Aide automatically discovers customer intents from past conversations and surfaces AI suggestions to make your team more efficient by automating operations such as tagging messages, assigning conversations, drafting AI responses with GPT technology, and giving agents clear instructions to follow for every customer intent.
Aide automatically helps you:
- Identify customer intents - understand contact reasons to help you relay customer issues and intents to your organization to improve your product customer experience.
- Draft AI Responses - based on previous agent responses with GPT technology. These are displayed on the AI Assist widget.
While Aide identifies customer intents automatically, you need to create Macros and attach them to intents to peform actions such as:
- Attaching Auto-run macros to intents - to automatically tag messages.
- Attaching Manual Macros to intents - for agents to use in AI Assist.
- Attaching SOPs to intents - step-by-step instructions for agents to use in AI Assist.
When you sign up for Aide, we automatically identify customer intents based from past conversations using the last 2 years of your data.
Your Intents
Aide understands the meaning of each customer message and uses AI to identify what Intents your customers are writing in about and groups similar intents into a Topic. Similar topics are then added to a Category.
Customer Intents are organized into a 3-level hierarchy, Categories → Topics → Intents. This is referred to as a “taxonomy”.
- Categories are the main folder that contains your topics and intents. They are by department, for example, you might see categories such as Account Management, Billing, Logistics, Operations, Orders, Sales, and Technical Issues.
- Topics are the general theme of intents inside a category. For example, under the Account Management category, you might find Account Access or Account Address
- Intents are the issues customers have. For example, under the Account Management → Account Access, you might find Request Login Assistance.
For example, if your customers frequently request help accessing their accounts, you will find an intent that looks like the following:
Each customer intent gets a name, description, and an emoji to help you identify it at a glance. You can edit these in each intent’s settings.
When you open an intent, you will see the following:
- Questions - examples of customer messages that match the intent.
- Macros - a set of action to perform (Auto-run Macros) or suggest to agents (Manual Macros) to apply.
- SOPs - step-by-step instructions for your agents to follow for this intent.
- Settings - edit your intent’s name, description, emoji, or delete it.
Customizing your Intents
We recommend that you customize your intents. While Aide automatically generated intents based on your past conversations, it is only a starting point and it's important for you to edit it to ensure it reflects your organization's goals and matches your existing taxonomy if you have one.
Here are a few guidelines to keep in mind:
- You can rename, delete, or create new categories, topics and intents by clicking the “three dots” (…) on the right side of each row on the Topics page.
- Give each Intent a meaningful and unique name and emojis because they will be displayed in the AI Assist widget when your agents are working through their inbox.
- You must add examples of questions for every new intent you add.
- Category and topic names are do not affect intent detection but intent names do.
Aide discovers as many intents as we can find from conversations in the past 2 years, so you might find duplicates or some that should be combined. For this reason, we recommend that you review and edit your taxonomy.
Here is an example of a poorly named taxonomy that repeats the same 3 words for every intent. The reason categories and topics exist is to help you reduce that repetitiveness and give each intent a meaningful name.
In the second example each intent name is unique and has emojis which are incredibly helpful when displayed in the AI assist widget. This is because when using AI assist, the first thing that you'll see is the detected Intent name and if several Intents begin the same way, you have to read AI suggestions and figure out if they are correct or not. Unique intent names save you from the effort of having to read.
Creating New Intents
The main way Aide is able to match incoming customer messages is by comparing them with previous examples of questions. Therefore, when you create a new intent, you must add examples of questions so that Aide can learn from them and match new messages.
For every intent, you can do the following:
- Add Question Examples
- Attach Macros
- Attach SOPs
Adding Question Examples
When you first start using Aide, you will find intents with examples. However as you customize your taxonomy and add new intents, you will need to add examples for Aide to learn from.
Here are a few tips to keep in mind when you are creating examples:
- Add 2 or more examples of questions for each intent.
- Try to use different examples based on real customer questions to help Aide recognize different wordings. For example, for an Order Status intent, the first example could be “hey any updates on my order?” and the second could be “where is my package?”
When you are adding new examples, we automatically run a “Compatability check” to make sure that the examples you are adding relate to the same intent. For example, if are adding examples to an “Order Status” intent where the first example is compatible “hey any updates on my order?” and the second example is not compatible “hey, I want to return this item” then you will receive an error message explaining that the second example does not match the intent nor the previous example.
After adding new examples, it takes up to 24 hours for us to retain the AI model on the new examples. If you want to retrain your model immediately, contact [email protected]
Attaching Macros
You can attach multiple Macros and configure them to Auto-run or Manual. Auto-run Macros are executed automatically and are perfect for performing actions such as tagging, auto-replying to common questions, and Manual Macros are for when you want your agents to apply the Macro manually. You can configure by using the “Auto-run” switch on every intent's page.
If you are a Front user you need to create your Macros manually and add actions to perform such as “set tags”, “assign to”, “post internal comment” or “Auto-reply” and then Attach them to intents and set them to Auto-run or Manual.
If you are a Zendesk user your Macros are automatically imported and you only have to Attach them to intents and set them to Auto-run or Manual.
Attaching SOPs
SOPs are step-by-step instructions that you need to manually create for your agents to follow.
If you are using an existing Knowledge base such as Trainual, Guru, or have them in your docs, contact us at [email protected] and we will help you import them into Aide.
Intent Automatability
Aide estimates how automatable customer intents are based on the responses you've sent previously to customer questions. For example, if agents are always using the same response and doing the same thing everytime a customer asks a question, we consider an intent Automatable. There are 4 potential values:
- Automatable agent responses are usually the same.
- Potentially Automatable agent responses are sometimes the same.
- Not Automatable responses are usually different.
- Manually Created intent was created manually and Aide did not estimate its automatability.
These help you gradually automate repetitive conversations by attaching Macros and setting them to Auto-run when highly Automatable or Potentially Automatable customer messages are received.
Conversations
Aide shows you how many conversations you received for every intent in the last 30 days. This helps you figure out the volume each intent corresponds to. If you would like to see all conversations, take a look at Conversations page.
Macros
In order for you to automate responses and actions such as tagging, you need to create Macros and attach them to intents.
Macros are a set of actions that you can perform on Zendesk or Front. For example, Front actions can be: set priority, assign to a user, set tag, post internal comment, or auto-reply.
- If you're a Zendesk user, your Macros are automatically imported into Aide.
- If you're a Front user, you have to create your own Macros. They are similar to Front rules and allow you to set tags automatically.
There are 2 types of macros in Aide:
- Auto-run Macros actions are applied automatically to messages that match the intent Macros are attached to.
- Manual Macrosactions must be applied manually by an agent. macros are surface on the AI Assist widget when a message that matches the intent.
Make sure to set up your Macros to Auto-run for actions you would like to perform automatically for every ticket, such as setting tags, posting internal comments, or auto-replying to common questions.
Last Encounter
Aide shows you when a customer message that matches an intent was last received, this could be 5 minutes ago, an hour ago, days, or even months ago. This is to help you make sure that Aide is functioning correctly and the intents you have are relevant.