Virtual Agent
Design conversations that deflect real work: topics, NLU, live agent handoff and measuring deflection honestly.
Design conversations that deflect real work: topics, NLU, live agent handoff and measuring deflection honestly.
- Topic blocks keep shared steps in one place
- Train NLU from real transcripts
- Always offer a route to a human
- Deflection means resolved, not started
Topics and flows
A Virtual Agent topic is a scripted conversation with inputs, decisions and actions. Conversational Interfaces ship topics for password reset, order status and incident creation, and Topic Blocks let you reuse a fragment such as identifying the user across topics.
NLU
Natural language understanding maps what a user typed to an intent. Train it with real phrases from chat transcripts, not with what you imagine people say. Review unmatched utterances weekly for the first two months.
Handoff and measurement
A bot that traps people damages trust faster than no bot at all.
- Always offer live agent handoff, and pass the conversation context with it
- Measure deflection as resolved without agent contact within 24 hours, not as conversations started
- Publish the top five topics on the portal so people know what it can do
- Retire topics that nobody uses, they dilute NLU accuracy