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Chatbot escalations

Updated on May 10, 2021

Pega Customer Service chatbots act as the primary point of contact for all text-based interactions. When the conversation needs escalation to a customer service representative (CSR), queues and routing configurations and logic determine how that happens.

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Chatbots escalate conversations in the following cases:

Customer request
Customers can specifically ask to speak to a CSR by entering text that corresponds to an escalation command in the chatbot configuration. Chatbots use natural language processing (NLP) and text analysis to determine the customer intent. For more information, see Legacy Webchat overview.
Bot failure
If the bot cannot understand the customer intent for a predetermined number of times, the bot automatically begins the escalation process.

Bot escalation settings work for Legacy Webchatbot and Digital Messaging.

Configuring bot failure escalation settings

Configure automatic escalation of conversations to CSRs by performing the following steps:
  1. In the navigation pane of App Studio, click SettingsChat and messaging.
  2. In the list of chat and messaging settings, click Bot failure escalation.
  3. To enable automatic escalations of failed web chatbot conversations, select the Chatbot response failures will escalate to an agent check box.
  4. In the Consecutive non-matches list, select the number of response failures from the web chatbot after which to escalate the chat. The default value is 3.
  5. Click Save.

Escalating chat requests directly to an agent

When customers initiate a conversation request from a supported channel, they interact with a bot as the first resolution path. To bypass bot interactions for conversation requests, change the bot configuration to escalate directly to the Customer Service Representatives (CSRs).

To bypass Legacy Webchat interactions and allow customers to directly reach CSRs, perform these steps:
  1. In the Dev Studio enter and search SetCommandOnLoad.
  2. Open the Set command on load data transform.
  3. Set the value of the Param.input property to the value that you configure for the Chat with agent case type, in the Legacy Webchat configuration.
    For example: Talk to agent.
  4. Set the value of the Param.display property to the same value that you specified for Param.input.
  5. Click Save.

Escalation failure in chat conversations

Customers cannot escalate a chat request in the following scenarios cases:

These cases apply only to Legacy Webchat requests and not to the other conversation channels because those requests can be routed later when the CSRs are available.

  • No CSRs available: When no CSR has logged into the selected queue, the routing engine sends the configured Agent not found message to the customer after selecting a queue.
  • Maximum wait time exceeded: The routing engine periodically calculates the estimated wait time required to route the incoming or queued conversation requests based on the configured Wait time evaluation. Suppose the calculated wait time for the conversation request exceeds the configured maximum wait time. In that case, the routing engine sends the configured Agent not found message that is configured for the queue after the customer selects the queue.
  • Off hours: The routing engine sends the configured Off-hours behavior message to customers when they attempt to live chat during the queue off hours.

For conversation from the digital messaging channels, the routing engine does not stop the customer from initiating a conversation during off-hours or when the maximum wait time is exceeded. Customers may send a message when no CSR is available. The routing engine can acknowledge receipt of the message, and then hold the messages in the queue until a CSR becomes available. At this point, the routing engine attempts to route these delayed messages to an available CSR.

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