This video provides an overview of Virtual Agent in the Now platform.
You can skip to these topics from the YouTube description for this video.
What is Virtual Agent and what are its benefits?
In this video, we’ll show you what Virtual Agent is, and how it can benefit your organization.
Let’s take IT as an example.
Fulfilling IT service requests and resolving issues can be a challenge for companies, their
employees, and the agents trying to help them.
Users may reach out to an internal knowledge base or a service desk for help.
But knowledge bases can be difficult to navigate.
And agents become swamped with a high volume of common issues, increasing costs, pressure
on SLA, and potential user dissatisfaction.
ServiceNow Virtual Agent gives users the ability to get help and get things done.
By empowering users with a familiar messaging interface, you can improve employee service,
reduce agent workload, and ultimately scale your company’s operations.
Virtual Agent supports multiple clients and channels, including web, mobile, and other
messaging apps.
It can also integrate with other chatbots via our Virtual Agent API, which is available
in the ServiceNow store along with other Virtual Agent store apps.
The ServiceNow platform provides over 40 conversation topics in the base system that cover the most
common IT, HR, and customer service workflows.
ServiceNow also provides a Guided Setup experience to quickly deploy for faster time to value,
as well as AI-driven topic recommendations to analyze your data and identify the topics
with the best potential for success.
Let’s see how Virtual Agent handles an entire IT service interaction from start to finish.
Beth is working from home, and her laptop computer starts behaving strangely.
So she goes to the Service Portal to get help.
Virtual Agent determines a conversation topic to serve the user based on either keywords
or natural language understanding, or NLU.
Virtual Agent accesses the item in the user’s record, and can make recommendations based
on the equipment she owns.
Virtual Agent then provides a multiple-choice to describe one or more symptoms.
In our example, Virtual Agent recommends replacing the item based on its age and reported malfunctions.
It then presents replacement options for the user to choose from.
Beth reviews the options, and selects this laptop.
Virtual Agent then provides a calendar, so she can select a date and time for delivery
of her new laptop.
She says she needs it today.
Virtual Agent responds with a confirmation and a link to the request record that it creates
on the user’s behalf.
In some cases, a user needs a live agent to complete an interaction.
You can set up Virtual Agent to hand off to a live agent using routing logic you can define
using the Advanced Work Assignment feature.
Transition to new topic: Virtual Agent Designer
Now let’s look behind the scenes to see how Virtual Agent topics are created.
The Virtual Agent Designer allows administrators to create rich, interactive conversations
called topics.
Let’s check out the Request for Leave topic.
The Designer employs an intuitive low-code, drag-and-drop flow design, allowing even non-programmers
to build topics visually.
This flow begins with the user selecting the start and end date of their leave.
Next is a choice list for the user to select the type of leave.
And here’s the Decision node that branches off to the available leave options.
After the user selects the option, a topic block, which serves as a mini reusable topic,
helps provide relevant knowledge articles for the type of leave selected.
Finally, after the user confirms their request with a Boolean node, an HR case is created
for the user’s leave request.
Here are the nodes you can use to build your topic flow.
Input nodes enable rich, dynamic conversations with user choice, decision trees, and surveys.
Bot response nodes include text, images, links, and other rich media that Virtual Agent can
present to the user.
Utilities nodes allow you to direct the conversation flow with lookups, script actions, and other
integrations.
Now let’s look at accessing Virtual Agent in third party channels.
Virtual Agent works wherever your teams already work.
For example, you can use Slack to escalate a ticket.
Or use Microsoft Teams to ask about current outages and drill into the details.
Now let’s take a quick look at Virtual Agent Analytics.
You can closely track your organization’s Virtual Agent usage and conversation quality
with the conversational analytics dashboard.
The dashboard comes with metrics in the base system that provide measurable insights to
show adoption, what topics are working, and what can potentially be improved.
You can also modify the metrics or create your own.
Now let’s see how you can improve the quality of your Virtual Agent conversations using
NLU capabilities that can learn, understand, and respond to user queries.
ServiceNow provides a low-code workbench for anyone to build, train, and test NLU models,
with multiple languages supported.
Models are trained by entering sample utterances of what you expect users to say, and then
highlighting the different terms that can be used to answer questions without having
to prompt the user.
You can even tune it for your own company’s internal vocabulary and workplace language
by identifying synonyms for different terms.
And there’s an integrated testing module to quickly validate the accuracy of a model
before publishing.
Augmenting your IT, employee, or customer service options with Virtual Agent can make
life easier for your real-life agents, and your employees.
For more information, see our product documentation, knowledge base, or podcast.
Or ask a question in the ServiceNow Community.