I have recently been using Live Assist from CaféX to add chat capabilities into Unified Service Desk (USD) for Microsoft Dynamics 365. In this post I will highlight some of the concepts I’ve discovered around campaigns and engagements.

We use campaigns and engagements in Live Assist to target chat interactions and also customize the user experience. When you first install Live Assist you’ll have a default campaign and engagement. But quickly you will need to customize these.

Using the Live Assist campaign and engagement configuration / settings options is pretty intuitive. That is once you appreciate what is possible. Therefore in this post I’ll try to highlight the key capabilities we have available. Hopefully giving you the background knowledge to start to delve a little deeper. (Also, you will find some great training videos here that will help expand your knowledge.)

You manage the settings for campaigns and their associated engagements in the Live Assist settings. This can be accessed various ways, one being from the URL you’ll find within the Dynamics 365 settings area. (As shown below.)

In this post I give a summary of the key features for;

• Campaigns
• Engagements
• Customizing Engagements
• Customizing Engagements – Pre / Post Chat Surveys
• Campaign Goals
• Targeting Campaigns by Audience
• Targeting Engagements by Location (Within your website.)
• Targeting Engagements by Behaviour
• Content Engagements
• Data Tracking Configuration

Spoiler alert … you can do loads with Live Assist! I will cover as much as possible but may miss the odd feature.

Campaigns

A campaign defines the audience, timeframe and what engagement(s) are applicable. Campaigns can also optionally contain a goal to measure the success of a campaign.

Note:
Initially you will have a default campaign that is unending and has an open ended goal. Plus will be open to all visitors to your site.

The audience options can be used to focus on people from a particular geo-location, gender, age range etc.

All campaigns have at least one engagement.

Below you can see my default campaign that has no end date, no goal, is open to all visitors and has the one default engagement.

Engagements

Engagements define how live assist interacts with visitors to your site. Including defining what gets shown, to whom and when.

The default “ocean theme” will give you a pretty standard blue chat button and a blue themed chat window (Shown below). The style of the chat window and chat button can be controlled. Including their colour, position, images, text etc etc. Additionally you can control which page(s) the chat option displays on.

Initially the chat option will show to all visitors regardless of any behaviour conditions. Behaviours allow you to trigger engagements based on ” visitor flow”. Examples might include someone who has been viewing a page for more than a certain length of time or maybe someone has stalled in your ordering process. (Suggesting they might need some support.)

There are effectively two types of engagements, chat and content. Chat engagements will be designed to open chat conversations with your agents, whilst content engagements can be used to automatically direct the visitor to content.

Customizing Engagements

The chat banner can be customized in many ways! Including changing its style, placement, background colour, editing the text, changing the image etc. You can access the options to achieve these effected from the engagement.

Below you can see that I have changed the default chat button to include a revised image, alternative text and I have customized the background and board colours.

Additionally you can control other items in the engagement. Including the predefined responses available to agents and any automated messages.

Note:
It is also possible to link this engagement to skills. When we define agents / users they can be assigned skills. Meaning that chat requests would then only show to agents with the correct skills.

The chat window can be customized in a similar way, Except you cannot change the ocean theme but we can add new themes.

Below you can see that I have altered the colours of my chat window and added a very glamorous photo!

Customizing Engagements – Pre and Post Chat Survey

It is possible to also create pre and post chat surveys. Below you can see that on my engagement I have change the view from “Chat” to “Pre-chat survey”.

This might be useful if you wish to capture details about the visitor and their query before connecting with a chat agent. (Tip:
In Unified Service Desk (USD) you can access the responses to these questions in replacement parameters!)

It is a simple process to add questions into the survey. These can be text fields or option sets, as required.

For example, it my quick test I created a dropdown option set to establish if the visitor had a sales or support query.

Campaign Goals

A previously mentioned initially you will have a campaign that is ongoing and has no goal. The concept of goals is to help achieve business objectives, such as increasing sales, improving service outcomes etc. Initially the goal is simply to interact with visitors but we can edit this.

Firstly we select a goal type. Types include selling products, generating leads, completing service activity, increasing page views or “other”. You’ll use other if the pre-defined goal types don’t quite meet your requirements.

Having defined the goal type you will need to consider what indicator is used to say it the goal has been completed. The simplest approach is to use a URL. Say a potential customer completes a lead form and that form takes you to a thank you page. Or when taking an order the final step is an order confirmation page. Reaching these pages will have shown that the goal has been achieved.

A more comprehensive approach to goals is to use data tracking to confirm what records were actually created. This level of integration is more powerful but also will be more involved to configure.

Charts are available to show progress towards goals. (Which are updated hourly.) You may also want to look at the difference between goals achieved with assistance and those achieved without.

Note:
At this point in time I am simply investigating the out of the box capabilities of Live Assist. Reviewing goals does lead me to think about what else I can do with this data and if the goal data can be accessed directly in Dynamics 365 or maybe even PowerBI. (For now these will be questions I will return to another day!)

Targeting Campaigns by Audience

Initially your campaign will be for all visitors to your site. But this might be wasteful as you could be engaging with customers that don’t meet the demographic you wish to target. For example, you might waste time chatting with customers that are outside of the regions you deal with.

When defining an audience we first define the origin and then filter based on customer info. Origins include;

• External referral – the referral URL.
• Search keywords – include or exclude visitors who used certain keywords. (Not forgetting that Google does not support keywords other than via Adwords.)
• IP Range – include or exclude people from given IP ranges. You may, for example want to exclude people from your own organisation. Or include only your own people, maybe whilst testing a new campaign.
• Platform – Currently Live Assist isn’t available on mobile clients. Therefore currently you’d want to exclude visitors from mobile devices.
• Marketing source – data tracking can be used to establish the marketing source and there you could target people for specific campaigns differently.

Having defined the origin of our audience we next define the customer information. Many of these fields will rely on data tracking being configured. As Live Assist will need to be “told” how to determine a visitors company size etc. The most common option that you might want to use is geo-location, which doesn’t reply on data tracking. You can see above that I have included only customer from the United Kingdom and Netherlands.

Targeting Engagements by Location

By default the engagement will be applied to your entire website. But it might be that a sales campaign should only apply on your “shopping” pages. Or maybe a campaign to service your customers should only show in the support section of your website.

Locations can be defined in one of two ways. The first is to simply enter the details of the URL corresponding to that area in your website. In many circumstances this will be all you need to do.

But your URL structure might not follow a ridge layout. Or maybe your site map is likely to change which would in turn “break” your engagement set-up. For example, if you add a new page you would need to remember to add it into all corresponding engagements. In these circumstances you can add JavaScript into your website. Then refer to the sections of your website using tags. This second approach will be more complex to setup, as you’ll need to make changes to your website. But it is probably a more robust approach!

Targeting Engagements by Behaviour

Targeting engagements based on visitor behaviour can be a powerful way to encourage or discourage certain outcomes. For example, if someone abandons a shopping basket part way into the checkout flow maybe a chat with an operator may resolve their potential issue.

As with location visitor behaviour is an attribute on the engagement. And will initially default to “All Behaviours”.

Each behaviour will have a condition bases on navigation, e-commerce or visitor journey. Some of these options will require data tracking to be configured! Others reply on URLs but can be amended to work from section tags. (If you add JavaScript into your website to define the section tags.)

One example of behaviour might be flow. We might want to attempt to chat with the customer if a flow is abandoned or maybe if they move backwards in the flow. Take a checkout process as an example. If the user abandons the checkout process before completing the shipping details or if they back track just before confirming the order maybe a chat conversation would help. Flows are constructed by listing the URLs or sections that makeup the flow. We can then define if the engagement should apply if the flow has been abandoned etc.

Time on location and visited location can be used to trigger a conversation. In the example I gave above if someone paused on the “contact me” page without contacting us maybe suggesting a chat would be useful.

The concept of “About to abandon” relies on the use of Google analytics. Then if the data suggests the user might be about to abandon the current action then a chat could commence.

The other options in eCommerce and Visitor Journey will all reply on data tracking being defined. As Live Assist, for example, would need to be aware of what fields hold your product and pricing information.

It might be that a chat should begin is a visitor views or selects a particular product. Or maybe they are presented with an error. Such as an item being out of stock. In this example a chat with an operator may help suggest an alternative or discuss when stock will become available.

Content Engagements

The concept of a content engagement is actually very similar to that of a chat engagement. In that both relate to campaigns and both can be based on visitor location and / or behaviour. The only difference is that a content engagement will direct the visitor to information whilst as chat engagement will connect them with an agent.

This concept could be very useful when you don’t actually want to tie up an agent. For example, maybe the customers is viewing a low value product that doesn’t warrant engaging with an “expensive” chat agent.

We create content engagements in the same way as chat engagements. Other than the channel is set to content.

As with chat engagements there is a number of formats available.

Having selected a format you can access a number of predefined examples. A good approach might be to select something which is close to your requirement and then customize it!

Below you can see that the customization options on a content engagement are very similar to those of a chat engagement. Notice that by selecting the cog I can optionally define a URL that will be triggered if the visitor clicks on the content engagement.

Data Tracking Configuration

I have mentioned in several features that to fully utilize them you will need to configure data tracking. This is because Live Assist will not magically know what your products are or what field to use for the visitors age etc. Live Assist will need to be “taught” how to derive this information.

Live Assist uses data tracking to assist with campaigns, marketing activities or sales. It makes extensive use of data tracking when targeting campaigns and engagements, measuring goals and providing agents with insights regarding a visitor.

As you configure various options in Live Assist you will be presented with an orange button that allows you to access the “Configure tracking” option.

Alternatively you can use the data sources option from the campaigns view.

In data sources you select if you wish to define eCommerce, visitor or visitor journey attributes.

With any attribute data can be obtained by extracting the data direct from the webpage or by embedding JavaScript code on the page. Referencing the html element or a named JavaScript variable maybe the simplest approach as no changes are needed to your website. However future maintenance could result in issues. Therefore the preferred approach is to embed code into your website to interact directly with Live Assist. Meaning the values are then pushed directly into Live Assist without the need to define this mapping.

I have shown a sample of some typical code below;

I hope this post has given you a good flavour for all of the key features of Live Assist. And that with this knowledge you feel confident enough to explore these features in more depth.