The LMS Conversation Simulator ticket generation app by Zendesk Labs assigns realistic, true-to-life training tickets to agents in a structured, easy-to-use way. This new tool improves your agent training in several key ways:
- Creates a safe space for practicing customer interactions when onboarding agents
- Enables rapid assessment of agent training retention and comprehension
- Delivers just-in-time training for new products, services, and policies your agents need to understand
This article contains the following topics:
Getting started
Before you install the LMS Conversation Simulator app, take a moment to review the following:
- Training tickets generated by the LMS Conversation Simulator app must be evaluated within Zendesk QA (or another QA tool).
- You need to be signed in as a Zendesk admin to complete the setup.
- The app currently supports English only.
- You must have at least two custom objects available for use. If you’ve already used up all of your included custom objects, you’ll need to upgrade your plan to obtain more.
Installing and configuring the app
Install the LMS Conversation Simulator from the Zendesk Marketplace.
To install and configure the app
- In the Zendesk Marketplace, go to the LMS Conversation Simulator app page.
- On the app's page, click Install.
- Select the Zendesk account where you want to install the app, then click Install.
The account you selected opens and the LMS Conversation Simulator page displays.
- Change the app title if required.
- Configure group and role restrictions to the app as required.
Note: If you restrict an agent from the app, they won't be assigned training tickets.
- Click the Sign in with LMS Conversation Simulator link.
- In the new tab that's displayed, complete authentication.
- You are then redirected back to the app. A green check mark will appear next to the OAuth Authentication step. Click Install.
- During installation, the LMS Conversation Simulator automatically creates several configurations:
- Custom Object: Assign training template
- Custom Object: Training template
- Custom Ticket Field: Assigned training
- Custom Ticket Field: Training template
You'll need to configure access to the two custom objects for the app to work. In Admin Center, click
Channels in the sidebar, then select Messaging and social > Messaging., click People > Roles.
- From the list of roles, click the role you want to give permission to. The role settings page displays.
- In the Custom objects section of the role settings page, select the View and Edit permissions for the following custom objects:
- Training template
- Assign training template
- Click Save.
The installation is now complete.
Using the app
To open the app, in Support, click the LMS icon ().
The Agent Training page displays. Here, you can view the title, description, creator, and assignees for each training template.
Create a new training template
In this section, you'll create a training template that you can assign to agents.
This section contains the following steps. Follow each step in order:
Getting started
In this step, you'll provide basic information about your new template.
To create a training template
- From the Agent Training page, click Create Training Template.
- On the Create training template page, enter a unique name and optional description for the template, then click Next. The description you use does not affect your AI-generated tickets.
Define your scenario
Next, define your scenario. This defines the topics that the simulator will use to create tickets.
To define your Scenario
- In the Define your scenario section of the Create template page, choose one of the following options to use as reference points for AI-generated ticket conversations:
- Select intents: Select topics from the Zendesk-provided intents list.
-
Select similar tickets: Select related tickets from your real-life encounters with customers. You can use the standard Zendesk search syntax to find tickets that match your planned training conversations. The LMS Conversation Simulator will reference the end-user comments on these tickets to establish realistic detail for your training scenarios. You can click the ticket subject hyperlink to open the ticket in Support or choose the tickets you want to use as a training reference.
Important: Make sure to redact any sensitive PII data in these tickets prior to creating the training template.
- From the Select tone dropdown, choose the tone your AI-generated end user will use in conversation with your agents. You can choose from values such as friendly, sympathetic, and formal.
- If there are any other details that you think might help create the training, you can enter them under Additional refinement. For example, you might specify products to reference or specific policies to push back against. This directly modifies the AI-prompt used to create the training tickets, so try to be explicit in your instructions.
- Click Next.
Test your training template
This is a great time to test out an AI-generated conversation.
To test your conversation
- On the Create training template page, click Test this ticket. A test chatbot is displayed where you can converse with the AI.
Using this example, you'll see that the AI is referencing "software" when you want it to reference "retail clothing".
To improve this, you can return to the scenario pages and select example tickets that reference clothing. You could also expand on your additional refinement to add details about your products that customers might want a refund for.
- When you've finished testing, close the test chatbot.
Add training documentation
If you want your agents to review any training documentation prior to being assigned tickets for training or assessment, you can provide up to three links to documentation, videos, or internal policy documentation in your help center. These links will be provided in a single ticket to the agent prior to receiving any simulated customer conversations. When the agent solves the ticket, the first AI-generated conversation will be assigned to them. If no links are provided, the first ticket will be a generated conversation based on the scenario you created.
To add training documentation
- Under Training documentation, click Add link.
- Add a link to the training documentation you want the agent to see.
- Continue to add links as required.
Finishing up
Now that you've finished configuring your template, you can save, edit, or delete it as required.
To save your template
- Click Save to return to the Overview page. From this page, you can click the options button (
) to assign, edit, duplicate, or delete the training template, as needed.
Assign training tickets to agents
At this point, you’ve created your training template and are ready to assign tickets to agents. You can choose agents based on their scores with similar tickets in Zendesk QA or another QA tool, select all new agents who are onboarding, or select all agents that might work with a new product or service. Complete ticket assignment with the following steps:
To assign tickets to agents
- On The Agent training page of the app, for the template you want to use, click Assign.
- On the Assign template page, provide the following (click Next to advance to each section):
-
Template: Select your appropriate training template from the list of available templates.
-
Number of tickets: Enter how many training tickets you’d like the agent to receive from this training template. This does not include the initial training documentation ticket that you might have configured. Tickets will be created and assigned one at a time, with each new ticket being created after the previous one was solved. You can create up to ten tickets.
-
Tags: In order to identify, route, and track training tickets appropriately, you can tag your training tickets with one or more tags. Enter an existing tag, or create a new one. Press enter to finalize your selection.
-
Goals: Enter a description of your goal with this assignment, for example, "Test comprehension of a new returns policy".
-
Template: Select your appropriate training template from the list of available templates.
- Choose the agents who you want to assign the training.
- Click Assign training ticket.
Agent guide for the app
If you’ve been assigned a training ticket from the LMS Conversation Simulator, there are several important things to understand.
This section contains the following topics:
About the training documentation ticket
Your training might begin with a single training documentation ticket. This will have between one and three documentation links that your administrator suggests reviewing before you begin having simulated conversations. When you’ve finished reviewing the documentation, you can solve the ticket.
The ticket can be identified by the requester (LMS Training Bot), Subject (Training documentation ticket), and potentially tags or custom ticket fields (Assigned training and Training Template), which, depending on your configuration, you might see in your ticket view.
About the training ticket
After completing the training documentation ticket (if included), you'll be automatically assigned your first training ticket. This ticket will have a status of Open. You can identify this as a training ticket using the ticket tags or custom ticket fields (Assigned training and Training Template), which, depending on your configuration, you might see in your ticket view.
Complete this ticket as you would any other. The requester will continue replying to you until the ticket is fully resolved.
20 comments
Paula Saboia
Hi guys! After doing the step by step process and asking for the LMS app to create 10 tickets to 2 asigned agents, we could not manage to find those tickets. The end-user lms-bot@example.com has no tickets. Could you help me figure out why?
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Paula Saboia
Hi guys, after doing the step by step process on the LMS app, I asigned 10 tickets to 2 agents. However the end-user lms-bot@example.com has no tickets created. Could you help me figure out why?
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Walter
Hi Paula Saboia,
I believe this feature requires the Zendesk Quality Assurance add-on. Do you have that?
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Denis Menard
Hello,
Can we set the bot to speak in other langages? Like French, Spanish… Thanks
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Akshay Gupta
Hey, we tried setting up the LMS, but while testing the BOT flow, it kept loading and didn't turn out as expected. Could someone help us fix this?
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Suzy Schreiber
I was able to create and assign the template but I am unable to see any tickets get created or assigned. Nothing shows in my assigned tickets. Are there other requirements or steps to take to see the assigned tickets? The LMS Training bot user has no tickets created.
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Kelly Danner
Hi Walter & Paula Saboia - QA is not required, but we don't provide another way to score the tickets otherwise. Re: Ticket generation, we're looking into that now, stay tuned :)
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Kelly Danner
Denis Menard - Thanks for sharing! LMS is a Zendesk Labs project, so we'll incrementally release new features. We're collecting feedback from everyone post launch and will start tackling new features in a few weeks. Stay tuned :)
1
Dan Savage
Hey team, love the idea of this App but we are having a little trouble setting it up…even thought I have given people access to the app they receive the following message
LMS Conversation Simulator:
Failed to fetch the open training records
Furthermore, when I try to test my training templates it just sits on a loading icon and doesn't actually generate anything.
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Noosh
Hi everyone,
I set the app up in our SB instance yesterday and everything worked fine.
Today however, when installing it on our live instance, I'm constantly getting an error:
I uninstalled it, installed it again. Deleted it from SB to only have it on live. Logged out, logged in, cleared cache and cookies even. Nothing seems to work.
what am I missing?
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Shai Eyal
Hi Zendesk team!
Excited for this cool feature, however we could not get the training ticket to reply after the initial response.
Is it possibe to have a quick call with one of your support people to review this glitch?
We tested the scenario and it worked beautifully, but once we tried assigning it, it only sent the first message and stopped there.
Another thing: We want to begin by testing this in our sandbox. This environment is not connect to our Klaus QA environment, as that can ony be connected to our production env. - how can we score this?
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Fayiz Qadri
HI Dan Savage, You had previously created a template and assigned training using it. However, you later deleted the template while the assigned training remained, which caused the issue. I have resolved it for you, and it should be working now.
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Fayiz Qadri
Noosh Can you please verify that the Custom Object feature is enabled in your account? You can do so by following this guide (https://developer.zendesk.com/documentation/custom-data/v2/getting-started-with-custom-objects/#activating-custom-objects)
1
Noosh
Hi Fayiz Qadri
Thank you for the help.
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Tobias Hermanns
Hi, let me share our bottleneck and my questions.
1.) We had “Legacy Objects” enabled not “Objects” this was the first bottleneck, LMS always said “Setup in Progress” by unspecific error, instead of just telling “enable Objects”
2.) When creating Template, the list of “Demo tickets” should be hide when Intent option is selected, or it confuses
3.) When assign an Agent, a list of Agents / Groups like Assignee List should be display, otherwise it looks liek field contain nothing, it was not clear to search here
4.) Assign work, doesnt follow any guideline, I could find tickets as i have a Ticket Created in past 4 hours view, but without set a tag and a view it´s so unsorted, also it uses default Form, but due to missing Trigger may no Priority.
I vote for having a dynamically view added to the Agents on top like “Training Active” where the tickets come in WITHOUT any ticket form or priority and able to “Solve” it without conflicting with any other business trigger, this would make it easier.
Now my question:
How to see results? If Agents perform or not? If they do correctly? When they solve a ticket?
I just spoke with the bot, and I could Solve the ticket without solution, how to grab this feedback?
Another Bug found, sometimes the bot just reply: “No message provided”.
Feature Request:
Assign work to groups / all agents / all agents in Group instead of search “per Agent”
Repeat same tickets after X time
make process that reading the link / KB Article and “Solve Ticket” to receive tickets with real examples more clear.
Add option to Agents like “You´re invited in Training program” (notification)
Thanks.
Tobias
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Sheryl Doluna
Hi! I created 7 test tickets and assigned them to 2 agents but no ticket was generated.
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Chris H
Hi team! Diving right into things, I have seen a few issues after we managed to get responses in tickets. Right now I don't think it's ready for us to use.
It seems that the quality of the responses in the testing environment when building out the training template is far better than what is coming through on the ticket, I wonder if there is some automation etc that is slowing it down or confusing it.
We also want to ensure that these tickets are excluded from our analytics, is there something that can be implemented to ensure LMS conversations are excluded from reply time, agent reporting etc?
I'd love to chat to someone about all of this, so please reach out.
Cheers!
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Kelly Danner
Tobias Hermanns - Great feedback!
Yes, we'll do some more callouts on making sure that these tickets are caught by your configuration. As everyone uses their own config, this could be challenging. We'll do some thinking about it. I like your idea! Maybe we could add a config option to include a system view.
Questions:
Love your feedback! If you'd be interested in providing more feedback on the app holistically, please let me know and I'd be happy to set something up.
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Kelly Danner
Sheryl Doluna - Do you agents have access to View the custom objects specified in the article? We can't create the tickets for the agents unless they can view those.
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Kelly Danner
Chris H - yes we're just seeing this No Message Provided error today as well - will follow up, thank you! I'm happy to take some more feedback, I'll reach out to schedule something
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