Modeling conversational agents for service systems

Service providers are increasingly exploring the use of conversational agents (CA) or dialogue based systems to support end customers, as a CA promises natural method for users to interact and a convenient channel for customer service. Commercial CAs, excel in addressing specific tasks or functions such as searching for restaurants, providing location directions, or scheduling meetings, with small variations in the user request. Designing a CA for a more complex service system, requires sufficient knowledge of its services such as the service capabilities, their constraints, and effects, in addition to understanding user utterances. The design of a CA is typically an independent activity and its linkages to the service system it supports are left to the designers. In this paper, we study existing work with respect to text-based CAs and identify the conceptual elements of a CA. Further, a linkage between the model elements of a CA and service model of the service system it supports is established and presented. We show that interesting insights can be derived from the linkages, that can be useful to CA designers.