Microsoft bot framework handover solution to support agents in MS Teams

Question

My team is working on QnA bot. We take as a base this https://github.com/microsoft/BotBuilder-Samples/tree/main/samples/javascript_nodejs/49.qnamaker-all-features sample and right now thinking on the handover solution to real group of support agents in case of "no answer" from QnA maker.

The idea is to have pull of registered in MS Teams (or any other messager if the integration is more straight forward) accounts and having an user with "no answer" case been redirected to one of these accounts which is not busy by another user.

Does anyone have this kind of experience and can help with guiding to the right direction?

Answer 1

I have worked on the same scenario for one of our customer requirement. I have gone through several documents and found out some ideas for the implementation.

These are my findings and implementation details.

1. As per the github documentation from Microsoft, I understood that there is an experimental package available for handoff in C# code ( Microsoft Handoff library ). As of now this library is not recommended for production use and please check this experimental docs reference for more info and below comments in the github account:

The samples in this folder should not be used in a production environment. They are not supported and the team is not implying a given approach used in these samples will be integrated into a future version of the Bot Framework SDK. Instead, we want to provide a way to engage on topics that can help guide our roadmap for future work.

2. This is the best open source code for live agent ( handoff library ) that I found from github. The author of the code is an approved microsoft open source contributor and he has developed an agent hub routing + multiple channel connectivity in the bot. This will handle multiple user request to an agent with the help of agent hub. The agent can open a communication channel for user connectivity. You will get a better understanding once you go through the documents.

3. This is the one I have implemented reference , This will be a simple redirection to an agent from an user with his comments or issues through microsoft team channel group. I have implemented one way communication but at least you can inform to the group ( created for agent team ) for user issues with his account details in the channel in ms team. So any of the agent in the team can personally contact him through ms team account and resolve the issues.

Suggestions:

1. If qna answer is empty then you can redirect into Bing search instead of connecting agent.
2. Connect an agent whenever user required like the sentence "I need help from human agent",etc.