First thing tomorrow you'll be able to take advantage of all new functionality arriving for Lifecycles, Approvals, Tasks, and Transitions. All alongside even more ways to empower Super Agents within the organization. LET'S GO!

Approvals

Whether it's in a Lifecycle or added on the fly to a ticket, Super Agents and Admins can now edit an Approval. This is great because if someone is out of the office now you can flip approvers. Best of all, all changes to Approvals are audited within the ticket itself.

Tasks

Let's just get right to it. Not only can you now assign Teams and Groups to a Task. But you can also assign Collaborators as well!

Plus, we're introducing an additional Status of "Skipped" to Tasks. This new Status functions identical to Completed but introduces a new way to mark Tasks and of course report on them.

This Status is more relevant than ever within Lifecycles as the "Use Default Logic" Transition respects Skipped in addition to Complete as a means to progress a Lifecycle forward.

These new fields on Tasks can also be seen within My Work and My Group Work views!

Lifecycle - Manual Transitions

Since we introduced Lifecycles, Logic Builder provided a way to define how to move forward, backward, or wherever you'd like within a Ticket's active Lifecycle. What's more, the optional "Reason" field provides a way to show why you are returning to a specific Phase of work.

But up until now, you've always had to respect the rules as defined within the Lifecycle. You're either always moving forward through Phases of work or you've moving elsewhere when some condition is met.

But now Super Agents and Admins can now manually transition into any Phase of work using that same Reason field. This change is audited against the ticket so it's clear as to where you've come from, and why you've transitioned to a particular phase.

But if you're looking closely above, you might notice something else. Also available is the ability to add Tasks and Approvals on the fly into a Ticket with an active Lifecycle!

Automations

And all of these changes come with updates to Automations!

Power BI/Excel updates

Also worth mentioning that a simple refresh (manual or scheduled) of your Power BI or Excel templates will automatically introduce these data points on those respective queries. We'll have another update of the these reporting templates shortly to include new dashboards.

Also available if you missed it are several new date fields that are automatically getting set for you directly on Tickets. They are:

• First Assignment Date

• First Private Agent Comment

• First Agent Comment

• First Requester Comment

Again, all it takes is a simple refresh of your dashboards to unlock these new data points for you to report on.

Technically Speaking for December

We're also moving Technically Speaking up to this Friday the 20th. We'll go over these features and what's next. See you there!

Interested in experimenting with how your KB could respond to different prompts? With Chat Studio, we're giving Knowledge Agents more ways to further tune Knowledge thresholds. Let's dive in!

Chat Studio

Up until this point, tuning your Knowledge Base has always involved some back and forth between editing the Knowledge Base and testing those responses out with Tikit Virtual Agent. While recent improvements to the Knowledge Base, introduced support for KB Status, Agent Only responses, and OpenAI on Azure. There still wasn't a good way to experience everything the KB had to offer in a test environment.

Now featured alongside where you configure Knowledge Articles and Synonyms. Chat Studio gives you the ability to test out responses without having to interact with Tikit Virtual Agent. Best of all, you can control what responses are returned. Such as:

• including Draft and In Review articles
• including Agent only articles
• including Azure OpenAI results
• including the deflection score of the returned response
• how many responses are returned to simulate multi-response
• setting a unique scoring threshold for Chat Studio

We'll cover this and more on Technically Speaking, this Friday September 27th!

As the title of this announcement might imply, there are just a few things arriving with this release of Tikit. We're excited to get into the details about all of them, so no use in waiting, let's talk features!

@Mention

Let's start with one of our highest requested features, @Mentions. With @Mentions, we're giving Agents the ability to call other agents out from a comment within a ticket.

Once sent, we're letting Tikit Automations take over with a new out of box automation called @Mentions.

Within this Automation that is enabled by default, you're free to customize just like you are today how that notification is sent. By default, we'll:

• send to Teams and Email
• use the Generic Ticket Card
• let you you enable/disable the automation
• let you customize the notification in full
• let you use @Mention-ed users as properties within Automations
• leave the Message blank as Generic Ticket Card will handle all of the details

Once mentioned, Agents will receive notifications from Tikit and Teams will even distinctly color the mention as well.

Agent Only Templates

With our last release focused around KB Improvements, we introduced support for Agent only KB Articles. What's more, Agents could now retrieve knowledge just like the rest of the organization through TVA.

But what about Agent Only Templates? Forms that are linked to agent specific processes and Lifecycles? This release continues to extend Tikit Virtual Agent's capabilities providing Agents access to Templates that only will be seen by them!

• Someone needs access to a server? Azure resource?

• Add an employee to a private Team?

• Perform a one time virus scan against a computer?

Templates and Lifecycles created for by Agents, for Agents, can now be served through TVA!

Email Improvements - Minimum file size for Attachments

When it comes to working tickets generated from email, something we've seen is that signature graphics aren't technically attachments. Well. They are, but they are certainly less important file attachments when working a ticket.

If you're an agent, you might be deleting irrelevant attachments or performing some quick visual filtering to recognize the real attachment you're looking for. With our latest update to Tikit, we're giving you functionality to prevent files from being attached that do not meet a specific file size.

We've set this at 25kb for you, which should handle most scenarios. But as always, it can be tuned up, tuned down, or completely disabled by setting the value to 0. Now anytime an email is sent, each attachment's file size will be compared before attaching the file.

Knowledge Base and Template Links

When you’re talking about an issue or request with someone, you might already know the exact Template or Knowledge Article that would help them out. Rather than have them message Tikit Virtual Agent, it’d be even easier to just send them exactly what they need. That’s why “Get Link” is an option now available on Knowledge Articles and Templates!

Improved Agent Commenting experience

A small change, but a change none the less arriving with this release is how private comments are handled. Previously, the experience to leave a private comment required you to check a box and then send the comment.

But now you'll be able to do this with one less step. Now when leaving a comment, you'll have the option to Send as you always have in which case the Requester/Affected Users receive the communication. But you'll now also have the option to "Add Internal Note" which immediately makes this a private comment.

But let's not forget about Attachments, let alone Private Attachments. Because something else arriving with this update is support for dragging and dropping attachments and copying and pasting from your clipboard directly into the chat experience.

Best of all, this also carries over into other attachment experiences alongside @Mentions as well!

InTune - Device Manufacturer

And last but not least, we're also bringing in a small update to the InTune connector. Now when looking at a user's Linked Devices you'll see the Manufacturer of that device.

As always, we'll cover this and more at the next Technically Speaking happening next week. Until then!

The latest round of updates for your Knowledge Base are arriving first thing this Thursday, August 15th. This update brings more intelligence, features, and performance improvements to make your Knowledge Base more flexible than ever before.

Confidence Improvements

Tikit's native artificial intelligence is improving with enhancements to KB save times and Tikit Virtual Agent request times. But that's not all! We're also improving the actual underlying AI engine used by Tikit and as such raising confidence levels to a new bar.

Whether you have chosen to predominantly use keywords or full phrases, we are moving the default confidence level to 65% for all customers.

As always, you can change and tweak this to your liking. Coupled with Multiple KB Responses, employees will continue get exactly the information they are looking for with even higher confidence levels.

Knowledge Base Layout and Status

Up until this point there was no way to draft articles, save your progress, or ensure only agents could see specific articles. What's more, who created a specific article? Who was the last person to modify it? And last, depending on the size of Knowledge Articles the layout of the page could vary.

Now you can control the Status of a KB Article by setting articles to Draft, In Review, or Active. Additionally, you can mark articles as Agent Only to keep knowledge a bit more siloed. How is this all experienced?

With Tikit Virtual Agent, only Active Knowledge Articles will be returned to the employee interacting with Tikit Virtual Agent. But if that employee happens to be an Agent, they will also receive Active, Agent Only articles as well. Now Agents can experience Tikit Virtual Agent like the rest of the organization!

Integration with OpenAI on Azure

You can now you can integrate OpenAI on Microsoft Azure to ensure privacy and security. All uploaded documentation stays with you, within your Azure tenant, and only visible to your organization. Best of all, every single Knowledge Article you have configured up until this point is respected entirely.

After you've configured, interacting with Tikit Virtual Agent will continue to work as you've come to expect. Ask it questions and it will search your configured Knowledge Base for answers or Templates.

But if Tikit Virtual Agent cannot find anything in your Knowledge Base. It will then look to OpenAI in your Azure Tenant for any documentation you have uploaded to then provided a generative AI based response. In addition, you can enable use of citations to see just exactly how the response was created.

We believe this strikes the correct balance between the articles you've created for Tikit's Knowledge Base and the power of generative AI. Best of all, using generative based responses allows you further close the loop on additional phrases or even answers, to make available in Tikit's Knowledge Base.

Wrapping up

We've still got even more updates planned for the Knowledge Base and other highly requested roadmap item features in active development. That's all for now. Don't forget everything above is arriving this Thursday, August 15th!

Tikit has always been available globally. But today, our signup experience now includes the ability to provision closest to where you work to offer the best possible performance.

When signing up, just tell us where your team is located and we'll handle all of the work of getting things setup closest to you.

But to all of our current customers who might want to shift where their Tikit instance and data are stored. Migrations have already taken place for Germany, Asia, and Australian regions. No work necessary on your part!

We'll go over this at Technically Speaking later this week. See you there!

Tikit Virtual Agent has grown up quite a bit since it first launched. In that time you've been able to customize it's branding, iconography, train up its artificial intelligence to deflect tickets or provide Templates, return multiple responses, and today - customize the very first experience available to users across the organization with support for customizing the Help card.

Updates to Bot Configuration

Here you can customize and style the text as you see fit, but more importantly introduce buttons directly into the Help card.

If we were to restyle a few things, we could build out a help card that offers access to common requests without knowing how to ask for them. Best of all, we can introduce a mix of different kinds of buttons.

With the Add Button menu, you can add in:

• Knowledge Articles: No need to ask, just push the button to get the answer as configured for the chosen KB article

• New Ticket: Need a quick way to get a ticket opened for a specific Team?

• My Requests: Need to check in on your open requests?

• Template: Need to jump right into a specific request?

• Open URL: Need to go somewhere else like an internal company website? Perhaps a Microsoft Form?

Regardless of your choice, you have the ability to customize the text that appears in the button. Edit the button afterwards by clicking on it, or deleting it by hovering and clicking the red trash can. You'll also notice all buttons are given iconography to provide the context of what they do.

With our card built out, lets test it out inside in Teams with Tikit Virtual Agent. We'll use the "help" command, send the message, and we'll see our new updated card. Then we'll choose "Wifi password"

What's worth pointing out here is just like Multi-KB response, when you select a Knowledge Article. You will always see the first question that you've configured for a specific Knowledge Article. That way employees have a quick way to find what they are after next time should they choose to converse.

New Ticket

But there is one more item available with this update and that is the ability to move directly into ticket creation by either using the "New Ticket" button, or just saying "New Ticket" to Tikit Virtual Agent.

With all of that said, let's combine everything above into a brand new help card that enables employees across the organization quick access to common Templates and Knowledge Articles.

Now you can customize, style, and provide a host of service offerings from different Teams using Tikit!

Wrapping up

We're excited to get this feature out and look forward to seeing what you build with it. If you have something you want to share, make sure to bring it to Technically Speaking at the end of the month!

As your Knowledge Base grows, dialing in confidence levels and figuring out how to phrase what your fellow employees could be asking could become increasingly challenging. With the latest updates to Tikit, we're making Tikit Virtual Agent even more flexible and configurable than before.

Updates to Bot Configuration

Apart from the minimum confidence to return an answer, you can now additionally configure:

• The number of responses to return

• Whether or not to return a single response IF the most confident response is greater than the configured threshold

• The message delivered on the Multiple Responses Card
• The Create Ticket Message when a response couldn't be determined

With our settings configured, let's see what this new experience is like as there are several things happening:

1. When interacting with Tikit Virtual Agent, you'll receive several responses from your Knowledge Base that are a mix of Articles and Templates you've configured
2. Knowledge Articles will always show a brief summary of their content. Whereas Templates will show their Title and Description
3. If none of the responses look like what you're after, you can move straight into ticket creation which respects Multi-Department picker if you've toggled it on by selecting "No, create a ticket"

But what about interacting with the results? Clicking into any result will show the first response that you've configured for a specific Knowledge Article. That way employees have a quick way to find what they are after next time.

But if you're looking closely, there is also updated functionality around the Templates returned. As you can now back out of a specific Template and go straight into ticket creation that once again continues to respect Multi-Department picker functionality.

That's all for now

This has been a long standing request we're excited to finally be able to deliver. We'll be back soon with even more updates to Tikit Virtual Agent!

Since the launch of Tikit, we've done everything we can to ensure agents and requesters always stay in the loop of communication. But with that has come a host of genuine needs from all of our customers to customize those experiences.

Whether you want to turn off notifications when the Status changes, customize your own notifications from TVA, have even more fields to use within Automations, or have the opportunity to Apply a Template from Automations. Today those items and more are now available! So...

Some light re-arranging of Settings

The first thing ITSM customers will notice with Notification Center is that Email Connector settings continue to move into Teams centric configurations. Here's a quick before and after:

5.20.2024 and before:

5.21.2024 and after:

As you can see, Notification Center takes over by providing some of that Email Connector customization that you had before + offering the ability to disable several out of box notifications to Requesters whether it it be via Teams or Email.

While cutting down on some notifications is great, it's also possible you're here disabling the out of box notifications because you're looking to build your own and further customize Tikit to your organization's needs. So let's head over to Automations next to check out the new items that have arrived there.

Updates to Automations - Entities

Tikit offers an automation engine to drive everything from simple to complex workflows. With updates to Notification Center we're giving you more entities and more actions.

Previously you've had access to Tickets, Approvals and SLAs. We're now extending this list further to include Tasks and Lifecycles.

Tasks

With support for Tasks, you can not only perform automations centered around them. But key off of their respective properties such as the Assignee, Status, Title, or even the Phase of Work they might be included in.

Lifecycles

With support for Lifecycles, you can now build automations that key off of a Lifecycle's properties such its Title, Phase Name (so you could capture Phases across different Lifecycles), Active Phase (is a specific Phase the Active one), and finally the Status of the Lifecycle.

Tickets

And you can also now filter on the Template of a Ticket.

Updates to Automations - Action Types

We're also introducing even more flexibility to Actions with the introduction of Apply Template and Notification Center.

Apply Template

When a Ticket meets a certain criteria, a specific comment is left, or anything else you wire up within Automations occurs - Apply Template. With this action, even applying a Template can become an automated process within your organization for agents or requesters.

Notification Center

And now we can come full circle with Notification Center. The ability not just to send email in response to an Automation. But the ability to send a Teams notification as Tikit or Tikit Virtual Agent based on the role of the user within a ticket.

The first thing you'll notice after enabling a Teams notification, is the choice to pick who the message should go to. Based on your selection either Tikit, Tikit Virtual Agent, or both will become enabled offering you the ability to edit and style the message to your liking.

Messages to:

• Assignee
• Group
• Team
• Task Assignee
• Collaborators

will always come from Tikit.

Whereas messages to:

• Requester
• Approvers
• Affected Users
• Selected Users

will always come from Tikit Virtual Agent.

Best of all, customizing either experience is the same and offers support for variables within the message.

What's more, we're letting you choose the styling of the cards that go out. Just click on "Selected Card:" to see your options AND preview your changes.

Simple Card

Generic Ticket Card

Edit Ticket Card

Finally, you'll notice one last checkbox after you've made your selection - "Update Message/Card." Checking this off results in notifications about a single ticket to remain a single notification that always appears as the most recent conversation from Tikit/Tikit Virtual Agent. You'll still receive notifications in Teams about the update, except with this checkbox you can ensure there will only ever be a single notification about a given ticket.

Wrapping Up

There is no doubt, a LOT happening in this update. We're excited to get this shipped and can't wait to see the kinds of notifications you'll build with it. We'll go over Notification Center and what else is coming down the pipe at our next Technically Speaking happening next week on May 31st.

As we're preparing for several releases soon heading your way. Today we're publishing an update that introduces more resiliency to the email connector, fixes several bugs, improves performance when editing tickets, and helps requesters stay within the flow of creating tickets even when they aren't in Teams. Let's check it out.

Email Connector

General improvements have been made to how we process emails.

Side note. If you didn't make Technically Speaking last month we shared some updates to our knowledge base on how you can prevent specific email addresses or entire domains from creating tickets. You can read more about it here.

Request Portal - "Ask Something Else"

When your fellow employees navigate to web.tikit.ai/requests and create tickets, they'll experience ticket deflection just like inside of Teams. But now just like Teams, they can try their interactions again and keep talking to Tikit Virtual Agent.

That's all for now!

Over the last few weeks, prospects, customers, and even us here at Tikit have been patiently waiting for the next update to Tikit's Power Automate connector to become live. In that timeframe, week by week, region by region, that update has been rolling out and today - Microsoft has marked the rollout as complete.

Available immediately to those on the ITSM Plan, are updates to Tikit's Power Automate connector and new functionality around Lifecycles. Lets dive in!

Lifecycles: Power Automate Tasks

With Tikit Lifecycles, you've had a way to intelligently gate the Phases of work to ensure Approvals and Tasks are delivered at the right time, every time. Now, you can go one step further by adding Power Automate Tasks to Phases and kicking off automation at the right time, every time.

Power Automate Tasks in Lifecycles

While Power Automate Tasks are defined in a Tikit Lifecycle, their Status is controlled exclusively via Power Automate. Take for example the following Flow that onboards new employees into Entra only when a specific Power Automate Task has become Active.

Trigger: When a Lifecycle Power Automate Task Becomes Active

With the Update PA Task, you can set the Status of that Power Automate Task in Tikit and then use it in Transition Logic so you can continue to build Lifecycles that follow your business processes.

Even More Triggers and Actions

Whereas When a Lifecycle PA Task Becomes Active is a Trigger that exists within the context of a Lifecycle. What if you're looking to do something at the Phase or Transition level?

Trigger: When a Lifecycle Transitions to a Phase

Trigger: When a Lifecycle Transition Engages

With these two additional Triggers, Power Automate flow can initiate based on a specific Phase of Work starting or a specific Transition occurring.

Actions

We also heard from you that dynamically updating Approvals with the Requester's Manager, or Task Assignee's dynamically based on Custom Form answers was needed. Not only can you now use Update Approval or Update Task to accomplish that, we're also introducing Actions for Add Task and Add Approval.

Best of all, these Actions support Tickets that have and do not have Lifecycles!

There is a LOT in this Power Automate connector update. We're excited to see what you will build and will be covering this further on Technically Speaking, happening a whole day earlier. See you Thursday!