This article covers what you need to know to prepare for a successful onboarding that lays the foundation of a well-performed virtual agent.
This article includes the following topics:
Assemble the team
Your teammates are the key to success so pick your best players for this project.
You'll need:
Project Lead
- Typical job title: Head of Customer Support, Head of Customer Experience, Direct of Customer Service and Operations
- Owns the overall project and is responsible internally for the project's success
- Selects and briefs project team
- Communicates strategic objectives of the bot internally
- Does not attend the bootcamp but is aware of progress and informed of any blocks
Bot Builders
- Typical job title: Customer Support Agent, Customer Service Agent, Customer Care Agent
- Maximum 2-3 experienced agents
- Own the bot building, monitoring and content maintenance once live
- Understand current processes and customers
CRM Admin
- Typical job title: CRM Administrator, CRM Manager, Ops Manager (or Developer/Product Manager for API integrations)
- Knows and owns the CRM, widget, and technical setup
- Stays close to the project during kick-off, initial setup as well as testing and launch
- Attends the bootcamp when necessary
Custom Integration Engineer*
- Typical job title: Backend Engineer
- Responsible for implementing backend integrations
- Has a general understanding of the use cases
- Knows the data of the relevant backend systems
- Attends the bootcamp when necessary
*Not applicable to all projects
Set goals with your team
Common goals and KPIs
Once you have the dream team, it's important to understand what the pain points are and decide with the team what you want to achieve. For example, you might want to leverage the bot for 24/7 support, and have automatic routing in place to reduce Average Handling Time (AHT).
Some common goals and KPIs are:
- establish an Automation Rate of X% within one month of launch
- reduce Average Handling Time (AHT) by Y%
- reduce First Response Time (FRT) by Z%
- increase customer served through 24/7 support
Block the calendar
To ensure the success of your automation project, Ultimate has a 15-day bootcamp during onboarding to ensure you and the team will have a virtual agent working at the end of it.
This bootcamp requires 2+ hours/week from the Project Lead, 16-18 hours/week for Bot Builders, and about 5 hours from the CRM Admin for CRM integration testing and on launch day.
Save the date
Once you and the team have set the goals, blocked the calendars, the next thing is to think about what could be an ideal go-live date taking the 15-day bootcamp into account.
Prepare insights and data
Before the kick-off call with your Delivery Manager, prepare the materials below:
Historical data
- Customer messages in a selected timeframe in the past.
- Your Delivery Manager will schedule a separate session with you to import the historical data and understand the current CRM setup.
FAQs and processes
- FAQs could be a link to your help center page as well as a customer query report sorted based on frequency or volume
- The current processes of the FAQs - Your internal agent training manual would work too!
- You ideal automated processes of the FAQs with Virtual Agent's assistance
Branding guidelines
- Your internal manual that describes the right tone of voice to use with your customers. It is often obtainable from your marketing team.
Custom integration*
- Priority of automation - depending on the ideal automated processes you have, there might be a couple of different backend integration desired. It is important for you to align internally and decide which is the game changer that needs to be built first
- Pre-onboarding preparation
*Not applicable to all projects
Bootcamp duration and timeline
Here's the timeline from the kick off to getting the virtual agent up and running. Note that the actual time varies depending on the complexity of your solution, the channel the virtual agent will be working in, your time spent outside of bootcamp, etc.
Kick off
In the kick off we will decide together what the success criteria are and understand your technical as well as CRM setup. We can then decide a provisional launch date taking as many factors into consideration as possible. In addition, your team's availability for the bootcamp in the upcoming weeks.
Bootcamp
The bootcamp consists of ten to fourteen 60 to 90-minute sessions which fall into three distinct phases:
- Key concepts and tools
- Build & consult
- Test & Launch
It is mandatory for the bot builders, as per team assembly above, and would require input from the project lead and CRM admin at times.
It ends with the launch of your virtual agent that is unique to you and your customers but not your onboarding with Ultimate.
Post-launch
Once the virtual agent has gone live, we will assess performance against agreed success metrics, review conversations logs to spot where improvements can be made, and discuss next steps how Ultimate can best support the growth of your business.