Migrating advanced AI agents from Zendesk Chat to Sunshine Conversations

What's my plan?

Add-on | AI agents - Advanced

Overview

Before you start

Requirements

Best practice

Duplicate

Modify

Test

Launch

Before you start

Not all Actions you're used to in Zendesk work in Sunshine Conversations. For details see Impact on Actions when migrating from Zendesk Chat to Sunshine Conversations.

Metadata is your best friend. Metadata is any information that you would like Sunshine Conversations to collect, store, and send to us or your system. It could be information about the user's reply in the chat, user, message, or app. Technically speaking, it is "a flat JSON Object that can only contain the following value types: string, number, and boolean". Read the Sunshine Documentation on this here.

If there is information you'd like to continue to use which is not available by default in Sunshine Conversations, you will need to customize the Sunshine Conversations widget snippet to capture that. We can only advise in this regard, this widget customization must be done by your engineering team or a technical partner which we are happy to recommend. We recommend sharing the using metadata documentation by Sunshine Conversations with them.

In addition, you will not be able to update user information such as email or notes anymore.

Requirements

Access to your website and/or app's source code

Admin access to the AI agents - Advanced Dashboard

A testing environment with Sunshine Conversations widget implemented

Zendesk Agent Workspace

A Sunshine Conversations license

Best practice

Step 1 - Duplicate

To ensure there's no disruption in service, ask your CSM to duplicate the AI agent for you. The original AI agent will stay active until you have completed the below steps and are ready to launch your new Sunshine Conversations AI agent.

Note - Analytics and Historic data are not transferred and will remain in the original AI agent.

If you are using Sunshine Conversations to have access to more channels, you may wish to consider having a different AI agent for Web/App Channels and Social. This is because the types of requests and the way of communicating are different depending on the channel a customer is reaching out on.

Step 2 - Modify

In the duplicated AI agent, actions and dialogues will need to be updated to meet Sunshine Conversations standards.

Actions

As mentioned in the before you start section, some actions are not available or are different between Zendesk Chat and Sunshine Conversations. Therefore, we have an article dedicated to handling these differences - Impact on Actions when migrating from Zendesk Chat to Sunshine Conversations.

Escalation blocks

Before proceeding with this step, you need to ask yourself, what is my escalation strategy? Do you want all AI agent-handled tickets to be sent to Zendesk for analytics purposes or do you only want to have tickets where human agents need to intervene to be in Zendesk? If it's the latter, you can just ensure the actions have all the information you require, and escalation flow need to be checked in general. However, if you want all chats escalated, this would be handled slightly differently.

AI agent-Handled Requests

With Zendesk Chat, there was an option to enable where when a chat ended a ticket was automatically created in support with the transcript attached. To create the same result, it is slightly different from Sunshine Conversations. A Create Ticket Action will need to be added to achieve this - but we recommend doing it. The transcript will be attached automatically to the ticket, so it's just creating and adding the action that is required. This escalation needs to be done after every chat, regardless of whether you want a human agent to handle it, in order for the chat details to be passed over to Zendesk.

Escalate to a human

For escalating to an agent, as there is no ability to check for agent availability out of the box, consider how you want to handle this. Is your support available all hours every day or is it a weekday-only set-up? This will impact how you wish to handle this.

To manage the expectations of your customers you can provide your standard SLA as in the message, such as;

"We will pass this onto someone who can help you further, they will be in touch within 2 hours".

You can also use Operating Hours to differentiate based on the day and time as to whether it is within support operating hours. Again, this helps manage expectations accordingly.

From here, the AI agent will create a ticket in Zendesk Support for a human agent to handle and resolve before passing communication control back to AI agents - Advanced.

Note - These are not the only solutions, so if this doesn't suit your specific business case, do reach out to your CSM to discuss alternative strategies.

Step 3 - Test

Once all actions and flows have been reviewed the next step is testing. Before going live you want to do a full testing exercise to ensure all flows work as intended.

Widget Edits

Depending on your use cases you may need to adjust the widget, for example in the case of welcome replies. These can only be triggered once on Social channels and Whatsapp. For Web and App, you can achieve this by adjusting the widget snippet or adding an action Chat Started > Trigger Reply from the AI agent settings.

In Zendesk Chat you could see the webpage URL that a user was on when the chat started, this can also be achieved but requires it to be added as metadata within the widget.

More common use cases for metadata and customizations can be found here.

Step 4 - Launch

Once you're happy the next step is to launch the new AI agent and then monitor it to ensure everything is working as intended.

The below articles will support you in the ongoing maintenance and improvement of your AI agent.

Analytics Explained - Chat

Keep your AI agent smart using Confusion Matrix