At the Teams ’23 conference, Atlassian announced a beta release of AI integration into Jira Service Management. Well, the Virtual Agent for JSM feature has now been released to the general public. It represents the first live element of the larger Atlassian Intelligence product that will use the power of AI to make our interactions with Atlassian products more efficient.
What does it do?
Virtual Agent for JSM works with Slack support channels to automate interactions with customers (support for other collaboration tools will be added in time). It can ask questions and collect information, provide customers information from connected knowledge bases, and connect customers to humans for further assistance. And it learns from its interactions with your particular customers, so with time it will improve its ability to help.
Virtual Agent will help teams automate support interactions and deliver fast, always-on, conversational support via their favorite collaboration tools. The built-in AI engine analyzes and understands intent, sentiment, context, and profile information to personalize interactions. Virtual Agent also uses generative AI to dynamically generate answers from sources within your enterprise, like knowledge base articles, onboarding guides, and FAQs. And if necessary, it can seamlessly transition the conversation to human experts to complete the request – without losing context.
In short,Virtual Agent for JSM makes the best of employee time by handling routine matters for you.
Who can use it?
Atlassian Cloud customers with Premium and Enterprise Editions of Jira Service Management, who use Slack as a support channel(support for other collaboration tools will be added in time). Developed in partnership with OpenAI, Virtual Agent is included at no extra charge for up to 1000 assisted conversations per month per site. Just enable it in Settings in the organization’s admin portal, then configure it in projects you want to use it for – it’s right there in a JSM project’s settings.
Empower your team with Virtual Agent for JSM
How does it work?
Start by defining an intent – a specific problem, question, or request that your virtual agent can help resolve for your customers. That tells the virtual agent what to look for as it interacts with a customer; it will confirm with the customer that it has correctly understood the customer’s intent before proceeding.
Then create a conversation flow, which is a multi-step conversational flowchart that is designed to anticipate what your customers might say and make sure they get the help they need. Flows can have different branches to handle a customer’s various responses, take different actions, or move the customer to a specific resolution. A conversation flow can even send a web request to interact with another system, like getting a list of office locations the customer can then choose between.
There will always be customers whose needs don’t fit the intent and conversation flows you’ve prepared, and for them, Atlassian Intelligence answers may still be able to help.Atlassian Intelligence answers uses generative artificial intelligence to search across your linked knowledge base spaces, and answer customer questions that don’t match a defined intent – much the way a human agent would. Atlassian Intelligence answers is a feature you can activate for the virtual agent, and then for each request channel you want it to work in.
As it uses the intents, conversation flows, and knowledge bases you provide it, the virtual agent learns from interactions by leveraging a best-in-class Natural Language Processing (NLP) engine. So with time, it will improve its ability to handle customer inquiries.
In keeping with Atlassian’s commitment to security, their partnership with OpenAI includes a zero-day retention policy, ensuring that no data is stored on OpenAI systems.
Why use it?
Employee time is valuable. You want every employee doing valuable work, not simple repetitive tasks. Why make an employee look up the same information for customers over and over, when you can let JSM’s virtual agent handle that? Why make an employee go through the initial task of determining what sort of help customers want, over and over, when a virtual agent can do that (in most cases) – and connect to an employee for meaningful, targeted help?
Enhance your service experience with Virtual Agent for JSM
And don’t forget that Jira Service Management works just as well for teams serving other employees, like HR handling PTO and sick time requests. Virtual Agent is just as effective for them as it is for external customers. It also works 24×7, so it can provide after-hours customer help when your employees are off – or, if your service teams already cover 24×7, it can help you handle more support requests with the staff you have.
The value of Virtual Agent for JSM mirrors the value of JSM itself, enabling support teams everywhere to provide better service to more people, faster and at scale.
