Customer Agents
Overview
Customer Agents represent arguably the most impactful type of AI agent - one that interacts directly with your customers. Conversations are assigned to Customer Assistants in the same way they are assigned to human agents. Customer assistants can send messages, set fields, requeue/escalate, and close conversations, much like human agents.
In addition to being a type of AI Agent, Customer Agent are one of three types of bots in Quiq:
- Custom bots hosted externally and written against Quiq's Bot API
- Bots built in Quiq's Classic NLU Bot Designer
- Customer Agents built in AI Studio
Customer Agents inherit the full feature set of classic assistants. Therefore, the Bot Designer Guide is still a useful resource for building customer assistants as we continue to update our documentation.
Flow Execution
Customer Agents fully own the conversations assigned to them. When a conversation is first assigned to a Customer Agent, the flow starts at a special Assigned Behavior . From there, flow execution continues until it reaches a location where it's waiting for a new message from the customer. This is sometimes called a flow resting point.
The following are possible resting points in a customer agent's flow:
- Send Message Behavior : if 'wait for response' toggle is enabled
- Call API Behavior: if 'wait for response' toggle is enabled, or the API response payload specifies to await a response
- Prompt AI Behavior: if it doesn't change locations in it's success/error handlers
- Set Timer Behavior
Customer Agents are the only type of agent that rest at a location in the flow and then resume execution from that same location when the next event (e.g. customer message or timer expiration) occurs. An assistant's reaction to an event starts at its last resting point (or Assigned node) and continues until it rests again. This is referred to as a 'user turn'. The events logged in the Debug Workbench correspond to user turns.
Customer Agent Context
The context that Customer Agents execute contains the standard data common across all agent contexts:
- Session fields
- Search results
- API results
- Buffer state
The defining aspect of the Customer Agent context is the conversation, which includes full transcript history (including message delivery statuses, rich messaging elements, etc), field state (conversation and customer fields) and much more.
Full Reference: CustomerAssistantContext Object
Customer agents have special behaviors such as a behavior dedicated to sending a message and waiting for a response.
Customer agents likewise have special actions like starting the typing indicator
Customer agents have special global triggers called Special Events that are useful when automating conversations
Updated 3 months ago