Seamless Customer Service Experiences

Help customers and agents find answers easily. Lucidworks can crawl all of your data (including customer care tickets) and make your knowledge base accessible on your website, within a portal, or via a chatbot to surface the right answers in real time.

Intended Audience

Customer service and support leaders interested in call deflection and agent enablement

Attendee Takeaway

Learn how leading companies use innovative technologies to provide exceptional customer service

Speaker

Lesley Heizman, Product Manager, Lucidworks

[Lesley Heizman]

Hello, and welcome to Seamless Customer Service Experiences. Thank you so much for joining me this year at this year’s Activate, and I hope you’re enjoying the sessions so far. 

For many of you that I might not have met before, my name is Lesley Heizman, and I’m the Product Manager for the Lucidworks Customer Service solution. As many of you know, at Lucidworks, we’re a little bit obsessed with search, it’s just what we do. But if you heard Will’s keynote earlier about search, or even if you’re one of our customers who’s deployed Fusion before, I think we all know that sometimes managing search can be hard. There are many settings, configurations, and special terminologies to learn, and the learning curve can be quite steep, especially if it’s on top of your current roles and responsibilities. 

As we thought about our future at Lucidworks and where we want to go with our customer service solutions, I’ve been thinking about all of the customers that I’ve talked to this past year, customer support managers and directors and teams that are just trying to provide the best level of service to their customers and get through the day to day of their everyday work. Not all of our teams can be experts in search as they’re already experts in other things, like their domains of expertise, whether that be tech, products, or services. 

However, all of our customers want solutions that they can implement quickly, that are efficient and effective. They want to follow the best practice recommendations in the industry, but they also want a service that improves over time, that get better weekly, monthly, and year after year. And finally, they want to quickly realize the value of the solutions that they’re deploying. When it comes to customer service, we really want to empower our agents and our customers to find the information that they need quickly and to allow them to get onto the most important and challenging task of their day. 

So thinking about all these things, we realized at Lucidworks that we needed to change the way we were operating. We need to design for the experience that our customers are needing and wanting whenever they’re using our solutions. So I’m so excited to share with you today our vision for Lucidworks customer service and where we’re headed on this journey. We really want to empower our customer support managers and executives to create powerful search applications and experiences that don’t take months to implement, and you don’t have to hire specialized teams to do. 

In today’s sneak peak, I’ll be demonstrating how we tackle this with our new customer service solution. First, by centralized access for agents and customers to multiple strands of knowledge. This includes the ability to pull content from disparate sources into your service desk platforms and to use it to go beyond simple search term matching to leverage cutting edge machine learning, like semantic vector search that provides powerful and relevant results to both agents and customers alike. 

Second, through our new guided workflow set up process that’s meant for business users and not for search experts, build and set up your customer service apps quickly without the need to have extensive search knowledge or to know every data field within your system. We’ve built the supporting data models and deployed the machine learning models in the background so you don’t have to. 

Third, the ability to set up and deploy quickly. You can build and deploy an app easily on a shortened timeline. Agents need help now, not months from now, and you want to demonstrate value right away. So we’ve set you up for success by streamlining our new solution and simplifying our setup process while keeping the great search experiences you’ve come to know from Lucidworks. 

At a high level, this is how it will work. First, you’ll go in, into our Lucidworks Customer Service solution, and set up your app and configure it with your custom data sources and information through our guided workflow process. Then, once you’ve configured your app, you’ll go to your app marketplace, whether that be Salesforce or Zendesk, for example, or ServiceNow, and you’ll download the Lucidworks app from your marketplace. Then, you’ll connect your app to the setup that you’ve already configured using the information that we provide you during the setup process. At that point, you can deploy it to your users. 

All right, so let’s get into a sneak peek, a little demo that I’m going to offer today. Here we go. So today I’m going to take you through a demo of let’s call myself, Andy, here. I am the customer service manager at a company called North Enterprises. And I’ve going to be developing a customer service app today that I will deploy into Salesforce for my agents to use whenever they are working their cases and solving their cases. So here I’m going to come to the Lucidworks Customer Service solution, I’m going to enter my information here and log in. And the great thing of course is, I don’t have to deploy anything. Within my own institution, I’m just going to the cloud and logging in here to our solution. Here, it’s going to bring me into the customer hub, and this is where you’ll have the option to build different search applications and experiences. 

So here you notice on the home screen, I have the option to build an application. I’m gonna go ahead and select that today by hitting, New. And then it’s asking me, what type of application am I looking to create? So, if you’ve attended some of the other sessions today, or you have some on your list for later, you have the opportunity to create different types of search applications and experiences, but today, I’m going to select customer support since this will integrate in with our customer support platform. Here, I’ll give my application a name, a description so if people are looking in the system, they know what to refer to it as later, and then I’ll hit Create. Once I hit Create, I’ve created my basics of my application and now I’m going to go through and configure it. 

So you notice it takes me back here to the hub and I have a message that my app is ready to configure. So I’m going to click into my app here and we bring you to a help page here. So it’s showing me an overview of here are the steps that I’ll go through as I’m building my app, So it gives me some videos to watch if I choose to do so, or I can jump right in and start going through the process. Do you notice we offer you the guided workflow, guide here on the left-hand side of the screen, if you ever get lost. So I’m going to do the first item on my list here, which is to add my ticketing system, which really means to connect into your support desk platform. 

So at North Enterprises, we use Salesforce Service Desk Cloud, but you might be using Zendesk, for example, you might be using ServiceNow. And I find that many companies that I talk to, actually use multiple platforms. So they might be using one service desk internally with their own IT and staff, and one externally, so you could connect to multiple systems here. Today, I’m going to add Salesforce Service Desk Cloud here. So I’m going to enter a name for this connection, so I’ll just call it Service Desk North add a couple of labels that I can use when I refer to my data later, and then I’ll hit to continue to take me along the path here of going out and starting to grab and index my data. 

So here at the bottom, it takes me to step two, this is where I’m going to actually connect into Salesforce, and so I’ll have to give the information provided here that I have from my Salesforce account, including my client ID and I’ll hit, Authorize, below. It goes in and it starts to authorize me in the system, and then what it’s doing is it’s going to go out and automatically pull in the information. So the cases, the knowledge base articles, information about agents and organizations and customers that you’re serving within your Salesforce Service Desk Cloud.

We’ve done the work behind the scenes of defining the data model of information that you’ll need to provide relevant results to agents and customers when they’re solving cases or looking at the customer support portal, we’re going out and collecting that information and pulling it into our system for you. So you’ll notice here that I didn’t have to tell the system which objects did I want to index? For example, within Salesforce, or which fields did I want to grab? Because we’ve done the hard work of defining that for you. 

However, we do understand that there might be instances where you have created custom fields that you might want to use, let’s say, later to look at through reporting, to slice and dice your data or those types of things. So here we have a smart field mapper where if I do have instances like that, where I’d like to include additional fields and perhaps, map that into the data model. For example, in this case, perhaps Salesforce uses, question and issue as different case types, in my organization, we refer to it as severity. I could map that field here, and then I’m just going to click Save. Now that I’ve done that, I continue scrolling down to the bottom and I’m ready to move on to my next step. So I’m gonna hit, Next, here, and now I’m ready to start adding external content sources. 

So what are the limitations of many of our service desk platforms today is that whenever agents are working in the system, you can only pull in information for agents in your own knowledge base. So for example, knowledge articles from Salesforce or guide articles in Zendesk, and you don’t have the opportunity without installing additional apps to pull in outside content that you might want to make available to your agents. So here is where we’re asking you, what external content sources would you like to pull into your system for agents as well? And what happens when you define these, is we will start adding that data into our index from these content sources. And when we’re providing agents recommendations, when they’re working cases, it’s going to search through that data as well. 

So, if you attend the search session at Activate today, you’ll notice that we have the web connector option. So, let’s take, for example, I might want to add for my agents, my documentation site. Or perhaps if I have a tech product, there might be user guides or information for specific versions of my product or that type of thing that I want to add. So you could use the web connector for those types of items. You simply give it a name, labels again, and a URL, and you would tell the system which URLs that you want to actually pull in. And you can define how many levels deep and that type of thing that you’d like to do. 

Other options that we’re offering here are things like Jira, so I’m going to be adding that today. You know, it’s very common for a lot of agents to have access to Jira, because they want to see escalations that customers have requested or enhancement request or bug request or that type of thing. So we want to map those so that agents can have that available within Salesforce as well without having to also log into Jira. And then you might want to add other options too. So a lot of support teams might keep information in SharePoint, for example, with presentations or information they need to access or perhaps Google Drive. So we’ll be continuing to add to the list here of external content sources that you can pull from, and we’ll have connectors that are available there for you to use during this guided workflow setup. 

So for Jira here, I’m going to enter a name for our Jira, and we call it Jira North as part of North Enterprises. Again, I give it a label and I hit Continue. And then down at the bottom, it’s going to ask me for information from my Jira instance. So here I’m going to enter my instance URL, my username, and my API and token information, and then I hit Connect and Proceed down at the bottom. So here you can see it gives me a quick summary of the application that I’ve just built. On the previous screen, of course, you know, for demo purposes today we’re shortening it, but you could add many external content sources to your list here. Now that I’m done, I’ll hit Finish, and it’s going to take me back into the customer support hub. 

And what we really envision this to be is a hub for the customer support managers or directors, or let’s say, managers of agents where they can go in and check and see, how is their department doing? How are their agents doing? What are the search results and information that we’re seeing within our applications and experiences that were deploying? So we could take a tour, I’m going to hit Skip on that today. But as we come in, you notice up at the top we’re starting to zero in on metrics and KPIs that are important to my support organization. So something that a lot of support departments track that I’ve talked to, are cases closed per time period, is something that they track as one of their metrics. So up at the top here we can see, I’m looking at cases closed by the phone channel within the past hour, I could select different filters up at the top as well, based on different time periods that I might want to look at, and I can go in and look at different channels too. 

So, depending on what channels your support department supports, you can come in and select web or phone, for example. As we scroll down here, we’re also showing you additional operational metrics that might be important to your department, things like top queries that agents have performed, the click-through rate on results that have been provided to them, null queries as well. And I can take this information and that might give me some feedback. You know, if I’m receiving null queries about a specific topic, then I might want to create knowledge articles for my agents surrounding that topic as well. You can also go in and see a preview of the data that we’re starting to pull in. 

So here, if I select on the support portal tab, all of that information that we started indexing previously whenever we built our app, is going to start pulling into our system here. And this is what agents actually see when you deploy the app into Salesforce or Zendesk, for example. When they open a case, we’re going to use our semantic vector search to offer them suggestions on similar cases, related knowledge base articles, or other articles that you’re pulling into your system, other content in your system, as well as suggested subject matter experts about these topics, or they can always do a search as well. They might want to change the context of the information that’s been presented in the case and do their own search, and they have the ability to do that. So here, I’m just seeing a preview of this data that’s being pulled in. 

So right now I’m looking at all data from my service desk as well as my Jira system. I could select specific cases for example. And if you click on a case, you can see a preview of that case, or I could look at what we call articles. So this would be any of that external content that’s being pulled in, whether that’s Jira, website content, SharePoint content, any other information here. So that’s just a quick preview here. We can also go back and look at data. So, if we want to look at any of our data connector information, we can come into the data source manager here, we see a preview of the different data connectors that we have set up previously. And if we click on that information, we can see the metrics and information on when that connector was less crawling, the start and stop time and duration of that as well as the status. And if you ever forget any of the information regarding your app installation, I can click on App Installation here and it shows me my app URL, username, and sign in key. 

So I know I’m about out of time today, but I did what to say, obviously we’re very excited about releasing this new solution. And if you do have interest, by all means, we’re going to put a link out there in the chat with the session that you can put your information in and request more information. You can also reach out to me directly as well, if you would like to by email or through LinkedIn, if you’d like to have more information or put in your request for features. I would love to talk with you, especially if you are working in customer service and have an interest in this area, it’s always great to communicate and chat with our customers. 

And I hope that you have a great rest of your sessions today at Activate, and we, so look forward to having you and chatting with you in the future sessions as well. All right, thanks so much again and have a great day.