Virtual Agent Overview

[Heath Ramsey]

Welcome to the world of intelligent conversation and efficient service delivery!

Enable your employees and customers to quickly receive the answers and resolution they need through an intelligent chat interface. Virtual Agent is a key part of an end-to-end conversational experience powered by the Now Platform. It’s not just a chatbot — it provides solutions and completes business workflows by understanding your users and personalizing each conversation. And it’s available wherever your users need help: on your service portals, ServiceNow mobile apps, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Workplace by Facebook, Facebook Messenger, or any web page.  

Who is Virtual Agent for?
	Virtual Agent is for everyone. It helps users get what they need, whenever they need it, without having to wait on hold or for an agent to get back to them. It empowers everyone with new self-service abilities so they can instantly resolve their own requests and get back to focusing on their own work. And those personalized experiences that are now available on a  24/7 basis will drive significant increases in customer and employee satisfaction.
	For your agents, it offloads the most common and routine tasks that keep arriving at your Service Desk. All of those repetitive requests start being taken care of by Virtual Agent, which allows your human agents to focus on higher-value work. This not only increases operational efficiency, but also provides the foundation to scale your business to new levels.

How do I get started?
Every business is different, and ServiceNow ships pre-packaged conversation topics — templates for the most common IT, Customer Service, and HR Service Delivery scenarios — so you can get started in literally a matter of minutes. There’s no need to use all of them right away, but if you dig in to your own Service Desk data, you’ll usually find there are 2–3 types of requests that account for a high percentage of your agents’ time. As an example, imagine how much time your business would save if your agents didn’t have to field any of these requests starting tomorrow:
Order an item Users can enter the name or description of an item they need and pick from a carousel of images to place their order.	Check case status Users can search their open cases and receive a real-time status update.	Request for leave Users can submit a reason and date range for their leave that will then be routed for approval.
Even if your top requests are slightly different, you can see how deflecting the most common incidents and cases will start to save time for your agents.

Can I customize topics or create my own conversations?

In addition to the out-of-the-box conversation templates, ServiceNow delivers the tools your business needs to build or customize any conversation. Virtual Agent Designer is an intuitive, no-code interface that helps you visualize the end-to-end flow of a conversation. Editing a conversation is as easy as dragging and dropping new prompts or responses on the canvas, and you can go even further with decision logic and your own scripts. It’s as simple and powerful as you need it to be.   Building, training, and testing the natural language understanding (NLU) models that understand everyday language is also something anyone can do. You train models by simply typing a few sample sentences of what users might say, and then identify the parts of each phrase which can be extracted to intelligently answer questions and execute workflows.  And if you need support for additional languages, we’ve partnered with IBM Watson Assistant and Microsoft LUIS to act as alternative NLU providers.

What are the benefits to ServiceNow's Virtual Agent over third-party solutions?
There is no shortage of chatbot solutions that use some form of AI and NLU to deliver an improved service experience, but using ServiceNow’s Virtual Agent provides a number of advantages:
	Native to the Now Platform: Because Virtual Agent is a part of the Now Platform, it can use your ServiceNow data to personalize the conversation for each user. It can also create and update records, and it easily connects with the existing workflows you’ve already built. So you can skip the time and costs associated with complex integrations that require custom coding or depend on a third party.
	Secure: By using a native solution, your data never leaves the ServiceNow cloud infrastructure that your business’ security teams already trust. Training of the NLU models is done within that same infrastructure and is only performed using your business’ data, so you can be sure the results are tailored exactly for how your company works.
	Time-to-Value: The pre-built conversation topics we provide enable you to get started quickly without spending months sketching process flows or writing code. You can immediately start deflecting the most common IT, Customer Service, and HR Service Delivery requests that already happen in ServiceNow, and then iterate by creating or enabling additional conversations.
	Built-In Insights: ServiceNow Performance Analytics delivers the dashboards you need to identify the most common types of requests to automate with Virtual Agent. And once you’ve deployed, the Virtual Dashboard gives you visibility into how users are interacting with Virtual Agent, which channels are being used, and which topics may need an adjustment.
	Live Agent Handoff: Since Virtual Agent is a native part of the Now Platform, the full context of each conversation is seamlessly carried through to your real agents so they can quickly address any escalations. There are no dead-ends and users don’t have to completely restart their conversation when they reach a live agent.

Ready for the next steps?

Check out our detailed Virtual Agent and NLU journey map for more information about how to activate Virtual Agent in your ServiceNow instance and publish your initial conversation topics.

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