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Hi there,
When working with Virtual Agent, one might wonder how to set up a personalized greeting message. By default - until New York - this was not an option. You could think of a workaround as I described in an earlier article (Virtual Agent - Starting conversations in a custom way), though by default you were stuck with the "How can I help you?" message. New York brings new "Setup Topics", where you can select specific topics for certain topics. One of them, the Greeting topic. Out-of-the-box there is a "Greetings" topic, still this one is not personalized. There's also "Personalized Greeting Topic", somehow though… this one has not been set up 100% (a small typo in the welcome sentence, but more important: the select topics (topic picker) was left out.
Out-of-the-box greetings message
Greetings topic
Personalized Greeting Topic
Setting up a personalized greetings message
First, we choose to set up a new custom topic and not to modify the out-of-the-box topic. In our opinion, the out-of-the-box topics are (very useful) templates. Also leaving them out-of-the-box means you will receive any updates on these topics with future patches or upgrades from ServiceNow.
Create a new topic thru the Virtual Agent Designer (Collaboration > Virtual Agent > Designer). Details looking something like this:
Don't forget to:
1) Fill out the "Category" field. If you don't or forget to set this to "Setup Topics", your topic will not appear on the "System settings" "Setup Topics" section.
2) Setup the "Condition" field. You can use the code below:
(function execute() {
return false;
})()
Ones in the canvas op your topic, you'd only need to mimic the Utilities Script Action "Send Topic Picker" from the out-of-the-box "Greetings topic", and drag and drop a Bot Response "Text" between "Start" and "Send Topic Picker". For the Response Message on the Bot Response Text, use the script option where you can add the code below:
(function execute() {
return gs.getMessage('G\'day {0}, my name is Quinn, your Virtual Agent.', [vaInputs.user.first_name]);
})()
Save and Publish the topic.
Obviously, you can change the message in anything you would like.
Note: We are using vaInputs.user.first_name here. This is different than the Docs describes! What is described in the Docs - vaInputs.first_name - actually does not work.
https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/newyork-performance-analytics-and-reporting/page/administer/virtu...
For internationalization, we are using a gs.getMessage(). If you have an English and French instance for example, you could now add a UI Message (System UI > Messages), with below details:
Connect the greetings topic to the "Setup Topics"
In the Platform UI, navigate to "Collaboration" (or type "llab" in the Filter navigator), select "General Settings" under "Virtual Agent". The "System settings" UI page will open. On the "Setup Topics" section, the first field is the "Greeting topic" field. From the dropdown, select your new custom greetings topic.
The end result
And this how your personalized greetings messages look like upon opening the Virtual Agent:
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And that's it actually!
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Kind regards,
Mark Roethof
ServiceNow Technical Consultant @ Paphos Group
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