro tip: Creating effective training phrases

• Use words and phrases most commonly used by your actual customers. Customers may ask for the same thing in very different ways — capture as many of these different ways of asking as you can! Read through past issues, and copy and paste the initial phrases your customers use when asking for help with the intent's main purpose.
• Add as many unique training phrases as you can. Avoid repetition, but add as many as you can to give the virtual service agent as much data as possible to train with. We recommend around 20 training phrases to start with, but you can add up to 100.
• Review and edit your training phrases as needed. As you watch the virtual service agent’s performance, you may want to come back to existing intents and edit your training phrases to make your virtual service agent’s intent recognition even more effective over time.

Pro Tip: Your virtual service agent comes with standard flows out-of-the-box

Standard flows are reusable conversation flows that the virtual service agent uses to complete basic, repetitive tasks, like greeting the customer, creating issues, or asking for clarification if something’s unclear. There are five standard flows that come out-of-the-box with your virtual service agent:

• Greet: Posts a short, customizable greeting in response to a customer’s first message.
• Match intent: Quickly gets the customer into the correct intent’s conversation flow by asking a confirmation question, asking them to rephrase the question, presenting multiple intent options, or suggesting an answer from a knowledge base article.
• Resolve with CSAT: Ends a conversation when a customer indicates that their request has been resolved by the virtual service agent by asking for a customer satisfaction (CSAT) score.
• Auto-close: Triggers when the customer is matched with an intent or AI answer, but there's been no activity in the thread for five minutes; prompts the customer to ensure they got the help they needed.
• Escalate: This lets the customer know that a request has been raised on their behalf and automatically creates an issue in Jira Service Management using the virtual service agent default request type (unless it’s overridden during the conversation flow).

Pro tip: Writing effective messages for your virtual service agent

Well-written messages in your conversation flow can make a big difference in how your customers feel about their experience using the virtual service agent. Here are a few ways to ensure the best help-seeker experience:

• Keep messages short. Your customers might be in a hurry, so adding too many pleasantries or unnecessary details could add frustration. Only include what they absolutely need to know.
• Be considerate, friendly, and neutral. While it’s tempting to have fun with the virtual service agent, your customers may be coming to your channel for help with something urgent, sensitive, or potentially distressing. They also might be angry or frustrated if something isn’t working. A virtual service agent that talks to them as if everything is perfect might make their mood or situation worse.
• Offer clear, helpful choices. This may seem obvious, but when adding an offer choices step, try to account for as many possible options customers might need. In many cases, it’s helpful to also include a choice that says “something else” (followed by more clarifying questions), or even raise a request (immediately followed by the escalate standard flow). These two additional choices give your customers a way to indicate they need something that isn’t covered in the choices you’ve offered or that they want to bypass the virtual service agent and get help from one of your agents instead.

Pro tip: Double check your knowledge base permissions settings

Your linked knowledge base space needs to be set to All logged-in users under Who can view.

Pro tip: Optimize your knowledge base to improve AI answer quality

Here are a few ways you can ensure your knowledge base is setup for success:

1. Keep everything up to date: The most common reason for AI answers providing incorrect answers is because the source information is incorrect. Go through each article in your linked space and make sure everything is accurate and up to date. Remove vague, conflicting, or outdated information. Set reminders to check your knowledge base for accuracy every once in a while.
2. Avoid duplication: Keeping your knowledge base space up to date is easier if you only have one article for each topic. For example, you don’t want to have two (or more) articles that walk through the same troubleshooting instructions, because if those instructions change, you’ll have to go and find all of the articles and update each one separately. If you need to include instructions from one article in another one, try linking to the source instead of duplicating the information.
3. Include words and phrases that your customers use: When writing or updating your articles, make sure they contain words and phrases that are most likely to be used by your customers when searching. For example, your customers are unlikely to type “request new hardware” when looking for help – they’re more likely to type something like “I need a new laptop” or “I need a new keyboard”.