Plan and Prepare For Your Mpower Agent

This page provides suggestions for planning and preparing to build an Mpower Agent A virtual agent created with CXone Mpower Agent Builder that can handle voice or chat interactions. with Agent Builder. This is the first step in the Mpower Agent implementation process.

Plan and Prepare For Your Mpower Agent

• Plan the first few use cases the Mpower Agent will handle. What questions will it be able to answer? What business problems will it solve? To get started, choose a few easy use cases. You can add more later.
• Speak with agents in your organization. Ask about their experiences with each of your use cases. What questions to they get asked most often? What problems do agents have to solve?
• Gather real-word examples from your organization for each use case. These might include recordings or transcripts for chats, emails, text or social conversations, and voice interactions.

• Use CXone Mpower XO to analyze your historic interactions and extract examples to use with your Mpower Agents.

• Review the Agent Builder best practices.
• Decide what channels Various voice and digital communication mediums that facilitate customer interactions in a contact center. your Mpower Agent will work with (voice or digital). This determines the setup that's needed outside of Agent Builder. You need to have the channel set up before you deploy your Mpower Agent to production and go online. If your Mpower Agent will handle voice interactions, you need to complete the setup to voice-enable it. Note that a voice-enabled Mpower Agent is part of a Controlled Release program. Contact your Account Representative if you're interested in this program.

Design Your Mpower Agent

After you have gathered examples of real-world interactions, make plans for each use case:

• Use your examples to map out a script for a successful interaction, also known as the happy path, for the use case. Keep your examples; you'll refer to them often during the implementation process.
• Determine the use case's intents The meaning or purpose behind what a contact says/types; what the contact wants to communicate or accomplish. by examining the real-world interactions you gathered. You'll refine the intents as you go through this process. For now, start with the high-level, most obvious intents.
• Write the Mpower Agent side of the dialogue. Do this for each story or rule where the Mpower Agent sends a message to the contact The person interacting with an agent, IVR, or bot in your contact center.. As you write, keep in mind the following best practices:
  • Decide the personality of your Mpower Agent and its vocabulary ahead of time. Remember that your Mpower Agent is a face of your organization, just as human agents are. Ensure that its manner gives the right impression. Be clear on the mannerisms you want to replicate in it's responses.
  • Write all dialogue ahead of time. This allows you to ensure that the way your Mpower Agent speaks is consistent throughout the conversation. When working on a new use-case, review the dialogue you've already written to maintain the persona across all use cases.
  • Know the audience you're writing for. The language and terminology you use for the general public may differ from the language you would use for a specialized audience.
  • Keep messages from the Mpower Agent short. Many people don't like to read long blocks of text. The more text your Mpower Agent sends, the less engaging it's likely to be. If there's a lot of information to send, consider breaking it into several shorter responses.
  • Read through the conversation out loud a few times. You might consider role-playing the conversation with someone else. You could also record yourself reading the responses scripted for your Mpower Agent, then listen to it. These are all good ways to spot places in the scripted responses that need improvement.

Map Out an Mpower AgentConversation

The conversation between an Mpower Agent and a contact contains several elements. You might not need all of them in every conversation scenario. They are: 

• Greeting. The speaker (Mpower Agent or contact) says hello, good morning, welcome, and so on.
• Asking questions. The speaker is looking for information, clarification, or direction.
• Responding to questions. The speaker gives the requested information or asks a question when clarification is needed.
• Confirmation. The speaker seeks verification that they understood what the other party said.
• Closing. The speaker ends the conversation with thanks and a goodbye.

Additionally, the Mpower Agent may need to:

• State its limitations. "That's not something I know how to do yet."
• Apologize. "I'm sorry, I don't understand."
• Express an error. "Oh dear, something has gone wrong."
• Transfer to a live agent. "I'll get someone to help."

As you design a conversation, each of the Mpower Agent responses should clearly and concisely convey one of the preceding conversational elements.

It may be helpful to draw the conversation flow on paper or on your computer. This helps make gaps and inconsistencies more apparent. It gives you a guide to follow throughout the process of configuring your Mpower Agent.

The following example illustrates a conversation with an Mpower Agent that can perform several tasks. The chat window does not include a pre-chat survey asking what the contact needs. In this example, the contact wants to check their account balance.

After creating a simplistic diagram such as the one shown in the preceding image, you might want to add more detail. For example, you could add:

• The text of the Mpower Agent responses.
• The contact's intents The meaning or purpose behind what a contact says/types; what the contact wants to communicate or accomplish., as well as which of the Mpower Agent responses are stories and which should be rules.
• Variations of Mpower Agent responses. For example, for the greeting, create a set of three greeting variations.

Don't forget to map out how the conversation ends. If your Mpower Agent performs multiple tasks and the contact can make several requests in the same interaction, how does it handle that transition?  For example, does the it ask the contact if it needs anything else, or does it use buttons to list what else it can help with?