In some embodiments, the user assistance system may have access to stored past incident records and may refer to such past incident records as a basis for providing certain candidate messages and/or scoring candidate messages. This may occur in scenarios in which a current incident and a past incident have similar or identical users or circumstances. Such embodiments may have various advantages. For instance, the user assistance system may be configured to determine and learn over time a user's preferences, emotions, and/or circumstances surrounding repeated incidents, and may thus use past interactions with that user as a basis for determining how to help an agent interact with the user in handing a current incident. Further, different users may encounter the same incidents over time, and thus the user assistance system may be configured to learn over time how to more efficiently resolve such incidents.