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Why Employee Experience Virtual Agent governance is important
Your organization may have started out with an IT Virtual Agent first to scale for supporting many repetitive IT issues such as software requests or VPN outages. But as your organization grows, you may want to expand the Virtual Agent's impact area to cover HR topics such as payroll inquiries and benefits. Your organization may have separate IT and HR owners or different departments who can best lend their subject matter expertise in creating Virtual Agent content and experiences. But no one wants to worry about cross-impact between their respective areas, such as an IT admin editing HR topics or accidentally viewing an interaction record about an employee's paycheck.
The ServiceNow platform with Virtual Agent can help you and your organization manage the different experiences between IT and HR Virtual Agent topics, i.e. a multi-department Virtual Agent. Below is guidance on managing IT and HR conversation topics, creating the right boundaries where necessary, and using new key features to measure and enhance your users' Virtual Agent experience.
Roles for managing topics and NLU models
It is recommended to organize topics and NLU models between a custom scope, and then separate IT and HR scopes. Scoping helps avoid conflicts between applications and secures data inside from unintended edits. Your Virtual Agent topics will rely on your knowledge bases and service catalog, so it helps to ensure these resources are also properly categorized between IT and HR. Below are recommended roles that can govern Virtual Agent topics and NLU models in each of the three scopes:
- ServiceNow/Virtual Agent Admin(s) (Custom scope): This person activates the necessary VA/NLU plugins. They maintain branding, configure setup topics such as Greetings, and ensure that all the organization's topics maintain a consistent language.
- IT Virtual Agent/NLU admin(s) (IT scope): This person authors and maintains IT topics. They also work with the IT Service portal owner to ensure a consistent user experience.
- HR Virtual Agent/NLU admin(s) (HR scope): This person authors and maintains HR topics. They also work with the Employee Service Center portal owner to ensure a consistent user experience.
- Other stakeholders: You will likely have subject matter experts, e.g. payroll, benefits, IT support desk managers, who can identify relevant topics, and help design and review your Virtual Agent content. At a broader level, you may have a project lead who manages progress and reports on KPIs and usage metrics. You may also have a departmental or corporate communications team who promotes and shares your organization's Virtual Agent as the “killer app” to resolve their problems.
Custom Scope
The custom scope will contain setup topics and NLU models which are universal to either IT or HR. This includes Greeting, Fallback, and Close Conversation. Setup topics are best handled in the main custom scope as they can apply to any conversation. These topics are maintained by an administrator (role: virtual_agent_admin) with access to all other topics. This role can also author topics that apply across IT and HR contexts.
Using IT and HR scopes
IT and HR Virtual Agent use different scopes to manage topics. For example, ServiceNow delivered out-of-box conversations with IT and HR topics in the "ITSM Virtual Agent Conversations" and "Human Resources: Virtual Agent Conversations" scopes, respectively. You are then able to assign roles to these scopes to maintain separate governance.
Furthermore, you can categorize the topics between IT and HR. One of the benefits of doing this is that it will improve your topics analytics, covered further below. You can create topic categories in your instance by navigating to Virtual Agent > Categories.
This also applies to NLU models and Vocabulary Sources. For NLU models, it is important to ensure that utterances and intents between IT and HR models do not overlap. That way, users do not unintentionally surface an IT intent and topic in an HR context. Avoid overly relying on utterances that can apply to both contexts such as “request” or “issue”. You can use the Conflict Review feature to compare two or more models and ensure there is no conflict.
The portal experience
It is possible that you have different portals for IT and for HR, for example Service Portal for IT and Employee Center for HR. As mentioned previously, it is recommended that IT and HR Virtual Agent authors collaborate with their respective portal owners to ensure a great, consistent user experience. For example, consider elements such as Virtual Agent branding, language, and live agent routing. If you are considering a single portal that contains both IT and HR content, collaborate to agree on a single front-end user experience, while continuing to govern the IT and HR content division in the background.
ServiceNow gives you the ability to create unique Virtual Agent experiences between portals. For example, you can create different greetings with pinned, aka "promoted", topics when users open Virtual Agent in the Service Portal versus opening Virtual Agent in the Employee Center. This can be configured in your instance by navigating to Conversational Interfaces Home Page > Settings > Virtual Agent > Custom Greetings and Setup. Below are examples of two different Virtual Agent experiences based on the portal that can be created via the "Custom Greetings and Setup" page. To learn more on how to configure this, visit the documentation.
You can also control which topics appear in which portal. That way, IT topics and HR topics can only be shown in their respective portals. To configure this, navigate to your Topic's "Properties" tab, and use the "Condition" field to set which portal the topic should appear in.
Securing chat transcripts
One of the biggest concerns is security and privacy when it comes to chat transcripts. With no further action, any administrator user can view chat transcripts. These transcripts may contain highly sensitive information, especially when it comes to HR transcripts related to payroll or workplace issues. Fortunately, the ServiceNow platform contains tools and scripting abilities to secure transcripts. The Interaction table contains all chat transcripts. You should use a combination of UI policies and ACLs (Security Rules) to prevent cross-reading of sensitive conversations.
As an example, if you are using separate IT and HR portals, you can secure Interaction records based on the 'portal' field. You can also use an HR live agent variable to secure interactions to the HR scope. So when a user outside the HR scope tries to view the Interaction table, they will not see HR-scoped interactions. See the following KB: KB0867709. This approach is helpful if you are on a unified portal such as Employee Center. If you wish to secure live agent transcripts, be sure to properly scope your queues between IT and HR. That way, users can only access live agent transcripts only if they have access to that scope.
Analytics
In Quebec, the conversational analytics dashboard provides deep insights into your organization's conversations. To help determine the usage of Virtual Agent across IT and HR, you can rely on the out-of-box "Category" dashboard. Clicking on the ">" button allows you to drill into each Category.
You can edit the visibility of the cards within the dashboard by clicking "Edit page" on the top right drop-down next to the username. This loads the UI Builder where you can edit the cards.
Summary
The ServiceNow platform and Virtual Agent contains many features to help organize, control, and measure your organization's interactions between IT and HR Virtual Agents. While an administrator will always have the most access to all content, it is a good practice to determine the scope and abilities between IT and HR administrators and topic authors. This will result in great administrator and end-user experiences with Virtual Agent.
For fun: see this HBR article on “5 Ways HR and IT Can Work Together to Create Great Employee Experiences”
Here's an Academy video on managing interactions between IT and HR departments:
